The Activist Academic

Engaged Scholarship for Resistance, Hope and Social Change

Colette Cann, Eric DeMeulenaere

• Publisher: Myers Education Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781975501396, 9781975501389
• eBook ISBN: 9781975501419
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

2021 SPE Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention

Donald Trump's election forced academics to confront the inadequacy of promoting social change through the traditional academic work of research, writing, and teaching. Scholars joined crowds of people who flooded the streets to protest the event.

The present political moment recalls intellectual forbearers like Antonio Gramsci who, imprisoned during an earlier fascist era, demanded that intellectuals committed to justice "can no longer consist in eloquence ... but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, 'permanent persuader' and not just a simple orator" (Gramsci, 1971, p. 10). Indeed, in an era of corporate media and "alternative facts," academics committed to justice cannot simply rely on disseminating new knowledge, but must step out of the ivory tower and enter the streets as activists.

The Activist Academic serves as a guide for merging activism into academia. Following the journey of two academics, the book offers stories, frameworks and methods for how scholars can marry their academic selves, involved in scholarship, teaching and service, with their activist commitments to justice, while navigating the lived realities of raising families and navigating office politics. This volume invites academics across disciplines to enter into a dialogue about how to take knowledge to the streets.

Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Social Theory | Social Foundations | Certificate in Public Scholarship | Practicing Public Scholarship | Reimagining Public Engagement | Decentering the Public Humanities

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Click HERE to listen to the New Books Network podcast with the authors, hosted by Jane Richards.

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Click HERE to see a video of the book launch, moderated by Monisha Bajaj for Imagining America, with contributions from Margo Okazawa-Rey and John Saltmarsh.

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Watch the #CompactNationPod interview, which runs between minutes 9:35 and 48:45. In this episode, Marisol Morales chats with Colette Cann and Eric DeMeulenaere, as they share the true stories of their lives as activists, scholars, and parents who are trying to push forward social change through academic work.

Compact Nation Podcast · The Activist Academic

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What does it mean to be both an activist and an academic? Watch the FreshEd podcast Becoming an Activist Academic, which features authors Colette Cann & Eric DeMeulenaere discussing their own journeys as a guide for merging activism and academia.

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CHAPTER ONE

Year One: Activists Entering the Academy

IN THIS OPENING CHAPTER, we take a moment to introduce ourselves and share our journeys into and through academia. The narrative voice in academia is impersonal and void of self in an effort to increase the semblance of objectivity and, thus, reliability of data. Here, we open with a purposeful effort to negate that tendency and instead share who we are as a way to explain why activism in academia is critically important to us and such an important way to define our work. We do so in a narratively fictional dialogue that, in the words of Derrick Bell, “explore[s] situations that are real enough but, in their many and contradictory dimensions, defy understanding” (1987, p. 7). This dialogue is set in Eric’s family room during our first year in academia after our daughters have gone to bed.

Through this dialogue, we also offer a framework for the potential that we see for the work of academics—indeed, for our own work. We introduce critical scholars like Antonio Gramsci, Henry Giroux, Stanley Aronowitz, and bell hooks whose work inspires a more critical stance than what the growing number of “how to survive academia” manuals offer. Their theories of transformative intellectualism, by contrast, represent a model for how to engage the world as activist academics.

* * *

The following conversation picks up at the end of a long but joyous day. Colette and her 3-year-old daughter, Salihah, are in Worcester visiting Eric’s family. Her daughter, ecstatic to see Eric’s daughters, was “on 10” all day, trying to keep up with the older girls. They’d played Guitar Hero in the morning (a contentious way to start the day with two guitars and three superstars in the making) and visited the Children’s Museum in the afternoon. Colette’s daughter had been too excited to nap and so, finally, at 7 o’clock, fell asleep.

All of the girls had now been in bed for an hour and the cleaning of the house was almost complete. Eric’s partner of almost a decade had headed upstairs to do some work with the warning, “Don’t stay up too late talking. You two aren’t as young as you used to be. There isn’t enough caffeine in the world to get you through a day with three girls under 10.”

Colette is now half in the freezer looking for the vanilla ice cream she knows will be there. “You want some ice cream?” she asks over her shoulder to Eric.

