HASTAC 2023 Conference

In this panel, nine doctoral students from five fields will reflect on how collaborative program-making can help to transform one’s research, teaching, and institution making and resisting--and with potentialities for community activism beyond the academy as well.. All students on this panel are at a public graduate school, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where, on fellowship, they all still teach as adjunct professors throughout the vastly underfunded, “minority majority” CUNY system. Given our dual roles as students and teachers, we will discuss how our mission of “advancing equity and innovation in higher education” shapes our programs and how these core values are reflected through daily praxis and pedagogy. Critical making and social justice are the cement of our activities, and the way we organize and manage FI is strongly anchored in transgressing traditional boundaries of the academy (Davidson, 2017; Hooks, 1994;).

This panel will highlight how this collaborative program models a different way of being than is traditional at our higher education institutions (Davidson, 2017; Hooks, 1994). For example, two doctoral students in FI serve as the co-directors of HASTAC Scholars, the arm of our program that extends peer learning, collaboration, and equity far beyond CUNY. We will discuss formative principles including collaborative work, innovative pedagogies, peer mentoring (Budge, 2006) and collective brainstorming that help foster both success within the academy and beyond.

Budge, S. (2006). Peer Mentoring in Postsecondary Education: Implications for Research and Practice. Journal of College Reading and Learning, 37(1), 71–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/10790195.2006.10850194
Davidson, C. N. (2017). The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World In Flux (1st edition). Basic Books.
Hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.