Embedded Files
Changemaking in Urgent Times Fall 2025 Event Series
Wednesdays | 4:00 PM | FPH Main Lecture Hall
Changemaking in Urgent Times is a series that brings together artists, scholars, activists, and community practitioners to grapple with the urgent questions at the heart of our three Learning Collaboratives:
Art & Politics – How can art and politics intersect to challenge dominant narratives and create new visions for community?
Environments & Change – How do we envision sustainable and just futures in the face of a changing planet?
In/Justice – How do we create liberatory spaces amid the pervasiveness of white supremacy and oppression?
Through presentations by Hampshire faculty, staff, and students, and community partners, we will engage social justice/social change theories and practices for community change. The event series is an extension of the Changemaking in Urgent Times course, and is open to anyone in the Hampshire community.
Wed Sept. 10 | In/Justice
Radical? Critical thinking and the Freedom to Read in American libraries, jails, and prisons with librarian Chelsea Jordan-Makely
"The America I love still exists at the front desk of our public libraries," the author Kurt Vonnegut wrote, in 2005. Yet public libraries, and the Freedom to Read and access to information, have never been a given--and are under greater threat today than ever before. Understanding the present dynamic requires a historical and sociological perspective. Chelsea will draw on 15 years of library work and her research into libraries as bureaucracies to contextualize public libraries and information access amidst the culture wars, propaganda, and the ever-expanding Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). This frank assessment provides a baseline and vocabulary to help participants collaborate, imagine, and advocate for a future in which information access is universally respected and guaranteed.
Chelsea Jordan-Makely is a librarian, a researcher, and a doctoral student at Simmons University, where she is the Dean's Fellow in Data Analysis. She has worked in libraries since 2009, in a variety of settings and locations, including Canada, Tanzania, and South Africa, and as the Director at the Griswold Memorial Library in Colrain, Massachusetts—a 2024 recipient of the National Medal for Library and Museum Services from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)! Chelsea's research has focused on outcomes and impacts of library services for people impacted by incarceration, and connecting the dots between libraries and the prison industrial complex.
Wed Sept. 17 | Environments & Change
Sustainability in Analog Filmmaking with Professor Michelle Trujillo
Michelle Trujillo is a filmmaker and creative from South Florida. She is interested in exploring Latin American histories through moving image work and upsetting power structures and notions of normality through disorientation. She works in english, spanish and spanglish and has screened creative work at festivals, galleries and conferences both nationally and internationally.
Wed Sept. 24 | Art & Politics
Nobody as Yet Has Learned from Experience What the Body Can and Cannot Do-- Trans Art in Immiserating Times with Professor rl Goldberg
rl Goldberg is Assistant Professor of Queer Studies at Hampshire College. They are the author of I Changed My Sex! Pedagogy and Trans Narrative (forthcoming from Columbia University Press), and the co-editor, with Alex Brostoff, of Reassignments: Trans and Sex from the Clinical to the Critical (forthcoming from Fordham University Press), and the Fall 2025 special issue of College Literature on Trans Literatures. rl is a longtime prison educator, distance runner, obsessive pulp collector, and friend to all cats and dogs. This is rl's second year teaching at Hampshire College and they're really thrilled to be back--thrilled to keep having stimulating, surprising, and generous conversations with a truly remarkable community of learners.
Wed Oct. 1 | In/Justice
Black Feminist Radical Movement vs. the Anti-Black University: Learning from Concerned Student 1950 with Professor Gaurav Jashnani
In the fall of 2015, Black students pulled off an unlikely victory: following months of racial justice protests and campus organizing efforts, the University of Missouri’s Division I football team went on strike in solidarity with organizers’ demands, and the university administration collapsed within days. Almost immediately, these protests catalyzed student organizing against racism at over 80 U.S. colleges and universities, leading to major changes in higher education. Drawing on frameworks of racial capitalism, Black feminism, and critical pedagogy, this presentation traces the psychological and material harms that Black students faced, and demonstrates the importance of Black space and embodied experience to student empowerment, well-being and organizing success.
Gaurav Jashnani (he/they) is a native New Yorker, grandchild of colonial refugees, and lifelong activist. Their scholarship examines institutionalized racism, social change and embodied experiences of harm and healing, particularly in higher education and policing. In addition to teaching and advising Hampshire students, Gaurav is a writer, licensed therapist, public and special education advocate, and co-founder of the Challenging Male Supremacy Project.
Wed Oct. 15 | Environments & Change
Farming Practices of the Hampshire College Farm: Current, Past and Future with Emily Landeck and Charlotte Senders
Join the Hampshire Farmers in conversation about tillage practices at the Hampshire farm and beyond. Discuss dichotomies, perceived and real, and learn about examples of buzzword practices in action. Get a peek at how the farm is working to build climate resilience into our farming practices through various tillage systems, renovation of pastures, the use of living mulches in vegetables and more! Come ready to think expansively, challenge your beliefs and maybe even learn a few new things about microbes!
