Tuesday, April 6 @ 1 – 3 PM | Marcelo D. Viana Neto (Hostos Community College)
This post was written by Contributing Authors Midori Yamamura and Tommy Mintz and edited by Jason Leggett.
“That was the best of all the webinars and whatever I’ve been clocking into!”
“This was a very powerful conversation on the topic of homelessness. The biggest takeaway for me is to hear this topic approached from grassroots and not top-down perspective.”
These reactions came from participants of UnHomeless NYC: an information session. This two-day workshop examined homelessness with artists, community activists, students, educators, and attendees in dialogue around activities leading up to a public exhibition in the fall of 2021 and spring of 2022 at Kingsborough Community College. Together, educators across disciplines along with students, activists and artists are transforming educational spaces to critically reflect about perceptions of homelessness as agency for social change. As one activist, Manon Vergerio, reflected after the event, the voices from the street can be a powerful pedagogical tool that triggers us to see things differently, not just scholars writing for other scholars. Continue reading
This post was written by Contributing Author Alex Ho, who teaches in the Center for Ethnic Studies at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC).
When I worked at the Museum of Chinese in America, we would use one of the first photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown, “An Unsuspecting Victim” by Arnold Genthe, to show how an author’s intent through what they choose to show and to hide and to editorialize would affect the impression a photograph could give a viewer. The photograph is stripped of the other white Americans, darkened, and given dimensions much more familiar to our vertical-video smartphone world. It jibes with a persistent fantasy about ethnic enclaves like Chinatown–that they are mysterious and dangerous for white America. Continue reading
This post was written by Contributing Author Dillonna C. Lewis, Adjunct Assistant Professor at Hunter College, CUNY, and a facilitator of the event.
In post-panel processing with students, an underlying theme emerged–the ongoing relevance and impact of Audre’s poems and prose for our current socio-political realities. Students reflected on the need for additional community “read-in” spaces at Hunter College where they can dialogue with peers, professors and other participants from the larger community. Bringing Audre back to the community, and listening to the intergenerational interactions in break out groups, honored the power of poetry to speak to us all, to teach us all and to hold our complexities. In our small group conversations, we were able to lift up difference for conscious introspection and publicly name what sustains us in community and what divides us. One panelist shared her experiences with feeling dissected, probed and interrogated in White feminist circles where she was expected to speak for all Black women. The repetitive notion that academic spaces can only hold one brilliant Black woman at a time feeds this “under the microscope” phenomena that threatens current attempts to organize movement-building that defines and empowers. Continue reading
This post was written by Contributing Author Meagan G. Washington, Adjunct Lecturer at Hunter College, CUNY.
The community read-in of Audre Lorde’s work has generated an opportunity to reflect deeply on how her work offers ways to think about the current socio-political situation. The history of anti-black racism and more contemporary anti-Asian violence leave students and CUNY community devastated and struggling to come to grips with the violence. Lorde’s work in ‘A Litany for Survival’ as well as her other prose and poetry ground the experiences of violence by braiding together individual experiences with systemic structural violence. The reflections by Meagan G. Washington and Dillonna C. Lewis, show just how rich the conversation Lorde’s work provoked in the breakout rooms. Continue reading
Over the last year, CUNY colleges have developed new and innovative practices to ensure student success during the COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty, staff, and students at CUNY are reflecting on lessons learned as they look forward to future undergraduate education initiatives at their college.
In order to highlight this important work, the Office of Undergraduate Studies is joining forces with leaders across CUNY to host the 2021 CUE Virtual Conference. “Thriving, Not Just Surviving in a Time of Crisis: Expanding Our New Learning Environment” will be held virtually on four Fridays, April 9th, April 23rd, May 7th, and May 21. This year’s conference seeks to feature the transformative work being done at CUNY. Continue reading
This post was written by Contributing Author Ossama Elhadary, Associate Professor in the Computer Systems Technology department of the New York City College of Technology (Citytech).
Internships are critical in preparing students for careers in many fields and are also a critical part of active learning. With the Covid 19 pandemic though, internships have changed and to a certain extent students’ perceptions of internships have also changed. Many students are reluctant to search for internships because they assume beforehand that they either do not exist during this pandemic era or are simply too difficult to find. In reality though, there are a lot of opportunities that exist today that did not exist in the pre-pandemic era. Geography and time zone differences are almost irrelevant, and many of our New York students are now encouraged to search for internships outside the region and even outside the country. Continue reading
This post was co-written by Contributing Authors Kelly Baker Josephs (York College, CUNY Graduate Center) and Donna Hill (Medgar Evers College).
On February 26, 2021, Kelly Baker Josephs and Donna Hill led a discussion via Zoom about approaching pandemic teaching at CUNY via the frame of Black love. As Black female professors in primarily general education courses at campuses with large populations of Black students, Josephs and Hill have found themselves asking: How can we support our students as “‘whole’ human beings, striving not just for knowledge in books, but knowledge about how to live in the world” (bell hooks, 1994). This has always been a concern at CUNY, but the shift to virtual teaching and the threat of COVID-19 and its aftermath, in all aspects of our lives, has made the need to acknowledge non-academic factors as part of the “classroom” both more difficult and more dire. This hour of intimate conversation focused on the benefits and risks of such openness for Black faculty and Black students. Continue reading
This post was written by Contributing Author Matt Brim. Matt Brim is Professor of Queer Studies in the English department at College of Staten Island, with a faculty appointment at the Graduate Center in the Women’s and Gender Studies M.A. Program.
Part 1: The Plan
On February 24, 2021, I facilitated a workshop as part of the Transformative Learning in the Humanities series, an initiative of a larger TLH grant at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. The workshop was titled “Teaching Black Queer Studies as General Education for the Public Good.” I had several goals in mind for the session: Continue reading
This post is by Contributing Author Sarah Soanirina Ohmer. Sarah Soanirina Ohmer: polyglot, Black Feminist, womanist, literary critic focusing on trauma, healing, and spirituality, in French Spanish Portuguese and English, is an Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies, African American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies at Lehman College in the Bronx, NY.
On 02/27/2021, we listened to, as Lehman Masters in Liberal Studies student Chanta Palmer commented, “living references.” Racialized women from the Bronx, Gainesville via Baltimore, Minas Gerais Brazil, and Bogotá Colombia via the Dominican Republic. The discussion went from the self-identification and self-definition processes of a bisexual Afro-Latinx to the revolutionary acts of a fat black feminist in Brazil. Continue reading
