Professional Development
We team up with an amazing group of scholars of color to provide workshops and courses on topics important to you. Our workshops are not recorded. They are live with limited size to cultivate a protected and nurturing learning community.
live workshops
Black Feminist Polyethnography
Instructor: Kelly Jackson
Date: TBD
Despite our ongoing contributions within academia, Black women and our experiences within the modern University are largely absent from the literature. Black women scholars who comprise 2% of tenure-track faculty in the U.S., endure a compound form of anti-Black racism in higher education known as gendered anti-Blackness due to their multiple marginalized statuses associated with race and gender. This workshop will expose participants to a new method developed by Jackson, Mitchell, Ogbonnaya, Mackey, Crudup, and Carver (2022) Black Feminist Polyethnography. This method was designed to provide an affirming and communal space for dialogical reflection on a collective experience of gendered anti-Blackness in predominantly white schools of social work. Participants will be exposed to core components of this method and invited to consider how to use this method in similar or new ways within their own scholarship.
Self-Care in the Research Process: Beyond the Bubble Bath
Instructor: Gina Miranda Samuels
Date: TBD
Do you ever feel even more burned out when you think about your own “self-care?” Maybe the very notion of it is more enraging than energizing. This workshop invites participants to reconsider what self-care even means, by expanding our understanding of self-care beyond just taking a break, indulging in a treat, a bubble bath, or even taking a vacation. We’ll examine how we create structures of work, including the meanings we ascribe to being “productive” or “successful” that very well may be dragging us down. Or worse. Come join us and be in community to consider collectively how to detox from capitalistic, white supremacist notions of work and the meaning and value of life as an academic.
COURSES
These courses are pre-recorded, self-paced, and accessible on-line. If you have ideas for a course or don’t see what you were looking for please contact us.
What is Monoracism?
This course introduces students to the concept of monoracism—the belief in racial purity, and the pathologizing of race mixing and of mixed-race people themselves. In addition to providing a brief history of monoracism, we also examine how this becomes embedded in our theories and research. There is a second series to this course that then explores how to engage anti-racist theories and analyses of race that disrupt monoracism. Students are provided with seminal literature and additional learning opportunities at the end of this course.
Course Length: 30 minutes
Positioning Ourselves within Research
Scholars who conduct qualitative or interpretive studies are often asked to write positionality statements. Unfortunately, these statement often end up being performative confessions listing one’s social identities and can fall short of their intended purpose and importance. Sometimes as insiders to this research, we can also be challenged in deciding what or how much to share and why. In this class we will review the purpose of positionality statements, the role of being both a so-called insider and outsider, and provide tools for writing statements that are meaningful and useful to you and your research. We also provide examples of creating visual depictions of one’s positionality that can be helpful as you present your own work and your location within it.
Course Length: 45 minutes