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Critical Faculty/Staff Development and Support

Building Radical, Transformative Practices

Radical simply means “grasping things at the root.” — Angela Y. Davis, “Let Us All Rise Together: Radical Perspectives on Empowerment for Afro-American Women,” Women, Culture and Politics (1990)

The Annan Institute for Global Citizenship hosts faculty and staff development initiatives that focus on multiculturalism, internationalism, and community engagement. The IGC grounds faculty and staff development with the acknowledgment that higher education, along with other social institutions, has been shaped by histories of race, colonialism, dispossession, and exclusion. Our approach considers how dynamics of power from these contexts continue to shape structures, systems, practices, and ideologies of education. These, in turn, shape assumptions about whose knowledges matter, what epistemologies are legitimate, what constitutes excellence, and what questions, projects, and research are considered to be important.

Scholar Norma Alarcón writes, “I believe that we continue to be part of the insurrection of subjugated knowledges… [O]ne’s idealism can be the template for evaluation of the transformation of the production of knowledge and practices that are actually taking place in both the local and global university” [“Conjugations: The Insurrection of Subjugated Knowledges and Exclusionary Practices,” Chicana/Latina Studies (2014)]. Together, how might we create contexts for such transformation at Macalester?

We invite faculty and staff to engage with opportunities that move from workshops to building relationships for ongoing conversations and deep collaborations across departments and divisions for transforming contexts for learning and knowledge production. By building cohorts and sustained communities, we create space to foster the emergence of insurgent knowledges and to critically examine standard practices of academia, linking transformations in curricula and pedagogies to practices in hiring and tenure and promotion reviews, as well as rethinking relationships with students as agents of knowledge production and cultural transformation. These spaces also enable the critical reimagining of relationships between academic and community knowledges, as well as learning across curricular and co-curricular programs. The Annan IGC thus connects staff and faculty development initiatives to building new relationships with students and community members in a framework of justice.