Reckoning with Settler Colonialism in Higher Education

Join us on Friday, August 26, 2022 at 11:00 am for the kick off of the “Study and Struggle Series.” Click here to see the full schedule and to register

Panelist Bios:

Leigh Patel is a writer, educator, and cultural worker. Her work is based in the knowledge that as long as oppression has existed so have freedom struggles. She is a community-based researcher as well as an eldercare provider. Professor Patel is a Professor of Education at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Education, where she also served as the inaugural dean for equity and justice. She is also an elected member of the National Academy of Education. Prior to being employed as a professor, she was a middle school language arts teacher, a journalist, and a state-level policymaker. She is also a proud national board member of Education for Liberation, a nonprofit that focuses on supporting low-income people, particularly youth of color, to understand and challenge the injustices their communities face.

Her latest book, There is No Study Without Struggle: Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education, from Beacon Press contends with the distinct yet deeply connected forms of oppression while also shedding light on the crucial history of political education for social transformation. Her walk-on song is “Can I Kick It” by A Tribe Called Quest.

karen “kg” marshall is an educator, organizer, and coach (of the basketball variety) who currently serves as the Executive Director of Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools (Rethink). 

“to be of use” by marge piercy 

the people i love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. 

they seem to become natives of that element, 

the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls. 

While karen was schooled in many institutions – primary through graduate school - her greatest and most important education, came from her family – a close knit group of ordinary black people, migratory by force, who over time have cultivated the art and science of survivance. 

i love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again. 

i want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. 

karen’s leadership and professional experience extends over 15 years as she has progressed from smaller organizations and projects to large scale operations. through it all she embodies an understanding of leadership as practice and responsibility – and not a matter of position. she has taught middle school, high school, undergraduate and graduate level courses both domestically and abroad and has extensive experience working at grassroots levels with individuals and communities seeking transformative change. 

the work of the world is common as mud. botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. 

but the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. greek amphoras for wine or oil, hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. 

the pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real. 

karen marshall, is committed to the fullest development of marginalized people’s individual lives and their collective agency to bring about effective change. As the Executive Director of Rethink in New Orleans, karen works to make the tradition of radical Black student organizing relevant in these times, integrating culture, base building, leadership development, collective action and intergenerational community building. Rethink has become a community hub for the emergence of a new generation of New Orleans leaders committed to a lifetime of struggle for social justice. 

Denise Taliaferro Baszile is Associate Dean of Diversity and Student Experience and Professor of Curriculum & Cultural Studies in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University. Dr. Taliaferro Baszile’s work focuses on understanding curriculum as racial/gendered text with an emphasis on disrupting traditional modes of knowledge production, validation and representation. Her scholarship draws on curriculum theory, critical race theory, and Black feminist theory and seeks a fuller understanding rather than a simply a legitimate understanding of the dynamic relationship between race, gender and curriculum.She has published in Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Curriculum Inquiry, Race, Ethnicity and Education, and Urban Education. She has two co-edited, Race, Gender, and Curriculum Theorizing: Womanish Waysand Black Women Theorizing Curriculum Studies in Color and Curves. Dr. Taliaferro Baszile is past president of the American Educational Studies Association, current Vice President of AERA DivisionB-Curriculum Studies, and co-editor for the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing and Currere Exchange.

Loubna Qutami is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Qutami is a former President’s Postdoctoral Fellow from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (2018-2020) and received her PhD from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside (2018). Qutami’s research examines transnational Palestinian youth movements after the 1993 Oslo Accords through the 2011 Arab Uprisings. Her work is based on scholar-activist ethnographic research methods. Qutami’s broader scholarly interests include Palestine, critical refugee studies, the racialization of Arab/Muslim communities in the U.S., settler-colonialism, youth movements, transnationalism and indigenous and Third World Feminism. Qutami was a co-founder of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM)and the former Executive Director of the Arab Cultural and Community Center (ACCC) in San Francisco. She is currently a member of thePalestinian Feminist Collective (PFC).