Join us in celebrating Lorgia Garcia Peña’s much-needed meditation on freedom making in the academy for women scholars of color, as she reads from her new book Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color. Garcia Peña will be in conversation with Deborah Paredez. 

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket. Please register in advance.

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees for this event must show proof of vaccination and must remain masked at all times. Please arrive at least 30 minutes before the event so we can check vaccination cards and ID. 

Recirculation, a project of Word Up Community Bookshop, is located at 876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 157th St., A/C train to 163rd St., and the M4 and M5 to Broadway and 159/160th.

ABOUT THE BOOK

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, Lorgia 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 readers–in particular Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women–to engage in liberatory practices of boycott, abolition, and radical community-building to combat the academic world’s 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.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS/AUTHORS

Dr. Lorgia García-Peña is the Mellon Associate Professor of Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts University and the co-founder of Freedom University Georgia. She is the author of the award-wining book The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions (2016). Dr. García Peña is one of the 2021 Freedom Scholars, the 2018 Martin Luther King, Jr. fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the recipient of the 2017 Disobedience Award. García-Peña received a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and an M.A. in Latin American and Latino Literatures from Rutgers University.

Deborah Paredez is a poet, scholar, and cultural critic. She is the author of the poetry collections, This Side of Skin (Wings Press 2002) and Year of the Dog (BOA Editions 2020), a New York Times “New and Notable Poetry Book” and winner of the 2020 Writers’ League of Texas Poetry Book Award. She is also the author of the award-winning critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke 2009). She is the co-founder of CantoMundo, a national organization dedicated to Latinx poets and poetry, and a professor of creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University. Her book of literary nonfiction, American Diva, is forthcoming from Norton.

Word Up Community Safety Guidelines

• All children and adults ages 5 and older are required to have proof of vaccination for indoor events hosted by Word Up Community Bookshop. They must show proof they have received two vaccine doses, except for those who have received the one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
• People 18 and older are also required to show identification along with their proof of vaccination.
• All attendees ages 2 and older must wear a mask at all times when indoors at the store and during events at Word Up and Recirculation.

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PHYSICAL ACCESSIBILITY: Recirculation is a wheelchair-accessible space with one ramp from the street level down to the store. Most of the shelves are on wheels and can be moved to provide additional access. The bathrooms are not yet ADA compliant and do not yet have a changing table but are gender neutral. The events are mic’d for sound and videos are captioned when possible. Free ASL interpretation is available for most programs upon request. Please email events@wordupbooks.com to request interpretation as early as possible. If you have specific questions about the space or how an event can be made more accessible to you, please do not hesitate to contact us at info@wordupbooks.com.