bell hooks was a 19-year-old undergraduate at Stanford University when she wrote her first draft of the classic text, "Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism." Since then, her 40 published books have informed several academic disciplines – including education – with clarity, novel insight, and extraordinary precision about conditions of freedom and power.
In grateful scholarly memorial, the Center for Urban Education will explore the educational legacy of this trailblazing Black feminist scholar, cultural theorist, activist, and public intellectual, who died December 15, 2021.
We invite you to join us as we give thanks for the memory of bell hooks with published reflections on her life, a video modeling the pop culture critique she advanced during her glowing career, and with study groups reflecting on hooks’ impact on the theory of transgressive and just education praxis.
Resources:
- “bell hooks, Pathbreaking Black Feminist, Dies at 69” – New York Times
- “The Revolutionary Writing of bell hooks” – The New Yorker
- “A Tribute to bell hooks” – Los Angeles Review of Books
- “Bell Hooks On Cultural Criticism” (Video) – YouTube
Fall 2022 bell hooks Conversations
- September 14: teaching to transgress, teaching transgressive expressive culture, teaching expressive freedom
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September 14, 2022 - 10 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.
Co-facilitators: Sabina Vaught (Professor, Department of Teaching, Learning, & Leading) and Janina Lopez (Doctoral Student, Department of History of Art and Architecture)
Readings: Chapter selections from:
- Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies
- Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
- (Optional) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
- November 17: Dialogue with Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall
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November 17, 2022 - 11 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Co-facilitator: Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies and Director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center, Spelman College)
Participants are encouraged to read Dr. Guy-Sheftall's personal reflection, "Loving bell hooks."
Spring 2022 bell hooks Study Groups
- March 29: Place as Nexus: Belonging Through the Eyes of bell hooks
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March 29, 2022 - 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.
Co-facilitators: Camilla J. Bell (Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Teaching, Learning, and Leading) and Chelsea Jimenez (PhD student, urban education program)
Readings: Chapters 3 and 4 from "Belonging: A Culture of Place"Study Prompts:
- What is our relationship to place?
- How can a deeper understanding of place inform our pedagogy? Shape our praxis? Foster possibilities?
- April 22: Black Masculinity and Black Feminist Thought: Black Men Bearing Witness
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April 22, 2022 - 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Co-facilitators: T. Elon Dancy (Helen S. Faison Endowed Chair and Executive Director, Center for Urban Education), Martez Files (Africana Studies, University of Alabama at Birmingham), Watufani Poe (Center for Humanistic Inquiry Fellow, Amherst College), and Christopher Wright (PhD student, urban education program)
Readings: Chapters 1 and 9 from We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity