Decolonizing Education: Building Antiracist Feminist Community Across Borders

Democratizing Racial Justice Project welcomes back Dr. Chandra T. Mohanty with co-facilitator Dr. Linda. E. Carty for a three-day workshop at UTSA.

April 3 - 6, 2023, UTSA Downtown Campus

APPLICATIONS EXTENDED!

Apply here by Friday, February 17, 2023: bit.ly/de-wshop

Community members, UTSA faculty, staff, and students are welcome to apply. Upon acceptance, participants must attend at least 6 sessions.

Democratizing Racial Justice Project is hosting a three-day workshop with collaborators from the Feminist Freedom Warriors Video Archive Project and the Democratizing Knowledge Project at Syracuse University. The workshop will focus on:

• Growing existing, and creating new, ways to identify and interrogate systemic injustices embedded within educational spaces and systems
• Exploring how individual, collective, and systemic transformation are possible  through centering Indigenous, decolonial, anti-racist, and intersectional feminist perspectives
• Learning  how to utilize Indigenous, decolonial, anti-racist, and intersectional feminist frameworks in teaching and everyday actions – within and outside the classroom

Workshop Facilitators:
Dr. Linda Carty, African and African American Studies, Syracuse University 
Dr. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Women’s and Gender Studies, Syracuse University 

Guest Speakers:
Dr. Sandy Grande, Indigenous Studies and Political Philosophy, University of Connecticut
Dr. Aída Hernández Castillo, Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) México
Dr. Michelle Téllez, Mexican American Studies, University of Arizona
Dr. Kia Melchor Hall, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Brandeis University
Dr. Imani Tafari-Ama, Institute for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

About Facilitators and Guest Speakers

Chandra Talpade Mohanty 
Syracuse University  

Chandra Talpade Mohanty is a feminist scholar-activist and educator in the Women’s and Gender Studies department at Syracuse University. Chandra’s activism, scholarship, and teaching focus on transnational feminist theory, anti-capitalist feminist praxis, anti-racist education, and the politics of knowledge.  She is the author of Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (2003) and co-editor of four volumes including Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (1991), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (1997).  Her writing has been translated into Arabic, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Farsi, Chinese, Russian, Swedish, Thai, Korean, Turkish, Slovenian, Hindi, Czech, Slovakian, Armenian, Greek, Portuguese, and Japanese.  She is the series editor of “Comparative Feminist Studies” (Palgrave/Macmillan) and was a member of the Indigenous and Women of Color Solidarity delegation to Palestine in June 2011. Mohanty is a member of the advisory boards of Signs, A Journal Of Women in Culture and Society, Transformations, The Journal of Inclusive Pedagogy and Scholarship, Feminist Africa (South Africa), Asian Women (Korea), Feminist Economics, The Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, Gender and Politics, and Journal of Cultural Anthropology, and serves on the International Advisory Boards of GEMMA (European M.A. in WGS), University of Granada, Spain, the Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on racism (CEMFOR), at Uppsala University, Sweden, the Center for Intersectional Justice, Berlin, Germany, the Project on Armed Conflict Resolution and People’s Rights, India, and on the Academic Advisory Council, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Advisory Circle, Jews Against Anti-Muslim Racism (JAAMR). Linda and Chandra were co-PIs for the Mellon-funded Democratizing Knowledge Summer Institutes: Just Academic Spaces: Crafting New Publics through Radical Literacies (2015-2018). 

Linda E. Carty 
Syracuse University  

Linda E. Carty is a Black feminist scholar-activist and educator in the African American Studies Department at Syracuse University. Linda’s activist and research work span black labor struggles, migration, and sexuality in Canada, the Caribbean, and the U.S. She is the author of “A Genealogy of Marxist Feminism in Canada,” (2014), “Not a Nanny: A Gendered, Transnational Analysis of Caribbean Domestic Workers in New York City” (2003) and “The Discourse of Empire and the Social Construction of Gender” (2002). Linda is the editor of the anthology And Still We Rise: Feminist Mobilization in Contemporary Canada (1993). She is a co-author/contributor to We’re Rooted Here: Essays in African Canadian Women’s History (1994) and Unsettling Relations: The University as a Site of Feminist Struggles (1991). Linda has co-authored “Mapping Transnational Feminist Engagements: Neoliberalism and the Politics of Solidarity” (2015) with Chandra Talpade Mohanty; and “Solidarity Work in Transnational Feminism: The Question of Class and Location,” with Monisha Das Gupta (2009). She works with UNAIDS-Caribbean, has been a member of The Black Women’s Collective, Toronto; Caribbean Women’s Health Association – Immigrant Services, New York City and is a founding member of the Democratizing Knowledge Collective (http://democratizingknowledge.syr.edu) at SU.  As an educator, Linda continues her grounded community activism in the Eastern Caribbean where she works with women and youth who have a desire to create structural change on both state and community levels.  The focus of this work is addressing a range of social ills from gender-based violence to the CoVid 19 pandemic.  She is the founder and Executive Director of the organization Gender Central (https://www.gendercentral.org) a project of educational programs for women’s self-empowerment conducted mostly through high school lectures and community workshops. 

