BIPOC Faculty and Staff: Making Room for Emancipatory (Summer) Writing - Session #3 Online
Workshop Overview
OFA is pleased to offer a facilitated summer-writing workshop series open to all BIPOC faculty and professional staff whose identities and positionality in the university have led to "invisible labor" (June, Matthew, others), often practical and emotionally strenuous. Each of the four workshop sessions takes inspiration from the acclaimed anthology: Spirit, Space & Survival: African American Women in (White) Academe, by editors Joy James and Ruth Farmer, with a foreword by Angela Davis. Collectively, the editors impart, "we write to retain our voices, to name and identify ourselves as independent…thinkers and actors" (Introduction). We also write to maintain our jobs as professors, administrators, and staff within institutions in which we may feel overwhelmed, muted, or part of a distracting hypervisibility. This month-long series of "meetups" encourages us to "work towards…the act of 'making'" (19) by returning to long-neglected conference papers, manuscripts, articles, scripts, poems, and data sources, with urgent, fearless inspiration.
The summer-writing workshop series is facilitated by Pamela Booker, MFA, an Interdisciplinary writing artist, OFA Teaching Consultant, and MSU Writing Faculty. She served as Goddard College Graduate Institute (GGI) Visiting Scholar at the invitation of Ruth Farmer, anthology co-editor and former GGI director.
We will meet on Wednesdays, June 8-29th, 11 to 12:30, by Zoom. Participants also have the opportunity to schedule individual meetings with the facilitator to discuss writing goals.
- Date:
- Wednesday, June 22, 2022
- Time:
- 11:00am - 12:30pm
- Time Zone:
- Eastern Time - US & Canada (change)
- Online:
- This is an online event. Event URL will be sent via registration email.
- Audience:
- Instructors
How it Works
Each workshop provides dedicated time to review projects currently in progress or under consideration for individual and group feedback that borrows from the (CRP) Critical Response Process and leaves "the maker eager and motivated to get back to work." We welcome scholarly, creative, and nonfiction texts, long-neglected conference papers, manuscripts, articles, and data research. Participants also have the opportunity to schedule individual meetings with the facilitator to consult on writing goals, intentions, revisions, and other support as needed.
In addition, each workshop begins with a featured topic of discussion engendered by the anthology’s themes and other more recent writings as blueprints for "redefining ourselves" within the academy while also identifying strategies for flourishing.
Workshop Sessions
Session #3: Publish Because Perish is Not an Option
June 22, 2022, 11:00am - 12:30pm
How do writing texts and compiling analyses that reflect contested ways of seeing the world, intertwined with resistance and joy, both excite our scholarly and creative impulses and cause dread? How do our contexts and subject choices directly impact the audience we hope to transform? Further, the ways in which we locate ourselves and our work at these essential cultural and intellectual intersections are critical to reception and maybe even future employment. To demystify the publishing process, we will examine research-based and creative texts, digital media, literary publishers, journals, and other discipline-specific resources.
Session #4: Planning Ahead for Emergent Work
June 29, 2022, 11:00am - 12:30pm
Now that we've toiled over the last weeks on meaningful research and creative projects, this final workshop is an opportunity to create "takeaway goals" for sustaining motivation and focus to continue and finish work. Our ability to more compassionately and skillfully "balance the personal and the professional" (179) enables us to move past survival to thriving productively in spaces within the academy and beyond. We will celebrate closing readings in the company of our generous "active listeners."
Pamela Booker/MFA (She/Her/Hers) is an Interdisciplinary Writing/Performance-Media Artist, Educator, and Eco-Activist. Her pedagogy is informed by the "artist as scholar" methods in partnership with cultural inquiry, race/gender/LGBTQ identities, and divergent storytelling styles. She holds an MA in Dramatic Writing & Performance Studies from New York University and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College. Her teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels focuses on returning adult and first-generation college student populations, a range of writing and critical thinking course content at Montclair State University, and formerly at NYU Global Studies and as Core-faculty in the undergraduate programs at Goddard College. Recent featured publications include Eco-Mediations & Memories of Dirt (About Place Journal) and the critically acclaimed anthology BlacktinoQueerPerformance (Duke Univ. Press). Currently, she is completing a collection of speculative short fiction stories and also recently founded WheresYourTree.com, an urban green initiatives project.