Reimagining Educational Work for Collective Freedom

Original artwork courtesy of Carmen L. Petit

A group of faculty at the University of Pittsburgh is convening a series of symposia and a study group entitled “Reimagining Educational Work for Collective Freedom: The Labor Strike as a Portal.” The interdisciplinary, globally-focused effort is a partnership between faculty members at the School of Education and the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, and received funding support from the Spencer Foundation.

The project involves:

  • Engaging in deep study, creating dialogue partnerships, and building potential for activism
  • Convening a symposium series with three gatherings for a public audience and study group participants
  • Conducting a student-focused study group that will meet monthly from May 2022 – December 2022

Symposium Series

The symposium series began with the labor strike itself, as form and function, and the agricultural worker strike in India in particular. We understand the strike as the agentive assertion of moving from one set of conditions through transformation to a future imagined by workers through a merger of their labor and their life’s work. And although we understand this particular strike as most immediately catalyzed by an agricultural law crafted to deepen global fascist, neofascist, patriarchal and ethnonationalist alliances and devastate an already precarious agricultural workforce, we also understand it as far more than a reactionary mobilization. In this resistance we saw a portal defined by the work–the collective educational work of studying the conditions and theories of life, of educating one another across imposed social and political boundaries, and undertaking the praxis of freedom.

This strike, and the many others that were taken up across the world in the same time period, inspired us to wonder about the strike as a portal meaningful for educational work. What does the strike teach us about how knowledge can be shared–can be taught and learned–for the radical imagining of a new world in which work is a creative expression of the core passions of life.

Past Symposia

“The longue durée of freedom work: Bridging history and the current moment through the agricultural mass strike”

The symposium series began with the labor strike itself, as form and function, and the agricultural worker strike in India in particular. We understand the strike as the agentive assertion of moving from one set of conditions through transformation to a future imagined by workers through a merger of their labor and their life’s work. And although we understand this particular strike as most immediately catalyzed by an agricultural law crafted to deepen global fascist, neofascist, patriarchal and ethnonationalist alliances and devastate an already precarious agricultural workforce, we also understand it as far more than a reactionary mobilization. In this resistance we saw a portal defined by the work–the collective educational work of studying the conditions and theories of life, of educating one another across imposed social and political boundaries, and undertaking the praxis of freedom.

This strike, and the many others that were taken up across the world in the same time period, inspired us to wonder about the strike as a portal meaningful for educational work. What does the strike teach us about how knowledge can be shared–can be taught and learned–for the radical imagining of a new world in which work is a creative expression of the core passions of life?

Day One Order of Events (Thursday, May 19)

2:30-4:00 p.m. Eastern US
Study group

4:30-6:00 p.m. Eastern US
Keynote Dialogue: Sarah Haley & Damien Sojoyner, moderated

7:00 p.m. Eastern US
Study group dinner: Seminar participants with Sarah Haley, facilitated, open only to study group members

Day Two Order of Events (Friday, May 20)

Noon-2:00pm Eastern US
Plenary: Keisha-Khan Perry & Ana Cristina da Silva Caminha, moderated, open to public

3:00 – 4:00 p.m. Eastern US
Study group workshop: Seminar participants convene with Keisha-Khan Perry

4:30-6:00 p.m. Eastern US
Plenary: Damien Sojoyner & Yusef Omowale, moderated, open to public

6:30-7:30 p.m. Eastern US
Study group: convenes

In this symposium we center forms of labor unrecognized in patriarchal framings, and therefore forms of labor resistance and creative work that go analytically ignored. We are excited to think broadly about work, labor, and creativity across dialogues among activists, organizers, artists, scholars, educators, and leaders.

Day One Order of Events (September 22)

1 – 3 p.m. Eastern US
Dialogue: Ujju Aggarwal and Paula X. Rojas, moderated and open to the public through registration, conducted in English. Language translators and sign-language interpreters will be present.

4 – 6 p.m. Eastern U.S.
Dialogue: María Lang and Amalia Ortiz, moderated, open to public through registration, conducted in English with performance by Ortiz. Language translators and and sign-language interpreters will be present.

