Acorn Ancestors: Mentorship as Intergenerational Making-Do

Session Submission Type: Performance Session

Abstract

Acorns encode instructions but must also improvise with their environment; women, people of color, queer and trans folx, and others for whom educational spaces were not designed have long been making their own networks of ancestors and inheritors through making-do. This session merges live lecture/performance with video and archival research with personal stories to explore possibilities and pitfalls of mentorship, of educational legacies, and of what we might freedom-dream together for future ancestors. We invite our ASA audience to bring their own memories of mentors, faerie godparents, aunties, all of the supports that have carried us through our learning journeys, and to consider how such sharing could build mutual support networks for not just making-do but for making powerful change in our institutions and communities. Womanist sociologist Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant provides comments with historical frames of Black women's experiences in higher education; Jen Shook and Moriah Bailey Stephenson weave music, story, and multimedia visual performance to parallel the weaving of mentor-family-making, followed by discussion.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Panelist

• Jen E Shook, Grinnell College

Commentator

• Tamara Beauboeuf, Grinnell College

Biographical Information

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant is Louise R. Noun Chair in Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies and Professor of Education Studies at Grinnell College. A womanist sociologist and qualitative researcher, she focuses on Black women’s contemporary and historical acts of self-definition and has published on Black women’s pedagogy as “politicized mothering,” embodied costs of being a strong Black woman, Lucy Diggs Slowe’s vision of “living abundantly” and narratives of belonging in higher ed.

Jen Shook intertwines performance, cultural memory, media/digital humanities, and Indigenous and gender/sexuality studies in her teaching at Grinnell College, and is a 2026 M. C. Lang Fellow in Book History, Bibliography, and Humanities Teaching with Historical Sources with Rare Book School. A dramaturg and director, she founded Caffeine Theatre—a company that mined the poetic tradition to explore social questions (Chicago 2002-2012). She also makes art with large rocks and small shadow puppets.

Moriah Bailey Stephenson creates intimate and vulnerable sound worlds with harp and voice (fka sun riah). A grad student in Geography & Environmental Sustainability and Music Composition at the University of Oklahoma, she studied Anthropology at University of Arizona and holds a Master’s in sociocultural anthropology from OU and a BA in Spanish literature/linguistics from DePaul University. She loves to explore explore environmentalism and connections to place with youth through the arts.