Recipients of the 2023-2024 AY Faculty Staff Union Anti-Racism Grants Announced
Recipients of the 2023-2024 AY Faculty Staff Union Anti-Racism Grants Announced
Here are a few excerpts
Here they are, promoting illiteracy linguistic justice and racial segregation affinity groups… and also death decolonization.
Title: NTT Labor Based Grading Project
A group of our NTT colleagues are researching grading contracts, a novel approach to evaluation advanced by rhetoric and composition scholar Asao Inoue at Arizona State University.
Oh, our good friend Asao Inoue. The same guy who said black kids should not want to succeed. But even he is not good enough. Wasn’t the “Labor Based Grading” debunked as insufficiently revolutionary? Like, some students are lazy, and what, we are going to punish them for that?! Do better. Educate yourself.
Title: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature Reading Group
A proposed Race, Ethnicity, and Literature (REL) reading group will bring interested students together to read diverse books and discuss them in community.
Don’t they see a contradiction with the “NTT Labor Based Grading Project” proposal above:
Grading contracts are operate [sic.] on a labor-based model of assessment, [de]emphasizing …factors outside of [students’] control, such as their proximity to Standard Academic English.
What reading group? Like in English? With “proximity” to it being out of students’ control? Don’t you see that we must is not [sic.] touch this colonial argot with a six feets pol [sic.] Sick!
Title: A Teach-In and Speak-Out For the Times: Pathways to Social Repair and Campus Transformation/ Solidarity, Healing, and Empowerment: Confronting Embodiments of Racism & Racism-Induced Weathering at UMass Boston
[T]his workshop will provide a… space… to examine and apply two concepts from public health to the ongoing need for enacting anti-racist and health-promoting work in the day-to-day operations at UMB: “embodiment” and “weathering…”
Interesting… What are those “embodiment” and “weathering?” First hit on Google:
This article contributes original insights to a developing body of phenomenological-sociological empirical work in this domain, in addressing the lived experience of organized exercise in outdoor environments, and specifically in theorizing the role of ‘lived weather’ in contouring these experiences. It thus addresses the call by Vannini et al. (2012) to remedy the notable ‘absent-presence’ of weather in much social science research.
The plot thickens (maybe also sickens) (or [sic.]ens?). Let’s google “absent-presence.” First hit:
Q: What is Absent presence
A: Someone who engages in mediated media technologies event essentially ignore other people as if they were absent even though they are present in the same space.
Ah, so much freedom when the shackles of the Standard Academic English are gone: one can give animate answers to inanimate questions… like in “illiteracy is someone who got their degree for the Department of Leadership in Education.” [sic.]
P.S. Notice also two parallel verbs, “engages” and “ignore” with no preposition between them. Freeedom!
P.P.S. - the “absent-present” concept does not apply to Jewish or Israeli students: those are always “absent”; and if “from the river to the sea” succeeds, they won’t be “present” either.
Title: Connecting the dots between past, present, and future: Understanding oppression in the early childhood education workforce in order to re-build towards intersectional justice
This 3-part webinar series will connect the dots between how racism, particularly the system of chattel slavery, continues to marginalize ECE providers in terms of status, salary, and work conditions. These qualities affect turnover and a range of child and student outcomes. Each 90 minute webinar will be composed of individuals with a range of personal-professional perspectives representing policy, practice, transdisciplinary research, and community-based perspectives engaging in 60 minutes of re-framing and 30 minutes of interactive discussion and planning. It will follow a “what, so what? now what?” protocol to link current and planned anti-racist action. The first seminar will focus on historical explorations of early care and education workforce issues, the second will focus on current perspectives and policies, and the third will focus on racism in higher ed teacher education.
An acute case of Chewbacca defense. Compare:
Why would a Wookiee, an 8-foot-tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of 2-foot-tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a major record company, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberatin' and conjugatin' the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.
Title: A Teach-In and Speak-Out for the Times: Pathways to Social Repair and Campus Transformation/ Sankofa Conversation on Structural Racism for the Times
This panel… will address the broader context for imagining the importance of the structural interventions required and the leadership necessary to becoming an anti-racist and health-promoting public research institution.
Hah, interesting, nobody ever bothered point me to where the beast of the “structural racism” actually hides his ugly body, but if it’s real, it will surely require a “structural intervention.” See vampires and wooden stakes.
P.S. - the social repair and anti-racism forum does not apply to Jewish or Israeli students.
Title: Sustaining Anti-Racism Efforts in Counseling and School Psychology, Continuing our Phillis Wheatley Peters Emerging Scholar Conversations and Social Justice Lunch and Learn Series
The “Phillis Wheatley Peters Emerging Scholar Conversations” offers a unique mentorship opportunity to three students with minoritized racial and ethnic identities in CSP, and spotlights the scholarship of six faculty, particularly those who are racially and ethnically minoritized, to the rest of the department.
Ah, there is nothing more anti-racist than a good old racial segregation!
P.S. - Anti-racism efforts in general, and in the College of Education in particular, do not apply to Jewish or Israeli students.
Title: Towards Advancing Gendered Racial Equity in Greater Boston’s STEM Education Ecosystem
Since its inception at UMass Boston in 2021, the [I CAN PERSIST] STEM Initiative has supported approximately 30 WOC in STEM. Results from the 2022-2023 annual survey indicated that 100% of scholars reported that they “do not feel alone in STEM because of support from the ICP STEM Initiative” and 95% of scholars reported that the “ICP STEM Initiative motivated my STEM professional goals.”
May we suggest contributing the awarded $3,000 towards a tuition-free calculus class for these students instead? Or maybe towards a proctored math placement test? What? Too colonial, too patriarchal, too racist. Forget it!
Title: A Teach-In and Speak-Out For the Times: Pathways to Social Repair and Campus Transformation
Award winning educator and writer… will read from The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom.
Ah, so true,
[i]n American schools, students sit at desks in classrooms, listen to lectures, do homework and take tests… [T]hese are all examples of colonization.
We didn’t know that in non-American schools students dance around, sing Kumbaya and never take tests. Oh well, you learn something new every day.
Besides, while the decolonization process starts from desks, lectures, homework, and tests, it ends with killing 260 peace festival goers. Ohh, finally, there is something that does apply to Jews and Israelis.
Keep going, the Instant University (also here) is around the corner. Its operating principles will be illiteracy, racial segregation, and also death promotion.