Anti-Racism

Questions abound in the literature and in practice about how best to advance social justice among groups who are content to ignore the chorus of marginalized voices pressing for social change. This qualitative study of 20 community-based practitioners explored how to assist the transformation of privileged learners on issues of race, class, and gender when they are in the training rooms. Pedagogy for the privileged presents an opportunity to enhance the effectiveness of adult educators who work with privileged learners on a daily basis in antiracism and diversity training, human rights development, leadership training, sensitivity training, and organizational development workshops. This article describes how grassroots educators understand the transformation process, including its ethical dimensions, and presents a new model for this pedagogy based on confidence shaking and confidence building.--Sade Alexis

"So much feminist thinking tells us to be wary of visual pleasure. But for some artists, taking pleasure in the painted surface is as political as it is recuperative"--Sade Alexis

In this article Kerry Downey discusses how spaces can be formed to protect those who “spill over”. They discuss the performance of gender and their own experience of understanding the queerness of their gender identity. They describe these spaces as “good enough containers” as they understand that these spaces will never be utopic. Downey discusses the use of participatory practice to create a good enough container and discuss the need as a white educator working with folks who do not often have space within art institutions, much of this involves getting out of the way. They discuss the necessity for close listening and a slowness when discussing identity. Along with this they go on to discuss queering and reclaiming institutions through expanding institutions to meet the needs of vulnerable communities.--Sade Alexis

"Drennan El-Awar provides guidelines for decolonization created in order to lay the framework of the Jamaa Al-Yad collective. The practice is rooted in historical decolonial movements that focus on and rely on the upkeep and preservation of grassroots community. The rhetoric used is not based on individual identities but rather communal ideals of resistance, land, place and belonging. Drennan El-Awar has created an active living document that uses self-critical precepts and subsequent questions based on these precepts as a means of prompting rather than policing the behaviours of readers. The document discusses and questions class, ways of knowing, and ways of being as a means of enacting decolonizing practices."--Sade Alexis

With a keen awareness of the colonial nature of post-secondary institutions, in which students are educated outside of local culture, Drennan ElAwar discusses decolonial education practices through the lens of illustration. He uses his experience of teaching in Greater Syria for twelve years as a means of discussing the ways in which a decolonial framework is useful and in many cases necessary for illustration practices. Drennan ElAwar discusses his own personal experiences as a meant of presenting anecdotal evidence for the effectiveness and the rhetoric behind decolonial practices. Core aspects discusses as a means of promoting activist illustration practices are: “communal and collaborative work, collision of local and colonial languages, interaction with the displaced, dispossessed and marginalized populations, exploration of social issues and concepts of fractured, uprooted and affected identities.” Drennan ElAwar uses class projects as examples of decolonial projects within illustration classrooms.--Sade Alexis

In this text Daniel Drennan ElAwar uses the syllabus and worksheets created for a Relief Printmaking class taught at Emily Carr as a means of questioning the role of an artist and their relationship to their work. He encourages students to question their contexts, to move away from the concept that artists are removed from their contexts. Instead students are encouraged to shift away from a focus on the final form of an artwork and to question the ways in which they create their work and why, in relation to their political contexts and potential as artists. Drennan ElAwar provides readers with a list of vocabulary as a means of assessing and considering events and the representation of said events. The vocabulary provided cover the themes of historic / geographic / temporal distances, mediation, potential, goals, and substance. This text discusses the ways in which one can activate their art practice and become more cognizant of the ways in which they are making art and how this reflects their political standpoints. This text asks artists to understand their potential for political action.--Sade Alexis

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"This text is of a speech given by Rachel Jones at a symposium held at Cambridge University in 2009. Jones uses this opportunity to discuss the ways in which the things we do not know allow for us to accept one another. She discusses the ways in which accepting that we cannot know or understand everything allows us to understand difference without attempting to assimilate or appropriate it. She uses the concept of wonder as a means of inciting individuals to be passionate about things that we do not know."--Sade Alexis

In this article Helen Molseworth discusses and analyzes the work of Lee Lozano, an artist who made work in the 1960s and 70s. Molesworth discusses specifically, Lozanos decision to boycott both the New York art scene and women as a whole. Molesworth takes this oppocrtunity to discuss that Lozanos actions display or comment on the ways in which the New York art community comes to represent capitalism and women which for some strange reason come to represent patriarchy. She argues that this boycott was to demonstrate the interconnectedness of patriarchy and capitalism.--Sade Alexis

The institutional racism addressed by the Black Lives Matter movement is encoded in many of the structures of academia, including academic libraries. As a librarian who teaches information literacy, I ask students to think about which voices are represented in the scholarly literature, make explicit the implicit biases of the way scholarly materials are organized in the library and research databases, and examine the way their own biases affect their evaluations of information. In this article, I examine some of the ways racism is build into the structure of the library and describe ways I teach students to recognize inequities in the sources they rely on for college level research.--article abstract