"The only relationship I can have to the university is a criminal one":
Safety, Repression, and Coalition with Amanda Ellis, Cherríe Moraga, Sherene Seikaly, Chelsea Lancaster, and Tara Jones
For our inaugural episode, we are joined by five extraordinary scholar-activists—Amanda Ellis, Cherríe Moraga, Sherene Seikaly, Chelsea Lancaster, and Tara Jones—for a conversation on how women of color in education are responding to political repression, past and present.
We discuss how our own educational experiences led us to political awareness, who is "safe" on campus and who is not, and how community, coalition, and art making help us imagine better worlds and build better futures.
Episode transcript
Guest bios
Amanda Ellis is an interdisciplinary researcher and assistant professor of Mexican American Literature and Culture at the University of Houston. Her first book project draws from Chicana feminist theory to consider the literary history and significance of the figure of the curandera throughout Mexican American Literature. She has published in: Chicana/Latina Studies, Aztlán: The Journal of Chicano Studies, MELUS, Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures, The Journal of Latina Critical Feminism, and Western American Literature.
Cherríe Moraga is an internationally recognized poet, playwright, essayist and memoirist who initiated her public writing life as the co-editor (with Gloria Anzaldúa) of the avant-garde feminist work, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. As a political and literary essayist, she has published several collections of writings, including: A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness; Loving in The War Years; The Last Generation; and Waiting in the Wings – Portrait of a Queer Motherhood. Moraga is the recipient of the United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature, the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Lambda Foundation’s Pioneer award, among many other honors.
Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores economy, territory, the home, and the body. Her forthcoming book, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine tells a global history of capital, slavery, and dispossession. She is the Editor of Journal of Palestine Studies, Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UCSB, co-editor of the Stanford Studies Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures Series, and co-editor of Jadaliyya.
Chelsea Lancaster is the coordinator of the Single Parents Arriving Ready to College program at Santa Barbara City College, as well as an adjunct faculty member and a community organizer.
Tara Jones is Coordinator of the African diasporic Cultural Resource Center at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Academic Achievement Counselor for UCSB’s Educational Opportunity Program, supporting first-generation, and income eligible students’ retention and matriculation. She holds a Ph.D. in Depth Psychology, specializing in Community, Liberation, & Eco-Psychologies at Pacifica Graduate Institute, a Masters in the Science of Teaching from Fordham University, a Masters of Arts in Counseling Psychology and a Master’s of Arts in Depth Psychology from PGI, and a Bachelors of Arts degree in Sociology and Black Studies from UCSB. She has served as a: public school teacher in Harlem NYC, social-emotional learning facilitator for teens and young adults in the non-profit shere, psychotherapist engaged in community mental health, and employment specialist working with homeless communities. She is the 2023 winner of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Anna Julia Cooper Award.