“No, no, no. Some of us have to worry about the middle age stomach coming on,” Eric replies, lifting his feet up onto the coffee table and patting his stomach. “Hurry and get your ice cream so we can chat before we start to nod off.”

Colette grabs a spoon out of the drawer and starts eating her ice cream as she heads into the den.

“Oh, but can you bring me a beer?” Eric asks.

“You have seriously lost your mind. Go get your own beer! I asked you if you wanted something while I was in the kitchen. Now, it’d be like me serving you if I went back to get a beer. And what happened to the worry about the belly? Beer belly is real you know!” Colette plops down into the armchair with her mug of ice cream, leveling a challenging glare at Eric over the rim of her mug.

“You know I’d get you one if the situation were reversed!” Eric unfolds his six foot three inch frame off the couch knowing that, regardless of his sighs, Colette isn’t about to get up again to get him a beer. “You’re wrong and you know it.”

He grabs a beer out of the fridge and heads back to the couch with the bottle opener. “When I’ve finished this beer, that’s it. I’ve got to get to bed.”

“I hear you,” replies Colette. “We’ve been talking all day in snippets between the giggles and tantrums of the girls. I know I shouldn’t be surprised, but we have really figured out how to double task an academic conversation while loading three kids into a car with snacks. We’ve actually covered a lot of ground already in our thinking about what it means to be an activist academic. I want to use this quiet time to really get down to the core questions we need to answer. How do we define it? Why is it important to have a vision of how to do the ‘academic thing’ differently? And, what motivates us to do this work?”

“Hold on. I need a moment to switch gears. Before we get back to work, tell me about how your first year is going. Now that Salihah’s in bed, give me the gritty details. It was a big deal moving your family across the country for a job. I want to hear about how you’re dealing with the New York winters. What do you even think about this whole academic life?” And, with a small grin, Eric adds, “Most importantly, I want to know how you’re dealing with east coast white people?”

“You know, now that you live on the east coast and the fact that you’re still white, that also includes you, right?” Colette quips, looking sideways at him. “You ask that a little too tongue-in-cheek for my liking. The racism in and around the college is for real. I’ve been Black enough for long enough to know that the face of racism here would be the twin of the racism I’ve witnessed and experienced elsewhere. But I’m not going to lie. It caught me off guard a little bit after the promises of idyllic small-town life described by the folks who showed me around campus. I mean, they acknowledged, ‘Vassar has problems like everywhere else,’ but I wasn’t really hearing them until I got pulled over for walking our dog while pushing Salihah in her stroller.”

In the middle of a sip, Eric chokes a little on his beer. “Stop it!” Mopping his chin and dabbing the front of his shirt, he asks in a more subdued tone, “What?”

“I am not lyyyyy-ing,” Colette emphasizes. “It was snowing in the middle of cold-ass January. I’m already not feeling walking the dog and I’ve got Salihah in her stroller bundled up in blankets. I’m walking the loop around campus when a security guard rolls up on me and asks, ‘What are you doing here?’ My heart starts racing and I feel my familiar friend, ‘righteous anger,’ about to erupt. But I also see my daughter in the stroller and am reminded that it’s not just me whose life would be affected if things went wrong. Remember what happened to Antwi at San Francisco State University? It was all I could do to limit my response to a clipped, “I live here,” through tight lips. The security guard froze for a second and got this, ‘I just fucked up big,’ look and drove away without saying anything. That welcome to Vassar put everything back into perspective. Academia wasn’t going to be for me like it was for everybody else. Not that I wanted it to be. It’s just that, in that moment, it became clear why.”

“Umm, institutional racism? White privilege? White supremacy? What did you settle on?”

After a moment of silence, Colette sets down her mug of ice cream. “The three-headed monster that plagues U.S. institutions? Yes, but I meant it became clear that my doing the type of work I do in academia is partly selfish. I do it to save my sanity…Well, to save my life. To actively work toward racial justice saves me from losing it.”

