Created by Dr. Brennan DuBose, The Blackstage podcast that celebrates Black stories, expertise, and experiences. The Blackstage was higlighted in People magazine and has featured segments with prominent Black figures in politics, film, and art.  You can learn more about The Blackstsage on their website: https://linktr.ee/Blackstagepod or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcast.

Our global society has experienced a historic and debilitating health pandemic that heightened issues of justice and inequality that already existed throughout all microcosm of society, including education. We find ourselves at another historic inflection point in the aftermath of what we hope was the worst of the global pandemic. The trauma and hurt we have experienced over the last two and a half years and centuries before now require healing and new, liberating approaches to being, doing, and knowing. 

In this podcast series, co-hosts Drs. Felecia Commodore and Royel Johnson invite scholar leaders to collectively think about what it means (and does not) to Humanize Higher Education. We hope to learn from invited scholars how to use, harness, and evoke humanizing values and practices to study educational problems.

To listen to the podcast, visit this link: https://open.spotify.com/show/6kbTWZOCSsNMbDJcZvAL78

A first-generation college student, Frances Contreras earned her bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and realized very early how she could connect research and practice by making a career in the field of education. While completing a master’s degree at Harvard, then a Ph.D. in administration and education policy from Stanford, Contreras focused her research on issues of equity and access for underrepresented students and the role of public policy in ensuring student equity from prekindergarten through higher education. Now the dean of UCI’s School of Education, she leads a team of scholars who she says “care deeply about education transformation.”

What are the major conversations happening around education right now, and why is research significant in these conversations? How will technology continue to shape the future of education? What is it going to take for teachers to feel supported in their craft? How do today’s students differ from those of past generations? These are some of the many questions we pose to Contreras in the latest episode of the UCI Podcast.

https://news.uci.edu/2023/01/23/uci-podcast-whats-next-in-education/

Hosted by Dra. Gina Garcia, this podcast is dedicated to everything Hispanic-Serving Institutions and brings you all the latest and greatest on what’s happening in HSIs. Join us as we explore the history and evolution of HSIs, culturally relevant and liberatory practices in HSIs, current and emerging research with HSIs, and the policies that shape servingness. 

https://www.ginaanngarcia.com/podcast

Ibram X. Kendi's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America--but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. Instead of working with the policies and system we have in place, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it. 

In his memoir, Kendi weaves together an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science--including the story of his own awakening to antiracism--bringing it all together in a cogent, accessible form. He begins by helping us rethink our most deeply held, if implicit, beliefs and our most intimate personal relationships (including beliefs about race and IQ and interracial social relations) and reexamines the policies and larger social arrangements we support. How to Be an Antiracist promises to become an essential book for anyone who wants to go beyond an awareness of racism to the next step of contributing to the formation of a truly just and equitable society.

https://www.ibramxkendi.com/how-to-be-an-antiracist

Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship—and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever.

Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.

https://www.amazon.com/Just-Mercy-Story-Justice-Redemption/dp/081298496X

First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. The methodology of the late Paulo Freire has helped to empower countless impoverished and illiterate people throughout the world. Freire's work has taken on especial urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm.

https://www.amazon.com/Pedagogy-Oppressed-Anniversary-Paulo-Freire/dp/0826412769

In 1988, Jonathan Kozol set off to spend time with children in the American public education system. For two years, he visited schools in neighborhoods across the country, from Illinois to Washington, D.C., and from New York to San Antonio. He spoke with teachers, principals, superintendents, and, most important, children. What he found was devastating. Not only were schools for rich and poor blatantly unequal, the gulf between the two extremes was widening—and it has widened since. The urban schools he visited were overcrowded and understaffed, and lacked the basic elements of learning—including books and, all too often, classrooms for the students.

In Savage Inequalities, Kozol delivers a searing examination of the extremes of wealth and poverty and calls into question the reality of equal opportunity in our nation’s schools.

https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Inequalities-Children-Americas-Schools/dp/0770435688

This innovative work critically studies the contemporary problems of one segment of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education. The lack of a diverse U.S.-based pool of talent entering the field of engineering education has been termed a crisis by academic and political leaders. Engineering remains one of the most sex segregated academic arenas; the intersection of gendered and racialized exclusion results in very few Latina engineers. Drawing on cutting-edge scholarship in gender and Latino/a studies, the book provides an analytically incisive view of the experiences of Latina engineers. https://www.amazon.com/Borderlands-Education-Latinas-Engineering/dp/0739175580

