Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this video belong to the speakers and do not necessarily represent the views or positions of any entities they are associated with or Marguerite Casey Foundation.
This event is part of our MCF Book Club: Reading for a Liberated Future series. The MCF Book Club shares the ideas of leaders who encourage us to imagine how we can radically transform our democracy, economy, and society.
Weaving personal narrative with political analysis, Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for students and faculty of color within academia. Much like other women scholars of color, Lorgia García Peña has struggled against the colonizing, racializing, classist, and unequal structures that perpetuate systemic violence within universities. Through personal experiences and analytical reflections, the author invites readers—in particular Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women—to engage in liberatory practices of boycott, abolition, and radical community-building to combat the academic world’s tokenizing and exploitative structures.
Dr. Carmen Rojas is the president and CEO of Marguerite Casey Foundation. Under her leadership, the foundation launched the prestigious Freedom Scholar award, and since starting in 2020 granted more than $165M in funding to dozens of organizations doing the hard work of shifting power to those people who have long been excluded from having it. Prior to MCF, Dr. Rojas was the cofounder and CEO of the Workers Lab, an innovation lab that partners with workers to develop new ideas that help them succeed and flourish.
Lorgia García Peña is the Mellon Associate Professor at Tufts University’s Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora where she focuses on Latinx studies, global Blackness, and Dominican diaspora studies.
She is the author of The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations, and Archives of Contradictions, which reveals, through the Dominican experience, how marginality is created through acts of exclusion. The Borders of Dominicanidad has won multiple awards, including the 2016 LASA Latino/a Studies Book Award and the 2016 Isis Duarte Book Prize in Haiti and Dominican Studies. Peña is currently working on an ongoing book-length project titled Translating Blackness: Migrations and Detours of Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspectives.
Charlene A. Carruthers is a political strategist, cultural worker and Ph.D. student in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University. A practitioner of telling more complete stories, her research includes Black feminist political economies, abolition of patriarchal and carceral systems, and the role of cultural work within the Black Radical Tradition.
Her work spans more than 15 years of community organizing across racial, gender and economic justice movements. She is the author of the book Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.
