Event Description
Professor Lorgia García Peña from Tufts University will lead a seminar on her recent body of work, Community as Rebellion, which offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for students and faculty of color within academia. Through personal experiences and analytical reflections, García Peña invites us—in particular Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women—to engage in liberatory practices of boycott, abolition, and radical community-building to combat the academic world’s tokenizing and exploitative structures. She argues that the classroom is key to freedom-making in the university, urging teachers to consider activism and social justice as central to what she calls “teaching in freedom”: a progressive form of collective learning that prioritizes the subjugated knowledge, silenced histories, and epistemologies from the Global South and Indigenous, Black, and brown communities. By teaching in and for freedom, we not only acknowledge the harm that the university has inflicted on our persons and our ways of knowing since its inception, but also create alternative ways to be, create, live, and succeed through our work.
Speaker
Lorgia García-Peña is the Mellon Professor and Chair of the Department in Studies of Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts University. She is also a writer, activist and scholar who specializes in Latinx Studies with a focus on Black Latinidades. Her work is concerned with the ways in which antiblackness and xenophobia intersect the Global North, producing categories of exclusion that lead to violence and erasure. She has been widely recognized for her public-facing work, including receiving the 2022 Angela Davis Prize for Public Scholarship.
Cosponsors
Hosted by the Center for Latin American Studies and cosponsored by the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, and the Othering & Belonging Institute LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster.