Dean’s Lecture Series Archive: 2022–23

ALYSSA HADLEY-DUNN
Associate Professor in the Department of Teacher Education
Michigan State University

“The Day After: Working for Equity and Justice in Traumatic Times”

What should teachers do on the days after major events, tragedies, and traumas, especially when injustice is involved? In this talk, Dr. Dunn will share from her recent book, “Teaching on Days After,” which focuses on teacher narratives and youth-authored student spotlights that reveal what classrooms do and can look like in the wake of these critical moments. Dunn incisively argues for the importance of equitable commitments, humanizing dialogue, sociopolitical awareness, and a rejection of so-called pedagogical neutrality across all grade levels and content areas. These stories come from diverse areas such as urban New York, rural Georgia, and suburban Michigan, from both public and private schools, and from classrooms with both novice and veteran teachers. “Teaching on Days After” can be used to support current classroom teachers and help preservice teachers think ahead to their future classrooms.

JAMESON LOPEZ
Assistant Professor in Educational Policy and Practice
University of Arizona

“Creating Visibility Through Indigenous Statistics in Education”

In this session, Jameson Lopez will speak about approaches to Indigenous quantitative methods that thematically develops how we can speak to Native nation building and Indigenous data sovereignty using statistics. Reinforcing the idea that quantitative research also belongs to Indigenous people and fundamentally is changing how we conduct Indigenous research in the field.

CHARLES DAVIS
Assistant Professor in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education and Director of the Campus Abolition Research Lab
University of Michigan

“Between the Carceral University and Police-Free Futures”

In the wake of the ongoing state and state-sanctioned violence disproportionately impacting racially and other minoritized communities, municipalities as well as colleges and universities have begun considering the reformation of how police departments are allocated public resources, trained,  and perform their everyday duties. However, and despite the demands of campus and community organizers and grassroots collectives, many have simply continued the longstanding pattern by postsecondary institutions of performative and non-performative gestures that fall short of meaningful divestment from the institution of policing. Further, despite their history of extraction and exploitation, universities have continued to refuse redistributing their resources in service of building strong communities that improve the material conditions in which made marginal people live, work, and learn.

In “Between the Carceral University and Police-Free Futures,” Dr. Davis will explore how the university’s entanglement with and perpetuation of the carceral state creates the conditions that render always already vulnerable communities subject to state and state-sanctioned violence. More specifically, Dr. Davis will draw upon theories from the Black radical tradition, decolonization and settler colonialism, and ethnographic study of the Carceral University to consider the otherwise possibilities for higher education to reimagine itself as a life-affirming institution. Rather than reinforcing the notion that universities and prisons sit in opposition to one another, whereas the former is presumed to be a domain of solutions while the other is seen as a consequence of society as the domain of problems, Dr. Davis invites us to consider the ways carceral society is a product of the university’s negligence and betrayal of its promise to serve the public good.