About the working group

Public education has been a key site through which rights have been imagined and fought for --- but education has never represented a singular fight. We draw on Audre Lorde’s observation that “[t]here is no thing as a single issue because we do not lead single issue lives,” to think through the ways that racial and economic justice, labor, policing, and gentrification intersect with and inform one another in struggles for educational justice.

From testing to desegregation to policing, we hope to create a space for co-learning and collaboration among educators, organizers, artists, researchers, and activists that might strengthen work for educational and racial justice in New York City.

Our hope in creating this working group is to provide a forum for participants to 1) think across and beyond the issues that drive our individual campaign, organizing, or research work; 2) identify potential opportunities for collaboration; and 3) draw on lessons and examples of organizing from different cities as well as historical moments.

The Center for the Humanities(CFH) is based at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), and encourages collaborative and creative work in the humanities at CUNY and across the city through seminars, conferences, publications and exhibitions.

This working group is initiated by the following individuals: Ujju Aggarwal, Brian Jones, Celina Su, and Jeanne Theoharis.

We hope you will join us! To get involved and for more information, please contact us at: [email protected].

This working group is a component of Narrating Change, Changing Narratives, an interdisciplinary research group that employs public humanities practices and explores narration as a guide for social change. The group is supported by the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research.