Disrupting normalcies in higher education
Dr. LaShawn Faith Washington on the cruciality of a Black feminist education
As a scholar of race, gender, and higher education, Dr. Washington is particularly invested in transforming how we credit the intellectual contributions of women of color, noting, “Women, especially Black women and women of color, live in the shadows of their own theories and contributions. Many people will say ‘I’m a Marxist’ or ‘I’m a Foucauldian’. Scholars who are men get the accolades and schools of thought named after them, but women don’t. By saying I am a bell hooks scholar, or a bell hooksian scholar, I am reclaiming the name and the knowledge and contributions made by women like Audre Lorde and bell hooks. These women have full bodies of work.”
Badgers in NYC
In partnership with The Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, the department traveled with fifteen undergraduates to experience African American and Jewish culture in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side through food, museums, and walking tours this April
A visual storyteller
Bob Trondson on the impact of human stories
Trondson’s path to filmmaking was shaped in part by his time in the African American Studies department at UW–Madison. He enrolled in an elective literature course taught by Professor Craig Werner; by the end of his second year at UW–Madison, Trondson became a major. He remembers encountering books like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God for the first time. “It was the most exciting literature I think I’ve read in my life,” he shares. “African American literature is based in realism, blending history with personal narrative, and that felt momentous to me at the time. I found African American literature to be endlessly fascinating in contrast to the literature I grew up with.”
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