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Learn from public syllabi.
As an educator who teaches courses on histories of race in the United States, I am all too aware of the deep need to address how current events impact the things we talk about in the classroom. A week before the quarter began this year, for instance, I emailed my students in order to address the January 6 insurrection. I touched on how it would likely impact the way in which we engaged with our course, as well as why learning about histories of racial formation and activism were so critical to moving forward. As writer and professor Rebecca Schuman puts it, “college, with its structured reading environment and safe discussion spaces, can give an entire generation the tools not just to begin to understand our violent, incomprehensible world—but to make it a little bit less violent, and a lot more comprehensible” (Slate). I see my courses as giving students those tools to take with them as they move beyond the university.
Happy Sunday! Today is Ida's third publication of a three-part series on how to diversify our education. I really appreciate this one; this newsletter has acted as my own public syllabi, in a way. I get to dive deep into diverse topics and constantly get introduced to new sources and inspiring people. But the sources that mean most are the *actual* syllabi that educators share online. I'd love to hear where else you're learning from and what this email inspires.
This newsletter is a free resource and that's made possible by our paying subscribers. Consider giving $7/month on Patreon. Or you can give one-time on our website, PayPal, or Venmo (@nicoleacardoza). You can also support us by joining our curated digital community. Thank you to all those that support!
Nicole
TAKE ACTION
Explore curriculum guides & public syllabi curated by academics, such as the #StandingRockSyllabus, #ImmigrationSyllabus and #IslamophobiaIsRacism syllabus, among many others.
Read or view at least one of the syllabus items that intrigue you.
Create a regular reading group with friends or colleagues to go through some of the syllabus items and have collective discussions about the texts.
GET EDUCATED
By Ida Yalzadeh (she/her)
As an educator who teaches courses on histories of race in the United States, I am all too aware of the deep need to address how current events impact the things we talk about in the classroom. A week before the quarter began this year, for instance, I emailed my students in order to address the January 6 insurrection. I touched on how it would likely impact the way in which we engaged with our course, as well as why learning about histories of racial formation and activism were so critical to moving forward. As writer and professor Rebecca Schuman puts it, “college, with its structured reading environment and safe discussion spaces, can give an entire generation the tools not just to begin to understand our violent, incomprehensible world—but to make it a little bit less violent, and a lot more comprehensible” (Slate). I see my courses as giving students those tools to take with them as they move beyond the university.
Unfortunately, most do not have access to these kinds of spaces that allow us to collectively process and work through the historical underpinnings of what’s going on right now. Most don’t know where to turn in order to figure out, “What got us to where we are today?”
In previous issues, I’ve written about the importance of new media & zine culture as two different yet converging mediums that allow for information and knowledge to be more easily distributed among those advocating for structural change. Today, I wanted to talk about online & crowd-sourced syllabi as a source that puts a new spin on the traditional college course. By using current events as framing sites for deep dives into histories of the United States, scholars, researchers and activists are curating online syllabi to distribute foundational texts and accessible content that help others process what’s going on and how we got to these moments.
The first real instance of an online syllabus going viral was in 2014, with the instigation and organization of the #FergusonSyllabus on Twitter by Marcia Chatelain, an African American Studies and history professor at Georgetown University. The Ferguson unrest was prompted in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown, and had many, including Chatelain, wondering what they could do. She began the hashtag as a way of crowd-sourcing texts that could speak to the reasons for the unrest and its historical context (The Atlantic). While Chatelain curated a list of books, essays, images and videos that lives on The Atlantic, searching the twitter hashtag yields thousands of results.
Since then, many other historians and scholars of the United States have collectively developed syllabi in order to help other communities make sense of the historical and political underpinnings that frame our current circumstances. Syllabi have been written to further contextualize the horrific Charleston church shooting, anti-Muslim racism, immigration, Standing Rock and the rise of Trump. These syllabi have the common goal of serving as a tool for those interested in social justice to educate themselves on the deeper contexts that underlie our most pressing issues of the current day.
