Please join us for conversation, book launch, and book signing. Lorgia García Peña offers a meditation on freedom-making in the academy for women scholars of color. She is joined by Ruha Benjamin, one of the foremost thinkers about knowledge and power in the US. This hybrid event is hosted by the Trenton Free Public Library and cosponsored by Labyrinth Books. We encourage you to come out to the library, but if you prefer, you can register here for the livestream. Directions to the Library are here. Angela Y. Davis calls Peñas book "A life-saving and life-affirming text. Cornel West adds, "Lorgia García Peña is one of the few courageous and brilliant intellectuals grounded in rigorous and visionary grassroots education. Weaving personal narrative with political analysis, Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for students and faculty of color within academia. Much like other women scholars of color, García Peña has struggled against the colonizing, racializing, classist, and unequal structures that perpetuate systemic violence within universities. Through personal experiences and analytical reflections, the author invites readersin particular Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian womento engage in liberatory practices of boycott, abolition, and radical community-building to combat the academic worlds tokenizing and exploitative structures. García Peña 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 prioritizes 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. Lorgia García Peña is a first generation Latinx Studies scholar, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic and an Afro-Latina from Trenton, NJ. She studies Blackness, colonialism, migration and diaspora with a special focus on dominicanidades. Dr. García Peña is the Mellon Associate Professor of Race, Colonialism and Diaspora Studies at Tufts University and a Casey Foundation 2021 Freedom Scholar. Ruha Benjamin is professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and author of the award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code and the forthcoming book Viral […]