“I know there were very practical reasons for why you took this job at a historically white college. They had daycare for your daughter and affordable housing, neither are small issues for working single parents of young children. But why did you put yourself in a place where you had to know racial microaggressions were going to be more than a daily occurrence? It seems like they’d be an hourly occurrence…”

Rubbing her eyes, as is her habit when exhausted or stressed, Colette replies, “I grew up in predominantly white, elite educational institutions. I know how to survive them. I attended elite white schools from the first through ninth grade. Didn’t I ever tell you how I ended up there?” Eric shakes his head silently, worried that if he interrupts, she might not tell the story. “My parents’ decision to place me and my sister in white private schools was based on one incident that changed the trajectory of my educational experience. When we moved to California, my dad took me down to the local public school to register. As we rounded the fence to enter the gate, he saw a little boy chasing a little girl with a metal chain. My dad turned me right around and we headed back home. He called private school after private school until he reached one that offered a full scholarship. Despite having been raised in Harlem public schools, I think he was out of his element in California and didn’t know what to expect. Anyway, I went to John Thomas Dye elementary school in Bel Air and then to Westlake for high school until the ninth grade when I just stopped going to school.”

For the second time, Eric sits up, “What do you mean ‘stopped going to school’?”

More sheepishly than she expects, Colette says, “I just stopped.”

Eric waits for her to continue. When it is clear that she will not, he asks, “How did you get away with that one? I’ve met your mom. She’s a force to be reckoned with. I find it hard to believe she didn’t make you go to school.”

Colette shakes her head and then shrugs her shoulders. “I do, too. I’d have to ask her, but I’m guessing that, on some level, she got it. She knew I was unhappy and fed up with all of it. I couldn’t explain it back then, this weight that I felt on my heart. Now, of course, I have the language to describe it—racial battle fatigue (Smith, Yosso, & Solórzano, 2007). But, back then, I didn’t. I just knew the school was literally making me sick. Eventually, my dad had a long, hard talk with me about my options. The school had called because I had missed so much school and said that I would be forced to repeat the grade if I didn’t return to school. I wasn’t prepared to fail and so went back to finish out the year and take final exams.

“Thankfully, when I went back, a good friend, also a Student of Color, pulled me aside to say that she was ‘escaping.’ She was headed to a Catholic school where, according to her friends, there were Black and Brown faces everywhere. It only cost $1000 a year and she could probably get a scholarship for that. I went home, called the school, arranged to take the entrance exams, took the bus up to the school and was accepted. I did all of this by myself without my parents knowing. I had expected a fight with my parents about switching schools; I think we had all bought into the idea that white schools were better. But when I told them I wanted to switch schools, they wholeheartedly supported my decision. They’d never heard of the school and were worried about what it would mean for my chances of going to a ‘good’ college. The alternative, though, was watching their oldest daughter drop out of school, perhaps permanently next time. My dad was more worried about my spirit than how it would look on college applications at that point. In fact, to this day, he says it was one of the best decisions I ever made. My sister followed me to the new school a few years later.”

“You never told me that story and we’ve known each other for years.”

“Didn’t seem all that important until recently. I now start my survey education course with that story. So many of the students come to that course believing the meritocracy myths about schooling: ‘Schools are fair places and, as long as you work hard, they are relatively benign places.’ I tell that story to set the tone for the semester: Our classroom needs to be a place where we can do deep critical reflection and so it needs to be a place where students can be vulnerable. And, more importantly, it needs to be a place where we problematize schools and consider the ways that schools underserve youth.”

Eric is silent for a moment, peeling the label from his beer bottle. He finally asks the question he’s been turning over in his mind. “After that experience, why would you choose to return to another predominantly white, wealthy, and privileged space to work?”

“Probably for the same reason my dad put us in those white schools. At the time, it just seemed like the best option for my family. My father probably never intended for us to attend a ‘white’ school. His grandmother, parents, uncle, and aunt were all public school teachers and administrators in historically Black communities. He attended predominantly Black schools. In fact, we have never even lived in white neighborhoods.

“Vassar seemed like the best option for my family. They offer on-campus daycare and guaranteed a space for my daughter. They have affordable faculty housing that includes the cost of heat. After struggling to support Salihah without daycare or cheap housing in California, this just made sense. And, to be honest, professionally it was a place I wanted to be. Despite the whiteness of the college, the larger community is overwhelmingly Black and Latinx. The public school system is struggling, righteously, to create more socially just spaces for K12 youth. And the Students of Color on the college campus are fierce beyond belief. To work with them is an honor.