One point I’d like to emphasize, though, has less to do with the content itself and more with those who are organizing it. Most all of the syllabi I listed here are curated by scholars of color. Back in November, I wrote about the importance of creating a more diverse professoriate in academia, as with their research comes asking a “more diverse set of questions—questions that are critical of using whiteness and capitalism as the norm by which all other subjects and ideas are measured.” That scholars of color are leading the way in these initiatives to digitally distribute knowledge across communities should come as no surprise. Community-based projects are central to the practice of collective liberation as we work to move our research beyond the Ivory Tower.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
By using current events as framing sites for deep dives into histories of the United States, scholars, researchers and activists are using online syllabi to distribute foundational texts and accessible content that help others process what’s going on and how we got to these moments.
The first real instance of an online syllabus going viral was in 2014, with the instigation and organization of the #FergusonSyllabus by Marcia Chatelain, an African American Studies and history professor at Georgetown University.
Syllabi written to contextualize the Charleston church shooting, anti-Muslim racism, immigration, Standing Rock and the rise of Trump have the common goal of serving as a tool for those interested in social justice to educate themselves on the deeper contexts that underlie our most pressing issues of the current day.
RELATED ISSUES
2/10/2021 | Celebrate zines.
1/21/2021 | Invest in new media.
11/8/2020 | Rethink what a professor looks like.
PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT
Thank you for all your financial contributions! If you haven't already, consider making a monthly donation to this work. These funds will help me operationalize this work for greatest impact.
Subscribe on Patreon | Give one-time on PayPal | Venmo @nicoleacardoza
Invest in new media.
Earlier this month, Twitter removed Donald Trump from their platform, citing his incitement of violence at the Capitol as against their “Glorifications of Violence” policy (Twitter). The social media platform has been abused by many, as it has provided megaphones for individuals who support policies that discriminate and enact violence upon already marginalized folks. On the other hand, it has also allowed for organizations fighting for real change to amplify their message and to a larger audience more quickly and globally than ever before.
Happy Thursday! Yesterday I felt a collective exhale from many across the nation. It's easy to pretend that a new administration will change everything. But in fact, it's all of us that need to change, and recognize that the systemic injustices we face are far beyond the presidency.
One way to do that is by reckoning with how we process information. We need to invest in emerging platforms and people to have diverse and nuanced perspective. Make broaden your media consumption part of your new year's resolutions. Ida has created a series on "democratizing knowledge" to introduce us to emerging and necessary platforms for education and growth. Here's our first. I love that, through these recommendations, can build relationships with leaders and organizers we may never meet in traditional outlets.
And creators like me get to be connected to people like YOU! Remember to send along a question for Saturday's Study Hall, and join us on our digital community. As always, this work is possible because of you. Consider subscribing for $7/month on Patreon, or give one-time on our website, PayPal or Venmo (@nicoleacardoza).
Nicole
TAKE ACTION
Move beyond just retweeting or sharing media that provides critical information and resources. Rather, also take the time to read and reflect on how you can support suggested action items that can be sustained over the long term.
Subscribe to Zeynep Tufekci’s newsletter Insight or read her book Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest in order to understand the possibilities and limitations of new media in large-scale activism.
Read #identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality and Nation to learn about the ways that different new media scholars are conceptualizing digital spaces of resistance and advocacy, as well as discrimination and surveillance.
Diversify what you read each day! Search for publications by writers you admire, spend time researching your favorite topics on social media to find diverse perspectives, and encourage your friends, family and colleagues to do the same.
GET EDUCATED
By Ida Yalzadeh (she/her)
Earlier this month, Twitter removed Donald Trump from their platform, citing his incitement of violence at the Capitol as against their “Glorifications of Violence” policy (Twitter). The social media platform has been abused by many, as it has provided megaphones for individuals who support policies that discriminate and enact violence upon already marginalized folks. On the other hand, it has also allowed for organizations fighting for real change to amplify their message and to a larger audience more quickly and globally than ever before.
