Community as Rebellion: A Conversation with Lorgia García-Peña

What does it mean to “teach in and for freedom”?

What does it look like to create liberatory spaces centered around the lives and needs of faculty and students of color?

How do we sustain and defend such feminist and anti-racist teaching against threats of institutional cooptation, censure, and exploitation?

To ring out 2023, we welcome Professor Lorgia García-Peña to discuss these topics and so much more. Dr. García-Peña is currently a Professor of Latinx Studies at the Efron Center for the Study of America and the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She has authored three books, all of which have won multiple awards. These include: The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction (Duke 2016), Translating Blacknesss: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (Duke 2022), and Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color (Haymarket 2022).  

A co-founder of Freedom University and a leader of the movement to create an Ethnic Studies concentration at Harvard, Dr. García-Peña's labors to create more equitable, empowering institutional spaces for students and faculty of color is well-known. Community as Rebellion, which reflects on many of these projects, has been praised by Angela Davis as a “life-saving and life-affirming text” that charts a “fearless strategy” for “how our institutions might be reimagined beyond the strongholds of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy.” These strategies—and the stories, experiences, and analyses that have fueled them—are at the heart of our conversation in this episode.

Credits:

Co-hosted and co-produced by Tina Pippin + Lucia Hulsether

Audio editing + outro music by Aliyah Harris

Intro music by Lance Hogan, performed by Aviva and the Flying Penguins.