Me ft. Quarterly-ish / Solstice Update

What a past 6 months 🥴

For those who may be new, welcome! This writing space is somewhere I intend to share updates about myself, some of my work and hobbies, plus some of my musings on what’s occurring globally and connecting it to what’s going on currently. It’s been a tough semester for a lot of reasons: attacks on higher education, ongoing genocide, the US President singlehandedly starting a war, people with power not leaving regular people alone, cutting of health, science, and social funds for communities in the United States / around the world and ensuing attacks on regular people while the our government uses us as pieces on a figurative game board.

With that said, I’ve been teaching two courses during that time, one titled Urban Contexts & Education Research and the other, Youth Participatory Action Research. In both these courses I had really brilliant students who held it down all semester as we critically engaged how we want education to play a role in society and where we can continue to make space for youth in a society that dehumanizes them, attacks their bodies and rights to space, while also infantilizes them when they speak up.

For those who don’t know, I have a lot of roles and have had a time working through and making sense of them; which I feel part of my job is demystifying what being a professor is. At the moment, my job as a professor is where my job is broken into conducting/running research projects, writing papers/books, teaching at universities and in community spaces (if you do community work), mentoring students (doctoral, undergrads and folks not at my uni), presenting and giving talks at conferences, other peoples unis and courses, writing (failing at lmao) grants. Oh, and reading and thinking while in an age of anti-intellectualism (its ok to think, its hard, we should do it more!). I know there’s a bit of a black box on how government funds that professors receive through grants are used and there’s discussion that the public doesn’t benefit from it so I’ll give a personal example.

My colleague and I are redesigning our masters of science education program to be more responsive to community partners in the Chicago area who do science education. For context, we have two strands of this program, one that is for people to become teachers (licensure) and others to gain pedagogical (methods of teaching and learning bc its a craft ppl!) skills to teach at a place like a natural history museum or STEM camp.

We applied to the National Science Foundation for a 3 million dollar grant to send 50 people (over 6 years) to school for free to get training in the community centered strand. The idea was to build cohesiveness across teachers and community educators so when they come out of school they can work together to pool resources and counteract the draining of funds from education. Well, DOGE flagged our grant because we include words like equity and community and climate. This is the case for many of my colleagues who run programs that influence hyperlocal decision making that make your communities better. If you want to see a waste of money read up on how Arizona State’s downtown campus came to be! This money would supports thousands of young people learning over decades but, inefficiency!!

Ok, back to the things I’ve been doing :). I’ve been fortunate to continue working with Estelita’s Library and we finally secured and purchased a property in Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood to now build housing and host our Black Panther Party Newspaper Digital Archive and The Black Scholar physical issues that I get to support managing with our crew there. We are also getting a mutual aid station build to support our neighbors with some basic resources (see it’s ok to support people!).

I also have been diving deep into the bird photography because there’s only so many ways to distract myself going into 30 and finding a niche hobby that everyone picks up (i opted to not go for running). Here’s a recent cutie pick of my fav bird, the osprey!

Speaking of hobbies, I also started to learn how to throw the javelin because we all need skills in the figurative apocalyptic space and my friends told me I wouldn’t be allowed to gather fruits and veggies. Here’s a quick video of my first meet:

Hope to see yall at para nationals (para is for people with physical disabilities, special olympics is for people with intellectual disabilities, TUNE INTO BOTH!).

I’m still biking, more aggressively now because Chicago biking is chaotic compared to Seattle. I enjoy the lake rides and Lennie enjoys the lake swims. Although Lennie has been really crushing it at her agility class. She’s 8.5 now so she moves at her own leisurely pace but she be hittin the weave polls with some smooth swiftness.

I’ve also be working through some research projects although all are being stifled or adjusted because of cuts to funding supports, particularly in the humanities and education: the one i mentioned above, gathering Black histories and experiences in Arizona, Youth’s Spatial Histories in Chicago through Art Acitivsm and Disabled folks spatial histories in Chicago which you can see here, www.crippingthemap.com.

I’ve also been writing a lot so I’ll link each paper here with a quick sentence summary:

1. Blackness, place and learning: Youth cultivating a sense of identity-in-place through spatial storyline

   1. This paper examines how five youth in Seattle’s Central District and Southend participated in an architectural design-build project that centered Black spatial histories. The project aimed to foster a meaningful context for identity development, learning, and spacemaking as intertwined relational processes.

2. Our Spatial Orientation: Positionality, Relationality, and Learning Through the Body

   1. In this conceptual paper, I center and build with the contributions of Black geographies as both a theoretical and methodological shift to consider spatial orientations and the spatial knowledge we bring to qualitative inquiry, connecting our prior time in spaces to our current approaches.

3. Actualizing Black Spatial Histories Through a Speculative Youth Archiving Project

   1. This paper details an action-based summer archeology program hosted by the Burke Museum and Seattle Public Schools Liberatory Education Program that explored Black spatial histories through speculative youth archiving.

4. Building the world anew: on critical hope in climate change education

   1. Across lands and waters, the urgency of the climate crisis necessitates that we respond in ways that look beyond saving the current world. Rather, we suggest that climate change education be refocused toward designing equitable futures and building the world anew – a project that must necessarily be rooted in the knowledge, perspectives, and practices of Black, Indigenous, and Third World communities as peoples who have each already survived world-ending events and whose experiences can guide what it means to learn to live with a changing climate.

Writing is my jam and it’s also an accessible way for me to continue to work towards a world where we all can do our thing. With that said, I’ve been able to read a bit more now that the semester is over and that’s been helpful for me to do thinking, reading and writing job. Here’s some of the texts I’ve been able to dive into recently:

• The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in O'odham Country by Gary Paul Nabhan is a land based story about where I grew up in Arizona.

• Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War by Andrew Lee which discusses how gentrification is fueled by corporations and guided by displacing regular people who make systems go.

• Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America by Leila Philip is about beavers, one of the coolest animals ever. This book also makes connections through how our current political economy was built off of destroying native communities and destroying natural resources.

As you can see I love the natural and environmental history perspective as a way to understand and make sense of what is going on in the current moment. I think on paper it’s a more objective perspective, but in reality its a lens that honors our inherent connections to the natural world and the places we call home.

I’ll leave you with that as I sign off from Helsinki, Finland. There’s always more to say but I’m happy to discuss more of my travels (I was on the road 10 of the 16 weeks of the semester, never again 🤢).

-kg