There is, however, a caveat to this last point. Twitter has been criticized for its limitations in creating long term social change. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci argues that its ephemeral nature doesn’t naturally lend itself to the slow and sustained work of movement building (TED). Critical to these tasks of resistance and liberation is “new media,” which encompasses digital forms of distribution that have allowed for a fast and global reach, such as social media platforms. While the role of social media is central to this conversation and the way in which we distribute information, I’d instead like to turn to some other mediums of new media that can serve as potential tools for thinking and organizing collectively.
This is the first of a multi-part series on “democratizing knowledge,” or making knowledge accessible to a wider public. So much of the way that we consume information now allows us to think and gather more expansively than before. Throughout the series, I want to highlight some of the ways that we can use different mediums of information transfer to organize movements of resistance and realize our goal of collective liberation.
Google Docs is one such digital medium that has been used to distribute reading, resources and support to social movements (The Cut). After the 2016 election, Google Docs began to be used more widely in order to aggregate resources for collective action. In the last year, usage surged, despite questions about the platform’s privacy (MIT Technology Review). The June protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder sparked the creation of Google Docs supporting Black Lives Matter. Everything from letter templates, to bail fund lists, to resource databases were distributed across the internet to support Black folks and their allies. We must also be mindful of the platform’s drawbacks: there are critiques of Google Docs as having the potential to also be seen and forgotten, and just as important, the company’s recent firing of Timnit Gebru implies a larger issue at Google regarding their ethical threshold in the face of capitalism (Wired). That being said, the platform’s ability to easily encourage collaboration and distribute knowledge should not be discounted.
Newsletters are another means of decentralized knowledge distribution that allows for a wide and accessible spread of information. Newsletters are usually operated by one person (or a small number of people) who send information directly to subscribers’ inboxes via platforms like Substack, Tiny Letter and Mailchimp. Much of the discourse around newsletters has focused on the big-name journalists who have quit working for reputable news outlets and started their own newsletters (The New York Times). However, it is also important to emphasize newsletters’ potential for BIPOC writers and activists. Platforms like Substack have given these folks a low barrier to entry in order to to write and widely distribute information about mental health, beauty, culture, queerness, surveillance and belonging.
Much like the weblogs that have long been a mainstay of internet culture, newsletters can be understood as a form of digital resistance (New Media & Society). Anti-Racism Daily—the newsletter you are reading right now—is one such space. First begun by Nicole Cardoza as a side project to propose actionable items to support Black lives, the daily email has managed to find its way into thousands of inboxes. Newsletters like these amplify the voices of writers who might be overlooked by traditional publishing, writers who are advocating for structural change and liberation.
Google Docs and newsletters are only two forms of new media. We live in an age where information is more global and accessible than ever before. Using new media platforms allows collectives to gather, plan and collaborate in a way that lowers the barrier to entry. This is especially important for marginalized groups, who have long been a minority in most American newsrooms (Columbia Journalism Review, Nieman Lab).
We must also see these new media platforms as tools in the fight for collective liberation. While the information that can be distributed across these channels are critical to collective knowledge and organizing, we also need to do the work to act in a collective, meaningful way that can be sustained over the long-term.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Critical to the current tasks of resistance and liberation is “new media,” which encompasses digital forms of distribution that have allowed for a fast and global reach, such as social media platforms.
Using new media platforms like Google Docs and newsletters allows collectives to gather, plan and collaborate in a way that lowers the barrier to entry.
Such platforms are especially important for marginalized groups, who have long been a minority in most American newsrooms (Columbia Journalism Review, Nieman Lab).
But these platforms are simply tools. We also need to do the work to act in a collective, meaningful way that can be sustained over the long-term.
RELATED ISSUES
11/9/2020 | Decolonize your reading habits.
6/15/2020 | Diversify your media consumption.
PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT
Thank you for all your financial contributions! If you haven't already, consider making a monthly donation to this work. These funds will help me operationalize this work for greatest impact.
Subscribe on Patreon | Give one-time on PayPal | Venmo @nicoleacardoza