A Teaching & Learning Speaker Series
This speaker series is inspired by scholar, educator, and activist bell hooks’ critical work on liberatory practices and pedagogy. In her book “Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice for Freedom,” bell hooks encourages us to think of the classroom as a space to transgress boundaries, a space that connects “the will to know with the will to become.” To her, engaged education was a practice for freedom, and the classroom, a space where liberatory practices can be imagined and rehearsed.
Inspired by her work and her legacy, the Teaching to Transgress Speaker Series seeks to feature radical thinkers, practitioners, and pedagogues, and to foster the exchange of critical and innovative pedagogies and teaching practices. With a focus on I-EDIAA (Indigenizing- Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Anti-racism, Accessibility) the invited speakers will enrich existing programming at the Center for Teaching and Learning at Queen’s University and engage the teaching community in emerging, effective, and novel approaches to teaching and learning.
Winter 2023
Disability Justice in Higher Education: A Conversation with Jeff Preston
with Dr. Jeff Preston, Assoc. Professor, Disability Studies, King’s University College, Western University
Tuesday, January 24, 2023; 12:00 – 1:00pm; Zoom
Dr. Preston is an associate professor of Disability Studies at King's University College at Western University where he teaches classes on disability, popular culture and policy. A long-time advocate and motivational speaker, Jeff's work focuses on the intersection of disability, subjectivity, biopower and culture. Jeff's first book, The Fantasy of Disability, was published in 2017 by Routledge.
External to Queen's Registration Form
Microactions: Moves in Research, Teaching, and Service that can Shift Equity Creeds into Deeds
With Dr. Özlem Sensoy, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University
Monday, February 13, 2023; 2:00 – 3:30pm; Zoom
External to Queen's Registration Form
Most people would agree that one does not need to become a mechanic in order to drive a car more competently, nor a chef to cook a great meal, nor a tennis pro in order to improve one’s game. Yet while many people “agree with” the core values associated with equity, and “believe in” the importance of anti-racist, anti-hetero/sexist, anti-colonial, anti-ableist action, they are hesitant to themselves engage in equity work. There are a few reasons for this, among them a fear of doing harm to already vulnerable or marginalized peoples; As well, action for equity can be difficult to imagine outside of mental images we have of activist marching in the streets, hanging from trees, or laying down in front of traffic on bridges and highways. These images of macro-actions as well as the sheer magnitude of social injustice can easily make one immobilized in the face of it all. In this talk, Özlem Sensoy will draw on her decades of academic work, teaching, and professional development in equity in educational settings to identify small things – microactions – every faculty member can incorporate into their research, teaching, and service that can result in major moves toward greater equity in our campus work life for ourselves, our colleagues, and our students.
About Dr. Sensoy
Dr. Sensoy's primary field of research is social justice education. Social justice education seeks to reveal how social inequities become embedded in the fabric of society, and to identify strategies for socially just change. Her research examines the opportunities and barriers inherent in advancing a more equitable society, through social justice education. In doing so, Dr. Sensoy studies a dual track: analyzing how inequities are reproduced in social institutions (such as schools, media, policing), and identifying constructive interventions to interrupt them (such as thinking critically about knowledge, pedagogical approaches, and political activism).
Her scholarship draws on and contributes to fields that include: social justice education, multicultural education, critical pedagogy, cultural studies, Islam & Middle East studies, popular culture, critical media literacy, feminist postcolonial theory, and visual research methods.
External to Queen's Registration Form
This Series is supported by:
The Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Indigenization Fund from the Faculty of Arts and Science
Dr. Eve Tuck
Meaning-Making with Youth and Communities
Wednesday, March 9, 2022, 11:00 - 12:30pm EST, Zoom Webinar
Facilitated by Dr. Eve Tuck, Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto
This presentation engages researching with youth and communities as a set of beliefs about knowledge and knowing, and as an approach that can be built into social science and humanities-based inquiry.
Dr. Clelia Rodriguez
Decolonization in Education and Global Engagement
with Dr. Clelia Rodriguez
Thursday, October 20, 2022; 1:30 – 2:30pm EST, Zoom
Dr. Clelia O. Rodríguez is a global scholar, author, mom and auntie, born and raised in the ancestral lands of the Nawat, the Chorti-Maya and the Lenka Peoples, what is presently El Salvador. She earned her MA and PhD from the University of Toronto. Before holding a Human Rights Traveling Study Abroad Professorship across three continents, United States, Nepal, Jordan, and Chile, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Ghana. Prior to teaching at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto about Decolonization in Education, Settler Colonialism, Pedagogies of Liberation, Popular Education, Social Action and Anti-Discriminatory based curricula, she was a Gender Academic University Advisor in Bolivia, as part of a partnership between CECI and Global Affairs Canada. Recently, she has collaborated with the University of Fort Hare teaching postgraduate workshops. She is currently developing a gender-based training program in Kenya working along side the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology and Eco Green. She is the founder of SEEDS for Change, a learning transnational collective bringing together Black, Indigenous and people from the Global Majority to co-create pedagogies of liberation. She is committed to ancestral sustainable pedagogies, decolonizing approaches to learning and teaching beyond the binary, critical race and cultural theories, anti-oppressive transnational cooperation and learning in community. Her work has been published in the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, in the Journal of Popular Education, Critical Pedagogy and Militant Research in Chile, the Black Youth Project, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South, Radical Teacher: A Socialist, Feminist, and Anti-Racist Journal on the Theory and Practice of Teaching, Postcolonial Studies, Revista Iberoamericana, Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education and the Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. She recently received the 2022 ACPA Latinx Network Community Advancement Service Award for her support and encouragement towards the needs of Latinx students and professionals in higher education and has been nominated twice for awards in excellence in teaching.
Dr. Clelia O. Rodríguez’s Book: Decolonizing Academia
Seeds for Change: Learning Without Borders Initiative
Sharry Aiken
Human Rights and Social Justice in Law: A Conversation with Sharry Aiken
Sharry Aiken, Faculty of Law, Queen’s University
Tuesday, November 22, 2022; 1:30 – 2:30pm; Zoom
Sharry Aiken is a law professor and founding Academic Director of a new Graduate Diploma in Immigration and Citizenship Law. A long-time activist for human rights and social justice, she is a past president of the Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR), and the former co-chair of the Canadian Centre for International Justice. Prof. Aiken currently serves on the board of a refugee serving agency in Toronto and is co-editor of the PKI Global Justice Journal, published here at Queen's. Formative experiences, before coming to Queen's, included a few years working with Canada World Youth facilitating youth exchange programs as well as a year in Sioux Lookout developing a popular education program on legal literacy.