A message for our alumni
We hope this message finds you well, taking care of yourselves, finding moments of peace and grace, as well as moments of productive resistance and radical hope. You may have read the recent statement that we, as a School of Education, put out to advance justice for Black Lives. In it, we express commitments along several levels—interpersonal, institutional, and ideological—and on all levels, our intention is to “go beyond words to take action.”
One form of action is to raise up voices of scholars of color and to engage in citational justice by consistently citing and centering Black, Indigenous and People of Color’s (BIPOC) voices, both inside and outside of academia. What we know is that full, robust, valid knowledge production depends on diverse representation, lived experiences, and interactions with systems of power and oppression. Far too often, however, the institutional structures that organize and validate knowledge production—universities, syllabi, journals, paywalls, conferences—exclude, marginalize, and de-center the voices of scholars of color. This project aims to take one small step towards changing these dynamics, by highlighting and centering the many contributions of the BIPOC graduates of the School of Education.
CU Boulder’s School of Education has a lineage of powerful BIPOC graduates who engage in consequential work in schools, universities, and communities. The aim of this action is to make that lineage and those voices more visible. To start, our plan is to assemble a bibliography of publications and projects authored/led by our School of Education’s BIPOC graduates, so that students, staff, and faculty can all read, teach, and cite this work. We recognize that citations—while important—are not the only measure of impact; indeed, work can have direct and local impact, when it is read, considered, taught, and taken up by communities, like the School of Education.
Our hope is to create this bibliography soon, so that some of the resources could be used in Fall classes and in conversations next year. This is why we are reaching out to you, as a graduate of our program. If you identify as BIPOC and are interested and willing to share, we are hoping that you could take a few minutes to fill out this google form, which prompts you to upload your CV and/or list any publications or projects that you’d be willing to share. We are thinking expansively here, so please be sure to include public scholarship, blogs, video interviews, etc. If you do not identify as a BIPOC graduate, we welcome your nominations of work from BIPOC graduates that you have found powerful. We will then reach out to them to see if they would be willing to be included. We will update this list once we have published links and citations online, and we appreciate your support citing and centering BIPOC contributions.
As a School of Education, we are humbled by the deep work, growing pains, and ongoing learning that are necessary to becoming an anti-racist organization. We want our students and current faculty to know about the scholars who came before them and to join in honoring the paths that you have walked, as scholars of color when you were here and, importantly, the work that you’re doing now.
Much respect,
The CU Boulder School of Education Working Group for Citation Justice