Event Description
The 2023 CUE Writing Retreat will take place Sunday, March 26 - Friday, March 31, 2023.
The Writing Retreat supports scholars, educators, and writers (broadly conceived) who may be working on academic manuscripts, book proposals, blogs, op-eds, syllabi, essays, journals, conference paper feedback and editing, screenplays, and other scripts. Dr. Richard D. Benson II, Associate Director of CUE, will host and coordinate activities for the duration of the retreat.
One aim of the retreat is engaging the unique challenges of Black and Brown faculty in higher education with specific insight on new directions and opportunities in academic publishing, writing, and publishing about pedagogy, publishing community-based work, and other publishing strategies.
Retreat participants will attend workshops and, most importantly, have structured uninterrupted writing time to work on their respective projects. In addition, participants will engage in wellness activities, including dedicated time for yoga or meditation, discussions about work-life balance, and strategies for sustainable writing practices.
Agendas
Virtual Workshops
Research & Writing: An Approach — Facilitated by Dr. Gerald Horne
Monday, March 27 | 10 - 11:15 a.m. EST
Dr. Gerald Horne will join the 2023 CUE Writing Retreat to facilitate a virtual session on research and writing. Dr. Horne will share his scholarly approaches to writing history and revising historiography that includes, unpacking the stages of developing a project idea to the completion of a book.
Dr. Horne holds the Moores Professorship of History and African American Studies. His research has addressed issues of racism in a variety of relations involving labor, politics, civil rights, international relations, and war. He has also written extensively about the film industry. Dr. Horne received his PhD in history from Columbia University and his JD from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BA from Princeton University. He is the author of more than forty books and one hundred scholarly articles and reviews. His current research includes the forthcoming book: Revolting Capital: Racism and Radicalism in Washington, D.C., 1918-1968. Dr. Horne is also developing projects which include a study of U.S. imperialism in Northeast Africa, principally Egypt and Ethiopia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and a similar study concerning U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia during the same period.
Writing as a Human Against the Human Project: An Invitation to Worst Practices — Facilitated by Dr. Sabina Vaught
Wednesday, March 29 | 10 - 11:15 a.m. EST
Dr. Sabina Vaught is professor at the University of Pittsburgh. She is most recently the co-author of The School-Prison Trust (University of Minnesota Press) with Bryan Brayboy and Jeremiah Chin. Dr. Vaught will join the 2023 CUE Writing Retreat to share a conversation on writing that is forged by both abundant and bereft relationships, that lives in the energetic tension of unresolved contradiction, and that insists on the hunger of curiosity over the security of answers. She is excited to think with you all about writing in search of freedom.
Optional Reading: A portion of Dr. Vaught’s workshop will be based on her recently published manuscript, The School—Prison Trust. Click here to access online.
Visiting Scholars
- Ayana Allen-Handy
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Professor Ayana Allen-Handy, PhD is an Associate Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Policy, Organization, and Leadership at Drexel University. She is also the Founder/Director of the Justice-Oriented Youth Education Lab (The JOY Lab). Grounded in critical race and intersectional theoretical framings, her work is dedicated to justice-oriented urban education and is built upon debunking and (re)framing pejorative narratives of urban students, schools, and communities.
- Preston Anderson
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Mr. Preston Anderson is currently serving as the music teacher at the South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice. Prior to and through this endeavor, he has engaged Afropessimism, black nihilism, and psychoanalysis in the production of what we call black cultural expression. He also creates content that takes a black radical theoretical lens to mainstream media and hopes to eventually have an animation studio for the purposes of producing media that is informed by and created to bolster black thought.
- Erica R. Dávila
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Professor Erica R. Dávila is a faculty member in the Department of Educational Leadership at Lewis University in Chicago. Dr. Dávila’s scholarship focuses on the areas of social justice and transformative leadership. In 2021-22 she was a visiting research fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Dávila’s scholarship examines social justice and transformative leadership in school spaces, and she is currently developing a manuscript which highlights the work of the women in the Young Lords Organization of Chicago.
- Cheryl Fields-Smith
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Professor Cheryl Fields-Smith is a Professor of Educational Theory and Practice at the University of Georgia. Dr. Field-Smith’s research interests include family engagement and homeschooling among Black families. Dr. Fields-Smith has published several journal articles and chapters, which among them include the first empirically based publication to focus exclusively on Black homeschool families. Her research on homeschooling among Black families has most recently been featured in a PBS NewsHour report and the Atlantic.
- Ebony O. McGee
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Professor Ebony O. McGee is a Professor of Diversity and STEM education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. Dr. McGee’s scholarship investigates what it means to be racially marginalized while minoritized in the context of learning and achieving in STEM higher education and in the STEM professions. Dr. McGee’s latest research explores the relationship between STEM innovation and entrepreneurship, whose infrastructure requires enhancements to support a more diverse population of founders and business owners in STEM.
- Amber Pabon
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Professor Amber Pabon is the Director of the Frederick Douglass Institute and Emerging Educators of Color and an Associate Professor in the College of Education's Secondary Education Department at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Pabon is a qualitative research scholar specializing in scholarship which focuses on the lives and histories of black teachers, as well as socially just ontologies and practices in teacher preparation.
- Kimberly C. Ransom
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Dr. Kimberly C. Ransom is a Distinguished Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois in the Department of Education Policy, Organization & Leadership. Dr. Ransom is an interdisciplinary historian who studies the History of African American Education and the History of Childhood. Her research examines the oral histories and material objects of Black children who once attended segregated schools in the Deep South during the Jim Crow Era (1940-1969).
- Kamau Rashid
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Professor Kamau Rashid is a leading scholar at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, IL. Dr. Rashid’s work engages in the teaching and research of Pan-Africanist critical theory, African combat arts in the Americas; Language revitalization in the African Diaspora; Language, ontology, and cosmology in classical and traditional African thought and culture; and Pan-Africanist, nationalist, and socialist movements in the African Diaspora.
- David O. Stovall
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Professor David O. Stovall holds appointments in the departments of Black Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Dr. Stovall is a leading national scholar in Education and his work investigates the areas of 1) Critical Race Theory, 2) the relationship between housing and education, and 3) the intersection of race, place, and school.
- Quito Swan
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Professor Quito Swan is a faculty member in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. Dr. Swan hails from Bermuda and is an award-winning historian of Black internationalism, Black Power, and the Black Pacific and a scholar of race, public policy, and the African Diaspora. Dr. Swan speaks extensively on issues affecting the Black world with appearances on outlets such as New Books Network, Black Power Media, Black Perspectives, C-SPAN, Wilson Center Now, and Bernews.com. Dr. Swan co-edits the University Press of Illinois' Book Series on Black Internationalism.