This post is authored by (alphabetical order of last name): Maha Bali, José Cossa, Kim Fox, Doris Jones, Jasmine Roberts & Mia Zamora
“When we think this question “who appears?” we are asked a question about how spaces are occupied by certain bodies who get so used to their occupation that they don’t even notice it. They are comfortable, like a body that sinks into a chair that has received its shape over time. To question who appears is to become the cause of discomfort. It is almost as if we have a duty not to notice who turns up and who doesn’t. Just noticing can get in the way of an occupation of space.” – Sara Ahmed
“Academics are highly intelligent and yet we cannot somehow figure out how to engage in anti-racist scholarship for personal and professional growth.” – Jasmine Roberts
“In other words, how do we define human and personhood in academia?” – Doris Jones.
As part of Equity Unbound’s commitment to social justice, and as part of our support for the #BlackLivesMatter movement and #ShutDownAcademia that is confronting racism in academia, we have organized a webinar on Inclusive Citation. How might we modify our daily scholarship practices and interrogate them in order to improve our processes and move towards a more socially just academic environment? Our commitment to educational equity must be rooted in intentional “design work” (curricular, research practices, pedagogical, etc) within the academy.
As Doris Jones has said, the U.S. is grappling with the aftermath of the brutal deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery (and many African Americans before and after them). There is a continuing need to find peaceful discourse and solutions for police brutality. Yet, police brutality is only one part of a complex matrix that describes a landscape in which racial injustice, racism and prejudice remains pervasive in the United States. In what ways does the status quo of the academy contribute to systemic racism? How can we start to address this problem? Although we certainly recognize that this webinar does not address the roots of these larger societal issues, it is an attempt to address white hegemony as we continue to produce new knowledge in higher education. The webinar panelists will aim to address the following issues:
- Maha: How do we as academics develop inclusive, antiracist, decolonial citation practices in our scholarship and in our syllabi/courses (see Maha’s article)
- Doris: How might a critical review of the literature allow us to develop a framework in which inclusive and decolonial texts converge to represent a new frontier for discussions about race and racial tolerance? Jasmine’s article: White Academia: Do Better
- José: Cosmo-uBuntu and Racial Justice https://youtu.be/Luoawh584BM
- Mia: In what ways are our scholarly practices also activist practices, and in what ways are we opening up the academy? How can we take concrete steps to listen, learn and collaborate with those who have previously been unheard/unauthorized? …through our scholarship, our citation practices, our teaching methodologies, and our mentorship relationships?
Date, Time & Registration to Join Us
The session will take place June 30th at 3pm ET, 7PM UTC, 9pm Cairo (see timezone converter below to see time on your timezone) on Zoom and will be livestreamed to YouTube and recorded. We’ll add the recording link here when we can and tweet it out.
To register for the session, please fill this form and a link to the Zoom session will be sent to you along with a calendar invite (there’s also an option to say you cannot attend but would like the recording).
Time converter at worldtimebuddy.comBiographies of Panelists and Co-Moderators (alphabetical order of first name)
(Please not that Jose Cossa cannot join us and Tutaleni Asino will join our panel)
Doris Jones (panelist) is a Senior Instructor in the Department of Rhetoric and Composition where she designs courses and performs research that responds to emergent discourse about knowledge production. As a critical pedagogue, Jones remains interested in problematizing how racial inequalities influence our knowledge production and consumption in academe. Based on current and previous research, she is intrigued by the close intersections between race and language and how this dichotomy influences linguistic and educational practices.
José Cossa (panelist) Ph.D., is a Mozambican scholar, writer/author, researcher, poet, blogger, “twitterer”, podcaster, entrepreneur, and an Associate Professor in the College of Education at Pennsylvania State University. Most recently, Cossa served as a Visiting Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the American University in Cairo and a Senior Lecturer at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. He is the author of the book Power, Politics, and Higher Education: International Regimes, Local Governments, and Educational Autonomy. Cossa’s research focus is on power dynamics in negotiation over educational policy; unveiling issues inherent in the promise of modernity and working towards de-colonializing, de-bordering, de-peripherizing, and de-centering the world; higher education policy and administration; system transfer; international development; and, global and social justice. In addition, Cossa is currently engaging in a new (exterior to modernity) theorizing, i.e., Cosmo-uBuntu, to offer alternative theoretical grounding to research, analysis, and practice. Twitter handle: @zeca72. Blog: Mozambicanscholar; YouTube Channel: Mozambicanscholar
Jasmine Roberts (panelist) is a scholar activist and strategic communication lecturer at The Ohio State University; her work focuses on issues related to open education, race and communication, intersectional feminism, and queer studies. She tweets at @ProfJasmine. Website: https://comm.osu.edu/people/roberts.827
TED talk “I’m Tired of Talking About Race”: https://youtu.be/ii4W9Y9pExk
Kim Fox (co-moderator) is a professor of practice in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication (JRMC) at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. Her academic research focuses on media representations including Black podcasters. Her creative works include the award-winning Ehky Ya Masr (Tell Your Story Egypt) Podcast, where she is the executive producer. She is on several boards including the Broadcast Education Association. You won’t find her ranting on Twitter, but check her out there … just in case: @KimFoxWOSU.
Maha Bali (co-moderator & panelist) is an Associate Professor of Practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. She is the co-founder of Virtuallyconnecting.org and Co-facilitator of Equity Unbound and the Continuity with Care community (which started during the COVID-19 pandemic) – all of these are grassroots communities that promote social justice. She blogs at https://blog.mahabali.me and tweets at @bali_maha.
Mia Zamora (co-moderator & panelist) is Associate Professor of English at Kean University (NJ) where she directs the MA in Writing Studies Program. She is a digital humanist and a #connectedlearning scholar who designs/facilitates learning networks for creative scholarship and educational equity on the open web. She is also a co-facilitator of Equity Unbound and the Continuity with Care community. Her work is described at: http://miazamoraphd.com/ and she can be found on twitter @miazamoraphd.
This conversation was livestreamed and recorded and is available on YouTube (transcript to be made available soon):
There is also a Google doc curating the questions and answers participants raised when they registered and which also now has a curation of resources.
Large Header Image TRUTH Jigsaw from Pixabay
Smaller Header Image: Integration from Pixabay