The New Jim Crow is a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement. Since its publication in 2010, the book has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year; been dubbed the “secular bible of a new social movement” by numerous commentators, including Cornel West; and has led to consciousness-raising efforts in universities, churches, community centers, re-entry centers, and prisons nationwide. The New Jim Crow tells a truth our nation has been reluctant to face.

https://newjimcrow.com/about

Presumed Incompetent is a pathbreaking account of the intersecting roles of race, gender, and class in the working lives of women faculty of color. Through personal narratives and qualitative empirical studies, more than 40 authors expose the daunting challenges faced by academic women of color as they navigate the often hostile terrain of higher education, including hiring, promotion, tenure, and relations with students, colleagues, and administrators. The narratives are filled with wit, wisdom, and concrete recommendations, and provide a window into the struggles of professional women in a racially stratified but increasingly multicultural America. https://www.amazon.com/Presumed-Incompetent-Intersections-Class-Academia/dp/0874219221#:~:text=Presumed%20Incompetent%20is%20a%20pathbreaking,of%20women%20faculty%20of%20color.

Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.

https://www.akpress.org/emergentstrategy.html

Tricia Hersey's work is influenced by her experiences as the daughter of an abolitionist pastor, as a native of the South Side of Chicago, and as the torch-bearer of her family’s Mississippi and Louisiana roots. Her upbringing is woven throughout her two decades of experience as a teaching artist, chaplain, poet, theatermaker, performance artist, and community organizer. She dissolves these boundaries to unlock mental, physical, and spiritual spaces for radical thought and imagination. The wideness of her practice opens portals and possibilities of world-building and future-casting while embodying the teachings of somatics, womanism, womanist theology, Black Liberation Theology, Afrofuturism, and her ancestors.  

From these vast reservoirs of knowledge, Tricia created the ‘rest is resistance’ and ‘rest as reparations’ frameworks and founded The Nap Ministry, a global pioneer and originator of the movement to understand the liberatory power of rest. Tricia's book, Rest is Resistance, is an immersive experiences she calls readers to move far beyond mainstream concepts of wellness. She asks us to study the ways in which our divinity, higher purpose, and ability to resist violent and oppressive systems are intertwined with how we access our rest, imagination, and DreamSpace. Her work is a pathway to the rest practices needed to collectively build and imagine new worlds as we simultaneously dismantle and deprogram ourselves from the systems that prop up and perpetuate the racial, social, and environmental harm done by white supremacy and extractive capitalism. 

To know more about Tricia and her work, visit: http://www.triciahersey.com/order-my-new-book.html

Your Body Is Not an Apology Workbook is the action guide that gives readers tools and structured frameworks they can begin using immediately to deepen their radical self-love journey--such as Taylor's four pillars of practice, which help readers dismantle body shame and give them access to a lifestyle rooted in love. Taylor guides readers to move beyond theory and into doing and being radical self-love change agents in the world. 

"In this book, you will be asked to draw, color, doodle, talk to friends, take risks, and perhaps step outside of what feels like your natural gifts and talents," Taylor writes. "I encourage you to release the need to be 'good' at what you are doing and instead strive to be authentic. Perfection is the enemy of radical self-love because it is an impossible illusion. When the voice of perfectionism chimes in, take a deep breath, remember that the work is about the process, not about the product, and give yourself permission to be fabulously unapologetically imperfect."

https://www.sonyareneetaylor.com/books/the-body-is-not-an-apology-the-power-of-radical-self-love-h2x6p-2kl3k

Cancel or call-out culture is a fraught topic these days. Originating as a way for marginalized and disempowered people to address harm and take down powerful abusers, often with the help of social media, it is seen by some as having gone too far. But what is “too far” when you’re talking about imbalances of power and patterns of harm? And what happens when people in social movements direct our righteous anger inward at one another? In We Will Not Cancel Us, movement mediator adrienne maree brown reframes the discussion for us, in a way that points to possible paths beyond our impasse. Most critiques of cancel culture come from outside the milieus that produce it, sometimes even from its targets. Brown explores the question from a Black, queer, and feminist viewpoint that gently asks, how well does this practice serve us? Does it prefigure the sort of world we want to live in? And, if it doesn’t, how do we seek accountability and redress for harm in ways that reflect our values.

https://www.akpress.org/we-will-not-cancel-us.html