A meditation on freedom making in the academy for women scholars of
color.
Weaving personal narrative with political analysis, Community as
Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for
students and faculty of color within academia. Much like other women
scholars of color, Lorgia García Peña has struggled against the
colonizing, racializing, classist, and unequal structures that
perpetuate systemic violence within universities. Through personal
experiences and analytical reflections, the author invites readers--in
particular Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women--to engage in
liberatory practices of boycott, abolition, and radical
community-building to combat the academic world's tokenizing and
exploitative structures.
García Peña argues that the classroom is key to freedom-making in the
university, urging teachers to consider activism and social justice as
central to what she calls "teaching in freedom" a progressive form of
collective learning that prioritizes the subjugated knowledge, silenced
histories, and epistemologies from the Global South and Indigenous,
Black, and brown communities. By teaching in and for freedom, we not
only acknowledge the harm that the university has inflicted on our
persons and our ways of knowing since its inception, but also create
alternative ways to be, create, live, and succeed through our work.
