A good point of entry for anti-oppression frameworks is Peggy McIntosh's classic essay, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack." If you have not read it, take time now to do so. If you have read it, there is value in re-reading the essay, several times. For a link to the essay, click here.
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Another great read for learning about white privilege is Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility" essay, available by clicking here.
Uday Jain's August 11, 2017 essay in New Socialist, entitled "White Marxism: A Critique of Jacobin Magazine," offers insight into the intense identity politics debate within today's Leftist politics. Click here for a link to the essay.
Inspired by Beyoncé Knowles-Carter's 2016 solo, Lemonade, the Lemonade Syllabus provides an extensive but not inclusive list of diverse resources that taps the rich trajectory of thought and expression from Black feminism. Test your literacy by reviewing the lists. If you find yourself deficient and aspire to be an educated person in the 21st century, find time in your education to engage. It's that basic, right? Click here for a link to the syllabus. And, thank you to Erin Livingston for posting this resource on her Facebook page.
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Graduate Students at University of Virginia compiled this resource, the Charlottesville Syllabus. It provides a reading list that establishes the history of white supremacy in Charlottesville, and the contemporary context for thinking about historical memory and the contestations over monuments. Several of the readings are from an urban studies perspective. Click here for a link to the syllabus.
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Here is a short read about public space and Charlottesville that presents some historical context about urban public space, the space in Charlottesville, and the challenges of US gun laws. Click here for a link to the article.
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Southern Poverty Law Center's "The Alt-Right On Campus: What Students Need to Know." Click here for the guide.
Rebecca Solnit is one the great public intellectuals in the United States, and is an inspiration and guiding force for City Lab. Among her seminal work is "Men Explain Things to Me," which first appeared in an essay that became the book of the same title. The essay unpacks her experiences with male arrogance, how it silences women, and how that silencing is connected to gender violence. Solnit was one of the first to write about "mansplaining," which remains a persistent problem for urban studies, urban planning, and urban design. All should read the essay, especially every male earnestly engaged in City Lab. Click here for the Guernica reprint, and thank you Rebecca Solnit!
I revisited Solnit's "Men Explain Things to Me," after reading a fantastic essay by Alissa Walker, "Mansplaining the City," which appeared in the August 16, 2017 issue of Curbed. Walker invites consideration of patriarchy within urban planning (and urban studies), through her discussion of the current debates about gentrification. The essay brings us back to Solnit's analysis of mansplaining, while adding a powerful consideration of intersectionality that drives third wave urbanism. Again, this material is essential for basic literacy in 21st century liberal arts education that drives the City Lab enterprise. Enjoy the read by exploring the links. Take time to do some reflective, spontaneous writing, and engage in conversation with somebody in City Lab about this important topic. Click here for this excellent read.
The Black Urbanist blog, click here.
Third Wave Urbanism podcast, a great resource that brings intersectional analysis to the discussion of urban challenges. Browse the episodes, pick one, kick back and listen. Can it be any harder? Click here.
An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, by Georgetown University professor, Marcia Chatelian that explores the ways colleges and universities unintentionally empower white nationalists. The essay invites us to consider the many challenges in the classroom. Given Trumps' "both sides" argument, should faculty take a "devil's advocate" position in the classroom? Of note are the reader comments, which suggest the ways structural oppression remains an issue within the university. Click here for this quick read.
The Campus Anti-Fascist Network (CAN) has a fantastic anti-fascist syllabus. I am reminded once again that its not enough to say one is against oppression. Instead one has to act against oppression. Yet, action without theory is potentially bad news, as it can be misguided, uninformed, and lacking rigor. Theory and action, what we call "praxis" is the key. So, read, read, read. Click here to review the CAN syllabus.
New York Times article rich in data and useful graphics showing 30 year trends in minority access to higher education. The data shows a growing gap between the percentage of eligible students and those attending, especially at "elite" institutions. The article shows data for a range of liberal arts schools. The growing gap suggests the structural inequities and inequalities in society. Click here for a read.
An item from Citiscope that provides resources on "hyper-diversity" in the urban form. Among the resources highlighted is https://www.urbandivercities.eu. The resources are derived from best-practices, mostly from European cities. Of value is UrbanDiverseCities' A Handbook for Governing Hyper-Diverse Cities. The challenge of hyper-diversity links to City Lab's analysis of Lefebvre's Right to the City as well as approaches to what constitutes resilience, especially when viewed as the commons. A post-colonial perspective invites consideration if European models are universal in their application? Click here for the Citiscope article.
A short essay from an African American professor at Vassar College that calls attention to the emotional labor of minority faculty, the intersections of race and class, as well as the challenges of teaching rich white boys. I'll be thinking about this essay well into the future. Click here for a read.
One of my favorite resources for developing anti-oppression pedagogy is The Decolonizer, which has abundant materials and analysis for becoming literate and developing skills. For example, it has a deposit of nearly all the books in the post-colonial theory canon, the must know authors and their classic works. Have you ever been provoked by Shandra Talpade Mohanty's Feminism Without Borders? Learned about knowledge production from Linda Tuhiwai Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies, or sipped a bourgeois latte while reading Edward Said's Orientalism or Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera? Well, here is your chance to begin, because you can get a free pdf of these books from The Decolonizer by clicking here.