“I never thought I wanted to be an academic. I went to graduate school, after years of teaching at a white private high school; in addition to teaching, I had been the academic advisor to the Students of Color offered scholarships to this high school. But I realized that the school was failing them in much the same way my schools had failed me. And, in fact, I became convinced that offering the scholarships was not about increasing access, but about creating a façade of opportunity while maintaining rigid racial and class lines. I went to graduate school to figure out how to create schools that actually served Students of Color and served them well.”

“Yet, now you are a professor at a historically white college?” Eric pushes.

“The irony and hypocrisy do not escape me,” Colette laughs. “Graduate school opened a whole new world for me, one I want as many youth to access as possible. Social theory, specifically, critical theory, is an incredible weapon to social consciousness! I learned about myself and my past experiences as well as about schools and other social institutions. Professor Daniel Solórzano explained it best when he said that theory, ‘is a tool that we use to explain phenomenon.’ For the first time, I was armed not only with my experiences, observations and an intuitive sense that something was terribly wrong with schools that purport to serve all students, but armed with critical theory.”

“Sounds like bell hooks.” Quoting her, Eric recites, “bell hooks explains that she, ‘came to theory because she was hurting…[She] came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within [her]. Most importantly, [she] wanted to make the hurt go away’ (1994, p. 59).”

“Exactly! Theory is a challenge to hegemony and I was hooked. I still feel committed to schools, but the vehicle for social change, for me anyway, changed somewhat. Academia can be, as you know, a powerful space to do racial justice and activist work, generally. Being here at Vassar, though, has made me think more purposefully about what kind of academic identity will do righteous work, but also sustain me and my family emotionally, politically, socially, academically…” Letting her voice trail away, she puts her now empty mug on the coffee table. Seeing a ring begin to form, she picks it up again, wipes down the moisture with her sweatshirt sleeve and replaces the mug on a nearby coaster.

“And what about you? After years of teaching, starting a school in Oakland and coaching school leaders, what drew you into academia? Somehow, I don’t see you as the stereotypical academic, huddled over dusty, spider-webbed books late into the night, overly concerned about minutia that matter only to you, but has nothing to do with changing the material conditions of the world around us.” Off the hot seat, Colette sinks back into the armchair, looking forward to the story sure to come.

“I see what you’re doing. Don’t think you’re slick like that or anything, changing the topic. But I’ll move on because you’ve done enough soul-baring for the night,” he says, letting her off the hook. Colette rarely shares much of her background, so he didn’t want to push too hard lest she avoid it in the future. “You know the outline of my story already. I guess I haven’t had cause to share a lot of the details. With our busy schedules, it’s good enough if I can even get to the broad strokes through quick asides on these short visits. I can’t remember the last time we’ve had such a long stretch of time to talk. Of course, we’ll pay for this in the morning,” he adds jokingly. “But since we’re obviously gluttons for punishment…”

“I went to graduate school because I was struggling to make sense of the inequities I saw teaching in urban schools. I had been teaching at a high school in San Francisco that was created from an NAACP lawsuit to provide a college preparatory education in the predominantly Black southeast section of San Francisco. But our school had more Black students dropping out than heading to college. I was disgusted and frustrated. I repeatedly expressed this frustration at faculty meetings and put out calls to my colleagues to work together to change the culture of mediocrity at our school; our school was not living up to its potential. Eventually I decided to go to graduate school to figure out why we repeatedly failed our Black and Latinx students. But I also went with the goal of finding thoughtful colleagues and earning the credentials so that we could start a school that would be able to address the failure I saw repeated at every school I had worked in for many years.

“After graduating, as you know, I worked with a group of artists, parents, and educational activists to open a school modeled on the Black Panther’s award-winning school of two decades prior. Not a charter school, but a small public high school that was very much a part of the district. It was difficult work. The district had just been taken over by the state; the last day of our first year, one of our students, a young man, was murdered. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Prologue
• Chapter 1 Year One Activists Entering the Academy
• Chapter 2 Year Two Capturing Praxis—Critical Co-Constructed Autoethnography
• Chapter 3 Year Three Framing Our Work in Critical Social Theory
• Chapter 4 Year Four Activist Research
• Chapter 5 Year Five Activist Pedagogy
• Chapter 6 Year Six Activist Service in Schools and the Community
• Chapter 7 Year Seven Community in the Undercommons
• Afterword
• References
• About the Authors
• Index