As much as DEI work requires an aspiration towards futures free of oppression, ones that are more just and equitable, critical DEI carries within it the tension of the status quo and the possibility of liberation. Utilizing la paperson’s conceptualization of the --as a concept that identifies the messiness of agitating towards change within a system that is designed to maintain the status quo --I describe what critical DEI looks like within a tuition-charging preK-12 institution. I begin with describing a DEI from below from my location within a local landscape where DEI wars are waged in the classroom. I then discuss the strategies and conditions through which I labor, against front and backlash, and also against capitalism in its many insidious forms, as an act of self-preservation. And finally, I examine why I stay in this work and return to it over and over again through a sense of shared purpose and radical love.

In this article, I situate the story of my students in the university as a racial and gendered capitalist institution which requires and deploys diversity initiatives as part of its strategy to maintain its accumulative potential. Using several examples from my experiences with students on Georgetown’s campus, I show how such strategies produce an excess emotional stress for students of color, and women of color in particular, who are forced to participate in this form of labor on campus. I will then turn to the kinds of strategies – strategies which I term annihilationist – that we might deploy in our classrooms in order to begin to teach students the skills they need to protect themselves as they seek to overturn systems that produce so much of their unwellness. I evoke “annihilation” to center anti-caste and anti-colonial traditions that challenge the university’s rigid hierarchies and stratifications.

Representation has become increasingly important to people of color, espcially when media outlets create monolithic images of oppressed groups. In Gaza, Palestinians remain either invisible or portrayed as terroists while Isrealis are treated to countless articles and shows on antisemtism. In the same way, other people of color, see media represent them as victims of a water crisis, never capturing the dignity and power of a people who are resilient and defy the limited images they are given. My composition class at Mott Community College critiqued the topic of representation, determined to capture their identities and contest simplistic and erroneous depictions of their status. In doing so, they became political agents of change, learning much about hegemony in a time of war and why words--like genocide--are integral to justice and equality.

This "Teaching Note" explores the transformative power of Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place in encouraging students to use literary theory to analyze the complex historical dimensions of their places. The note begins with my personal recognition of the book's role in my own intellectual development and realization of complicity in neocolonial subjugation. Building on its enduring power and the vulnerability the text creates for the reader, students can experiment with adopting Kincaid's rhetorical position and strategies in order to write creative travelogues of their places. The essay also considers the value of offering creative assignments in order to address student fatigue and centralize lived experience as highly relevant to thinking theoretically.

In its intent and structure collective art activist practice as a form of cultural production is pedagogical because it combines the creative power of the arts to move us emotionally with the strategic planning of activism necessary to bring about social change. Given that the goal of art activism involves some form of social action, working collectively becomes an important part of the educational process. Drawing from personal experience teaching an art activist classes as a collective in a corporate university the essay explores two questions: What does collaboration mean in artistic activism, and what can we learn about collective pedagogy for our increasingly diverse classrooms where critical DEI practices of teaching and learning in higher education should be enacted? The essay discusses the possibilities of collective pedagogy as a pedagogy of hope in the Freirian sense as well as some of the tensions and contradictions of this practice. It advocates for collective pedagogy as a prefigurative practice as it provides a space for participatory democracy as a way of living and being to be enacted in classrooms that are diverse.

The rise of DEI within U.S. universities has not made it easier to analyze or speak about genocidal violence erupting within our world. Following an academic year when Stony Brook University’s DEI office functioned as a truncheon wielded against students protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza, this essay delves into the example of dissident poet and former Stony Brook University faculty member June Jordan, who provides a critical example of Palestinian solidarity and principled practice from within academia. June Jordan’s Stony Brook years provide a vital example for students, faculty, and staff speaking about Palestinian freedom and global human rights on American college campuses.

This article explores the current politics and practices of language teaching and learning at higher education in the US, and the ethical dilemmas that we face as instructors of Spanish as a Second Language (L2) with a focus on climate emergency. How can we teach and learn Spanish—a colonial language mostly in Latin America, but also in Africa, Asia, and even Oceania—in the context of climate and the environment without somehow perpetuating the ‘colonial normal’? How can we teach and learn Spanish in the context of climate and the environment without somehow propagating the colonial imperative? If we acknowledge that the climate crisis is the result of intersectional colonial and neocolonial processes at various levels, we need to decolonize our teaching dynamics. Thus, to tackle these questions, we propose radical curricular possibilities for advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the L2 classroom with a focus on climate and sustainability. Our teaching philosophy proposes a root-level transformation and delves around the following teaching principles: contextualization of language teaching, critical analysis and decentralization of climate discourse, shared expertise and active learning, and transdisciplinarity.

The purpose of this piece is to offer educational leadership program officers and educators a collective assessment tool that can be used to evaluate the extent to which licensure curriculum meets a critical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) framework. Principal preparation programs are held accountable to state-level requirements formulated by the perspectives of previous school leaders and current state legislatures. State-level principal preparation and DEI accountability can still miss the dynamic lived experiences of racialized and marginalized students and teachers. This article aims to center the perspectives of Black, Brown, and Indigenous students and teachers by providing a tool that can be used in systematic evaluations of principal preparation programs. The Principal Preparation Answerability Rubric (PPAR) was co-created by Joy, guided by Dr. Chadwick, to assess principal preparation syllabi and other pedagogical materials at [University Name]. We co-created the PPAR from a literature review uplifting the needs, recommendations, and critiques Black, Brown, and Indigenous students and teachers have regarding principals in their roles as local-level leaders. It is from Black, Brown, and Indigenous knowledges that we interpreted the answerability rubric categories. We argue principal preparation can be answerable to those people who are neglected by US educational systems. We conclude in implicating how PPAR can contribute to reimagining principal preparation through critical DEI frameworks.

It’s easy to forget that even the tamest forms of institutional multiculturalism only exist today due to radical struggles by social movements, and particularly student movements. To be more specific, the university as we find it today is the product of two opposing forces: on the one hand, radical student movements, particularly those struggling against racism, capitalism, patriarchy, settler colonialism, and imperialism; on the other hand, the counterinsurgent strategies forged by the state, corporations, and university administrators, which aimed, and still aim, to neutralize the transformative power of these movements. The continuing struggle between those counterforces continues today. The administrative cooptation of radical movements under the banner of “multiculturalism,” often carried forward via institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, has been a crucial element of this counterinsurgency against radical student movements. But there’s also a more explicitly violent side to the story. For this cooptation would never have been successful if it were not carried out alongside the much more direct forms of coercion—including direct, brutal violence—that have been aimed at students over the past fifty years. This article focuses on this story, as well as the story of the ongoing resistance being carried forward by student movements today. [i] For a persuasive account of this story, see Roderick A. Ferguson, We Demand: The University and Student Protests (Berkeley: U of California P, 2017).