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Pedagogies of Resistance: Sharing Knowledge As A Political Act

  • MIT 77 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge, MA (map)

Pedagogies of Resistance: Sharing Knowledge As A Political Act

Technologies of Resistance: Towards Feminist Futures Panel Series

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The graduate students from nine universities of the Boston-area Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality originally organized an interdisciplinary symposium titled "Technologies of resistance: towards feminist futures" to be held at MIT on April 4, 2020. Due to COVID-19 and campus closures, this event was reimagined as four separate panels to be held remotely.

This panel will reflect and discuss means to implement conscious pedagogies of resistance, or critical pedagogy in the classroom and beyond. Panelists will share how they draw on the political through their teaching, in the subjects they teach, or the methodologies they utilize.

Speakers include:

  • Kat Tanaka Okopnik, The Dictionary of Social Justice

    Kat Tanaka Okopnik is a writer and editor, currently hosting public discussions of social justice, geek culture, food, and parenting on her Facebook page. She can also be found at ShadesBetween.com and on most social media platforms as @ktokopnik.

    Her ongoing major project is the Dictionary of Social Justice.

  • Laura Nelson, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Northeastern University

    Laura K. Nelson is a Computational Social Scientist with more than five years of experience successfully designing, managing, and analyzing large-scale data projects with real social impact. Expert in using computational methods, including machine learning, natural language processing, and network analysis, to discover actionable insights about the social world via large-scale data sets with impact in both academia and in industry. Skilled at identifying patterns in messy and complex social data, patterns that can guide decision making and management. Works independently and in teams to carry out research projects from start to finish--coming up with novel research questions, gathering and analyzing data, and writing and publishing results for both expert and non-technical audiences. Research has addressed questions around gender equality, entrepreneurship, and collective action.

  • Brooke Foucault Welles, Associate Professor of Communication Studies, Northeastern University

    Brooke Foucault Welles is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and a core faculty member of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University.

    Combining the methods of computational social science and network science with the theories of communication studies, Foucault Welles studies how online communication networks enable and constrain behavior, with particular emphasis on how these networks enable the pursuit of individual, team, and collective goals.

  • Brandy Williams, PhD Student, English, University of Chicago

    Brandy C. Williams is a recent M.A. graduate of the University of Maryland. They are an incoming English Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, and work on pre-modern critical race studies with an emphasis on Black feminist theory, particularly intersectionality. Pedagogically, Brandy is especially interested in feminist and antiracist pedagogy and looking at the ways that early modern English literature can offer insights into cultivating empathy and compassion in literature and composition classrooms. Their goal is to cultivate classroom environments that empower and support students who belong to marginalized identity groups, particularly LGBTQ+ students and students of color. They are also the senior content advisor for the podcast The Fall Line, a true-crime podcast amplifying cold cases of marginalized people in the southeastern U.S. Brandy can be reached on Twitter @brandycwill or at their personal website, brandycwilliams.com.