During this talk, Lorgia García Peña will discuss community building and public scholarship by focusing on her book Community as Rebellion.

Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for students and faculty of color within academia. García Peña argues that the classroom is key to freedom-making in the university, urging teachers to consider activism and social justice as central to what she calls “teaching in freedom”: a progressive form of collective learning that prioritizes the subjugated knowledge, silenced histories, and epistemologies from the Global South and Indigenous, Black, and brown communities. By teaching in and for freedom, we not only acknowledge the harm that the university has inflicted on our persons and our ways of knowing since its inception, but also create alternative ways to be, create, live, and succeed through our work.
Lorgia García Peña is a writer, activist, and scholar who specializes in Latinx studies with a focus on Black Latinidades. García Peña received a Ph.D. in American culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and an M.A. in Latin American and Latino literatures from Rutgers University. Currently, she serves as a professor in the Department of African American Studies and the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University.