Sandy Grande 
University of Connecticut 

Professor of Political Science and Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Connecticut with affiliations in American Studies, Philosophy, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Across her work, she aims to produce more nuanced analyses of the colonial present. She was recently awarded the Ford Foundation, Senior Fellowship (2019-2020) for a project on Indigenous Elders and aging. Her book, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought was published in a 10th-anniversary edition and a Portuguese translation is anticipated to be published in Brazil in 2021. In addition to publishing numerous articles and book chapters, she is a founding member of New York Stands for Standing Rock. As one of their projects, they published the Standing Rock Syllabus. In addition to her academic and organizing work, she has provided eldercare for her parents for over ten years and remains the primary caregiver for her 94-yr. old father. 

Michelle Téllez 
University of Arizona 

Michelle Téllez teaches at the University of Arizona and has a long history of grassroots community engagement and activism in multiple social justice projects.  She draws on critical pedagogy, community-based arts, performance, and visual media. Her scholarly work focuses on identity, mothering, transnational community formation, cross-border labor organizing, gendered migration, and autonomy and resistance along the U.S./Mexico border.  She is the author of Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas: Autonomy in the Space of Neoliberal Neglect (2021) and co-editor of The Chicana M(other)work Anthology (2019) both published by the University of Arizona Press and a founding member of the Chicana M(other)work Collective and the Binational Artist in Residency project. She is on the editorial review board for Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social, on the executive board of directors for the Southwest Folklife Alliance, and is the Faculty Fellow for the Guerrero Student Center. Dr. Téllez is widely published in scholarly books and journals.  She has been involved in five documentary films on topics as varied as the arrival of the Zapatista rebel army to Mexico City, and workers' rights. Her public scholarship includes writing for Truth Out, The Feminist Wire, Latino Rebels, and Mujeres Talk. 
 

Aída Hernández Castillo 
Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), Mexico 

Professor and Senior Researcher at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico City.  Aida worked as a journalist since she was 18 years old in a Central American Press Agency. Since she was an undergraduate she has combined her academic work with media projects in radio, video, and journalism. Her academic work has promoted indigenous and women's rights in Latin America. She has done fieldwork in indigenous communities in the Mexican states of Chiapas, Guerrero, and Morelos, with Guatemalan refugees and with African immigrants in the South of Spain. She has published twenty-two books and her academic work has been translated into English, French, and Japanese. Her more recent book is entitled Multiple InJusticies. Indigenous Women Law and Political Struggle in Latin America.  She is the recipient of the Martin Diskin Oxfam Award for her activist research and of the Simon Bolivar Chair (2013-2014) granted by Cambridge University for her academic work. 

Kia Melchor Hall 
Brandeis University 

K. Melchor Quick Hall, Ph.D. is a popular educator, writer, and researcher. Hall is the author of Naming a Transnational Black Feminist Framework: Writing in Darkness, and co-editor, with Gwyn Kirk, of Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and Beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism. She is both a Resident Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center (WSRC) and the Executive Director of the African American Education & Research Organization (AAERO) @ Melchor-Quick Meeting House (MQMH), founded by her mother and first teacher, Paula Quick Hall. At Pendle Hill Quaker Retreat and Conference Center, Hall co-leads a writing workshop for people of color, a reparations workshop for US-based, white inheritors of wealth, and an artist-led freedom visioning workshop for individuals interested in our shared liberation. 
 

Imani Tafari-Ama 
University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica  

For the last four years, Dr. Imani Tafari-Ama worked as Research Fellow at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, Regional Coordinating Office (IGDS-RCO) at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. She applied multidisciplinary skills in this position to manage development projects that utilized multimedia approaches to address problems of gender-based violence, legislative reform, women’s economic empowerment, and climate responsiveness and justice. Imani curated the Rum, Sweat and Tears exhibition to decolonize the “Rum City” of Flensburg, Germany (2017-18) and provide a critical African Caribbean response to the 2017 Centennial of Denmark’s sale of the land and people of the Virgin Islands to the United States of America for twenty-five million dollars in gold, 69 years after Emancipation. Her robust response to this contradiction reflects the four decades she has devoted to addressing subaltern subjectivities and resilience in the face of perennial social inequalities. Dr. Tafari-Ama is the author of Blood, Bullets, and Bodies: Sexual Politics Below Jamaica's Poverty Line, Up For Air: This Half Has Never Been Told (an award-winning novel; https://youtu.be/qQNYGjRFlwk) and Lead in the Veins (poetry) as well as several book chapters and articles. She is also a multimedia journalist who has produced several audio-visual documentaries including 'Setting the Skin Tone', which explores the catastrophic social practice of skin bleaching (https://youtu.be/VNwIZ_xHjm0). This eight-and-a-half-minute video documentary (produced in 2006) is an excerpt from her Doctoral research.