Emily Landeck (she/her/hers) grew up in Santa Cruz, California and after receiving degrees in biology and environmental studies in Washington, made her way out east through various farm jobs—both education and production-based.
She has most recently been the owner-operator of her own 40-acre wholesale vegetable farm here in the Connecticut River Valley, but has experience with smaller scale vegetable and livestock farms as well, including a draft-horse-powered vegetable and livestock operation.
She is passionate about the multitude of discussions and inherent forever learning that farming promotes. She lives in Greenfield with her family and has a young kiddo who may be seen running around the farm in addition to her very enthusiastic border collie, Caol Ila.
When not farming Emily loves to bike, hike, camp and generally spend time outdoors with family and friends, and particularly loves time near the ocean. She also loves cooking and baking and will happily chat recipes anytime!
Care Per Acre: Metric For Resilient Farmlands with Piyush Labhsetwar, Farm and Land Stewardship Manager of Grow Food Northampton
Farming is an unviable profession in our current socio-economic system which continues to push people off the land resulting in fewer people having to manage larger farmland. This has caused a crisis of attention on our farmland with both ecological and socioeconomic outcomes of agriculture worsening by the day. Climate crisis adds to this unviability. ‘Care per acre’ as a metric prioritizes human attention and care on our farmland to advocate for land justice and climate resilience.
Piyush Labhsetwar has worked in the field of regenerative agriculture since 2017 on projects like developing perennial grains, integrating them in agroforestry, and perennial ground covers. He now works as Farm and Land Stewardship Manager at a 121-acre community farm called Grow Food Northampton.
Piyush is committed to using agroecological practices to make farming regenerative and Just, and exploring connections between the two. He views his current role as a steward of agroecological interventions by the community to heal our relationship with the land.
Wed Oct. 22 | Art & Politics
Intentional Everything with The Performance Project
Members of the Performance Project will attempt to share their community practices and how they are inextricably intertwined with and inseparable from their creative process and performances.
The Performance Project brings people together to create theater and visual art through multi-generational collaborations. Our members participate in artistic training, inter-generational mentoring, and leadership development. We claim a public voice, engage audiences in dialogue about oppression and liberation, and celebrate our humanity and connection through the arts.
Wed Nov. 5 | In/Justice
From the Campus to the Frontlines: Student Activism in the Fight for Reproductive Justice with Collective Power
This one-hour intergenerational conversation will introduce the core principles of Reproductive Justice for students who are new to the movement or looking to get involved. We’ll discuss the distinctions between “reproductive health, rights, and justice” and define Reproductive Justice in an intersectional, accessible way. The session will explore opportunities for youth organizing at Hampshire College and across the Five Colleges, as well as strategies for sustaining activism in today’s political climate. We’ll also highlight Collective Power’s programs, including our paid undergraduate internship, Collective Rising; our upcoming annual conference, Collective Power 2026; and our student organizing group, which is currently welcoming new members.
Brooke Huguley is a certified birth doula, abortion support provider, 200-hour RYT, dancer, activist, and dedicated conference manager. Passionate about advancing social and reproductive health rights and justice, she has a proven track record of organizing reproductive justice conferences for up to 500 participants. Skilled in bringing together experts, activists, and policymakers, she is committed to fostering dialogue, driving change, and creating collaborative spaces for a more just and equitable society.
Brooke is deeply interested in the intersections of art, nature, and activism—exploring how these modalities sustain long-term movement work and well-being. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree at Brandeis University, focusing on Black birthing experiences, reproductive outcomes, and strategies to combat medical racism through a reproductive justice framework.
Wed Nov. 12 | LC Symposium
Growing Our Souls: The praxis of emergence
A day-long series of events and workshops focused on Emergent Strategy & the work of Grace Lee Boggs. Go to our Symposium Page for more info.
Wed Nov. 19 | Environments & Change
Why doesn't our family go to Disney World every year?: the ethics and reality of income determination with Professor Kenneth Mulder and the Ethics and Reality of Income Determination First Year Seminar
Why do some people make enough money to afford multiple homes and others cannot even afford rent on two full-time jobs? How do we "decide" that some jobs are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year while other jobs earn less than ten dollars an hour? Income inequality has steadily increased for decades in the US, and it is a growing threat to our sustainability as a society. Come learn about the factors that determine an individual's income and engage in a discussion about the degree to which salaries in the US agree with our ethical views on fairness, merit and justice.
Kenneth Mulder is a data scientist and modeler. Over the last twenty years, his work in data analysis and modeling has included modeling human development patterns, hurricane impacts, agricultural energy dynamics, tree disease transmission, and, most recently, fractal growth processes and how they might simulate the development of polymer morphologies. He is passionate about teaching students advanced data analysis and modeling techniques and also enjoys using board games to teach mathematical thinking. Presenters will also include students from his first-year seminar on income determination.
Wed Dec. 3 | Art & Politics
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