Fwd: Dismantling the Ivory Tower at #AMC2015
Moya Bailey
Academics charting new strategies for social justice organizing
The Dismantling the Ivory Tower Network Gathering is for people of color connected to colleges, universities, and academic centers who want to chart new strategies for social justice organizing. This gathering is coordinated by and welcomes participation from queer, trans and cis gender academics of color as an opportunity to create strategies to better engage these institutions. We will begin by outlining the challenges we face as academics invested in social justice, such as the separation between academic institutions and the communities in which they are located and how we can heal from traumatic experiences within academia. The rest of the day will be spent strategizing. We will set priority areas of engagement for institutional change by sharing skills we can use to dismantle the “Ivory Tower” and make organizing our guiding principle on and off campus.
This network gathering is coordinated by Moya Bailey, Northeastern University; Van Bailey, Harvard University; Kai Green, Northwestern University; Jessica Johnson, Michigan State University
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
This is an open network gathering.
The Dismantling the Ivory Tower Network Gathering is for people of color academics connected to colleges, universities, and academic centers who want to chart new strategies for organizing for social justice.
During this network gathering, participants will break into groups and have an opportunity to discuss the following questions:
- What does solidarity look like between people of color staff, faculty, students, and communities?
- How can we do our research in more just ways?
- How do we make our work more practical and accessible outside of academic spaces?
- What is the academic’s social justice toolkit?
- How do we deal with the risks associated with doing justice work as an academic?
- How do we create policies on campus that are more just?
- How can we use media, art, and technology to make our work visible and useful to organizers and communities?
- What strategies do we need to change tenure and promotion policies such that institutions value and reward projects that are accountable to communities?
Participants can expect to leave AMC with a network, a shared calendar of future events, and a survival kit for how to dismantle the ivory tower wherever they are.
We are encouraging Dismantling the Ivory Tower participants to continue the conversation by submitting sessions and pop-up meals in conjunction with related tracks at the AMC. For example, network gathering participants especially interested in accessible research are encouraged to organize sessions in theResearch Justice, Radical Librarianship, and Youth Creating Worlds tracks.
This network gathering is limited to 50 participants. To find out more and to learn how to register, dismantli...@gmail.com.