Auditorium A2, Maison de la paix, Geneva Graduate Institute
Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for students and faculty of colour 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 tokenising 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 prioritises 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.
Dr. Lorgia García-Peña is the Mellon Professor of Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts University and the co-founder of Freedom University Georgia. She is the author of The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation and Archives of Contradictions (Duke, 2016), Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (Duke, 2022) and Community as Rebellion (Haymarket, 2022). Dr. García Peña is one of the 2021 Freedom Scholars, and the recipient of the 2017 Disobedience Award. García-Peña received a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and an M.A. in Latin American and Latino Literatures from Rutgers University.
This event is organised by the Gender Centre in partnership with Black Conversations.
