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.
