White Apathy and Pedagogical Renegotiations: An Autothistoria-teoría of Teaching While Sick, Tired, and Brown

Abstract

In this article, I reflect on my experience as a graduate student and an instructor to examine the embodied risks, professional decisions, and consequences connected to attending graduate school while working as an educator in a predominantly white institution (PWI). Through recollection, memory, and archival data, this autoethnographic text highlights events that led me to reanalyze my “failure” at reaching all of my enrolled students in a sociology of race and ethnicity class and reframe it as a reaction to the social environment of White apathy. This mindframe was supported by the practices of an East Coast university after a racial bias event was publicized in national news media. I argue that we must examine how institutions of higher learning are complicit in fostering racial ecologies of Whiteness that subject Women of Color and others to experience dif- ferent forms of pain and abuse. In doing so, we can create new movidas (moves) that hold groups accountable and promote healthier learning environments for all.

Teaching Undergraduate Social Determinants of Health: “Bad” Neighborhoods, “Those” People, and Dispelling the Stereotypical Portrayal of Poor, Urban Communities

“…Coincidentally, a campus- and community-based garden overlapped with work conducted by Dr. Osiecki and Dr. Mejia, which fostered further research collaborations (Mejia et al, 2020). Dr. Mejia described her sociological theory on the intersectionality of emotions, the examination of social processes of racialization in/of space and place, and foreground feminist approaches to mental health (Mejia, 2020). Dr. Osiecki, unfamiliar with these theories, requested additional resources to understand this research and attended virtual development opportunities including the Ethics of Care Conference, Research Sustaining Indigenous, and “Other” Community Engaged Ways of Knowing, and Being Antiracist, Doing Anti-racism.…”