Day Two Order of Events (September 23)

Noon – 2 p.m., Eastern US
Dialogue: Verónica Gago & Lucía Cavallero, Ni Una Menos Collective, moderated and open to the public through registration, conducted in Spanish. Language translators and and sign-language interpreters will be present.

4:30-5:30p.m., Eastern US
Dialogue: Sabina Vaught and Yves Nguyen of Red Canary Song, moderated and open to the public through registration, conducted in English. Language translators and and sign-language interpreters will be present.

Learn from activist, organizer, and educator Kipp Dawson. A Pitt alum, retired Pittsburgh Public Schools teacher, and retired coal miner with vast labor union experience through the United Mine Workers, Kipp has also spent decades organizing in Civil Rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. She will be sharing stories of common cause across movements and the power of local-global organizing. Presented by Reimagining Educational Work for Collective Freedom: The Labor Strike as a Portal, The Kinloch Commons for Critical Pedagogy and Leadership, and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Urban Education.

“Labor, the university, and freedom work forward”

Day One Order of Events (March 23, 2023)

3 – 4:45 p.m. Eastern
Dialogue with Connie Wun & Dylan Rodríguez

Please join us for the final dialogue in our year-long study and symposium series “Reimagining Educational Work for Collective Freedom: The Labor Strike as a Portal.” Come listen to longstanding organizers, activists, and scholars Connie Wun and Dylan Rodríguez in conversation on topics from university faculty and student strikes to gendered labor conditions globally. Drs. Wun and Rodríguez will help us pull together complex threads of study from the year to help us shape our work forward.

5 – 6 p.m. Eastern
Protest & The University: Black Student Movements of the 1960s & 1970s

Dr. Emile Pitre is Senior Advisor to the President of the University of Washington. As a graduate student at the University of Washington, Dr. Emile Pitre was a founding member of the school’s Black Student Union. He served as director of the Office of Minority Affairs Instructional Center for thirteen years and was promoted to Associate Vice President for Minority Affairs in 2004. In 2020, Dr. Pitre received the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity’s Charles E. Odegaard Award, the highest achievement in diversity at the UW.

His forthcoming book, Revolution to Evolution: The Story of the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity at the University of Washington, can be found at the University of Washington Press.

Day Two Order of Events (March 27, 2023)

3:30 – 4:30 p.m. Eastern
Motherhood, Memoir & Prison Nation: A Talk with Keeonna Harris

Keeonna Harris is a storyteller, organizer, and mother-of-five.  She received her PhD in Justice Studies from Arizona State University, where her dissertation research analyzed the experiences of Black Women navigating motherhood and mass incarceration. She is the recipient of the inaugural 2018-2019 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship, the 2021 Tin House Summer Writing Residency, the 2023 Baldwin Center for the Arts Residency, and a 2023 Hedgebrook Writer in Residence. Keeonna has written for Salon.com, and has a chapter in the anthology So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket Books, 2023). Her forthcoming memoir, Mainline Mama (Amistad, 2025), draws from her experiences as a Black woman, teen mother, and twenty years of raising children with an incarcerated partner while building community in the borderlands of the prison.

Project Background

The effort is shaped around two praxes of freedom core to multiple knowledge traditions: the study group and the dialectic.

In her now oft-quoted essay, Arundhati Roy called on us to understand the pandemic as “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next” and to move through it deliberately, “with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it”.

Just months later, not far from where she penned those very words, Indian farmers, agricultural workers, and other laborers undertook the largest labor strike known to history—one that is ongoing.The labor strike itself, as form and function, is a portal of sorts. It is the agentive assertion of moving from one set of conditions through transformation to a future imagined by workers.

Leadership Team

Sabina Vaught (Principal Investigator) is professor and chair of the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Leading at the Pitt School of Education.

T. Elon Dancy II (Co-Principal Investigator) is executive director of the Center for Urban Education and Helen Faison Chair in Urban Education at the Pitt School of Education.

Nancy Glazener (Co-Principal Investigator) is a professor of English and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies (GSWS) and director of Pitt’s GSWS Program.

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