In the August Trans*Formational Change newsletter, I asked folks to send in their submissions responding to the question(s), "how will higher education (the field, campuses, and individuals within both) respond - or not respond to A Vision for Black Lives? How do YOU want or will show up?" Below you can find the first submission by Dr. Dafina-Lazarus (D-L) Stewart who generously shared zir own reflections. Thank you D-L.
If you've got some thoughts to share and willing to see it posted on this blog, send your submission and a little bit about yourself to tj.jourian@gmail.com with the subject line "Moving the Vision Forward". Any type of submission is welcome, poetry, musings, open letters, etc. that are reflective in essence.
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My never-ending list of books to check out is perhaps unsurprisingly (because #TransIsBrilliant) full of ones by trans and gender non-conforming writers. Many of them are included in my ambitious book-buying ventures, seeing as I can't resist buying them when I see them in real life - especially if I get to support an independent/queer/feminist bookstore at the same time. They're just so pretty! Anywho... here is a smidgen of that list, some of which I've actually managed to read a bit. You'll undoubtedly recognize a few names, and I'm hoping hear about some folks you didn't know are out here living out Toni Morrison's quote, "If there's a book you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
For those of you looking to bring some amazing speakers to campus for LGBT History Month in October or Trans Awareness Month in November, this is a pretty good list to work through too. On Friday, July 22nd, an article in Inside Higher Ed highlighted some of the responses from campus administrators “after a tense summer nationally.” While perhaps some of these responses held nuance and complexity, the theme the article focused on was administrators’ “call for a peaceful start to the academic year.” Maybe as a result of attending one too many* anti-war protests, whenever I hear the word ‘peace’ I have a tendency to ask, but what about justice?
Book recommendation - Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism by Nadine Naber7/15/2016 Although I’ve had a copy of Nadine Naber’s book, Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism almost since it first came out in 2012, I finally got to crack it open and read it in the first half of this summer. And I’m so glad I did.
I work and write in a field that I entered because I sincerely believed it to be the gateway towards social justice for all living things. Needless to say (or perhaps not so needless for some), I was more than a bit naive. Higher education, whether institutionally, culturally, or societally, is as much an arbiter of oppression and injustice as any other social enterprise. That is not to say that I do not believe in the liberatory power and potential of education - in fact it is that very belief that keeps me in the discipline, striving towards becoming faculty myself one day. However, I am far more critical of education these days, more skeptical of intent and purpose, more aware of its harm and dangers, where before I took the benefits of all education as a given.
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It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society - Jiddu Krishnamurti Blogs I Like
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