I just read a great essay in NACLA about undocumented workers and Hurricane Harvey. The essay builds from analysis of how undocumented workers served a critical role in the recovery from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The analysis invites us to consider the meaning of disasters and recovery within an apartheid state like the United States, especially the understanding of how the systemic mechanisms of race and class exploitation and oppression make marginalized populations essential to the reproduction of capital. The analysis here resonates with Klein's Disaster Capitalism proposition, with emphasis on how profit is made from the creative destruction of man made disasters like Katrina and Harvey. Left to our thinking and action is how do we dismantle the apartheid state as it further penetrates the ways of life during the 21st century perfect storm of catastrophic crises? Perhaps a key part of the answer rests in understanding the resistance defined resilience of marginalized communities such as undocumented workers? Click here for the brain food provided in the NACLA article.
A Facebook post from Erin Livingston, a former DePauw student who was too smart for DePauw and bailed-out of college all together, about the story of Michelle Jones, a doctoral student in U.S. History at NYU, who spent the last 20 years in prison in Indiana. Jones, under the encouragement of prison reform activist, Kelsey Kauffman, who has taught classes about the prison industrial complex at DePauw and is part of the Greencastle community, researched the history of Indiana prisons while doing time. She earned her undergraduate degree while in prison, and produced such remarkable scholarship that she was recruited by several PhD programs, including UC Berkeley. Jones was rejected by Harvard and Yale. The circumstances around the Harvard rejection reveal the systemic nature of bias in higher education, as Harvard was afraid of accepting Jones out of concern for a right-wing backlash. The faculty committee had recommended Jones for admission. How do we get out of the absurd place in higher education and how do we get out? Jones, of course, is smarter than Harvard as evidenced by her concluding thought: “Forget Harvard. I’ve already graduated from the toughest school there is.” RIGHT ON! To read this amazing story, click here.
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Here is an article from Black Youth Project that explores the topic of white privilege. It argues that a focus on privilege distracts from the core project of dismantling systemic oppression. The suggestion is that a focus on privilege is itself a form of privilege. While there is a great degree of validity in critiquing mis-placed forms of addressing white privilege, it is important for all with positions of privilege to be aware of their position, and actively work at purging their privilege, which is part of the enterprise of dismantling systemic oppression. Click here to read the article.
Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution provides us with the Right to the City proposition, which serves as one of the most important concepts for thinking about how humanity will weather the perfect storm of global crises in a socially just fashion. Keep in mind the R2C concept focuses on access to the transformative (the development of human capacity) impact of cities. As we move to total urbanization (100% urbanized) with 2/3 of humanity living in cities by 2050, the issue of access is especially important for issues of gender equity and equality. We know that the Industrial City (the modern city) had a disturbingly poor gender record with R2C, as urban planning and urban design had a significant gender blind field defined by patriarchy and heteronormative thinking. Lefevbre’s analysis, while suffering from a lack of gender awareness, provides us with the opportunity to deploy critical theory from gender and sexuality studies to the ways humanity will confront the perfect storm. Do we reproduce the inequity and inequality of gender relations that marginalizes half of the global population an urbanized world? This article from Motherboard invites us to think about these major issues of sexism and the city. Click here for the article.
Back in Spring 2016 the faculty voted to include awareness of diversity and inclusion into the professional competence requirement for interim, tenure, and promotion faculty reviews (Kuecker was chair of the committee that ushered the change). The measure made DePauw one of the few institutions in Higher Education to have a diversity and inclusion requirement (Pamona is the other school). In part, the anti-oppression component of City Lab is Kuecker's work toward the continuous effort at developing professional competence in this areas, just as I would for Latin American Studies, Urban Studies, or Complexity Thinking. It is about intentionality. One intentional step is to reflect and evaluate course syllabi from an anti-oppression viewpoint. Today, I came upon a wonderful resource for this task, an assessment tool called "Inclusion by Design," developed by professors at Temple University and George Mason University. For the resource, click here.
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One of the challenging aspects of anti-oppression work is unpacking the relations of power within our institutions so that we can do the work of dismantling the many forms of privilege. This work is an essential part of critical urbanism and it is fundamental to City Lab pedagogy. Part of this imperative is asking tough questions about the role and function of higher education in the 21st century. As part of its mission, for example, DePauw University aims to develop leaders in the 21st century. Yet, the meaning of leadership is left unstated, and the unpacking of the deeper meanings of leadership is left unexamined. A Harvard Business School article by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic entitled “Why do so Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders” provides an excellent starting point for a gender critique of leadership models. He finds that male hubris is “commonly mistaken for leadership potential.” The hubris argument is based on the idea that men tend to think they are smarter then women, and are driven by arrogance, overconfidence, and narcissism. Those characteristics, Chamorro-Premuzic argues, also makes men more risk driven when they have leadership as compared to women. He also points out that data shows that leaders most often fail. Given these gender dynamics, it appears that analysis of how leadership models serve to reproduce inequities and inequalities are an important part of 21st education. Click here for the article.
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