Community As Rebellion

Join us for a conversation between Marguerite Casey Foundation President and CEO Dr. Carmen Rojas, and author Lorgia García Peña.

Weaving personal narrative with political analysis, Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for students and faculty of color within academia. Much like other women scholars of color, Lorgia García Peña has struggled against the colonizing, racializing, classist, and unequal structures that perpetuate systemic violence within universities. Through personal experiences and analytical reflections, the author invites readers—in particular Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women—to engage in liberatory practices of boycott, abolition, and radical community-building to combat the academic world’s tokenizing and exploitative structures.

About the Author

Lorgia García Peña is the Mellon Associate Professor at Tufts University’s Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora where she focuses on Latinx studies, global Blackness, and Dominican diaspora studies.

She is the author of The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations, and Archives of Contradictions, which reveals, through the Dominican experience, how marginality is created through acts of exclusion. The Borders of Dominicanidad has won multiple awards, including the 2016 LASA Latino/a Studies Book Award and the 2016 Isis Duarte Book Prize in Haiti and Dominican Studies. Peña is currently working on an on-going book-length project titled Translating Blackness: Migrations and Detours of Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspectives.