OCAD U 2021 Academic Year Welcome | Keynote
POSSIBILITIES AND CHALLENGES OF THE SETTLER UNIVERSITY
Leigh Patel, Professor, School of Education, University of Pittsburgh
Wednesday, September 1, 2021
10:30 AM - 12:00 PM EDT | Online via Zoom and OCAD U LiVE (https://www.ocadu.ca/live)
All students, faculty and staff welcome! ASL interpretation will be provided during the live stream.
Join us for this year’s Academic Year Welcome keynote address by Leigh Patel, professor at the School of Education, University of Pittsburgh. In her keynote address, “Possibilities and challenges of the settler university,” Professor Patel will trace the logics and practices of stolen labor on stolen land that has been crucial to the development of education in settler colonies. She will address the potential for universities to be engines for social change with historical and contemporary examples of universities protecting its property through material erasure and epistemic violence. She will also address the constant existence of political education to agitate and alter power structures.
Leigh Patel’s work is based in the fact that as long as oppression has existed so have freedom struggles. She is a transdisciplinary, community-based researcher as well as an eldercare provider, educator, writer, and cultural worker. Prior to being employed as a professor, she was a middle school language arts teacher, a journalist, and a state-level policymaker. Professor Patel is also a proud national board member of Education for Liberation, a nonprofit that focuses on supporting low-income people, particularly youth of color, to understand and challenge the injustices their communities face.
She has been interviewed for and has written for public outlets, such as The Atlantic, Beacon Broadside, NPR, The Conversation and The Feminist Wire. She has published dozens of academic research articles and is the award-winning author of five books. Her latest book, There is No Study Without Struggle: Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education, connects the distinct yet deeply connected intertwined forms of oppression while also shedding light on the crucial nature of political education for social transformation. Her walk-on song is “Can I Kick It” by A Tribe Called Quest. You can follow her on twitter @lipatel.
For more info, please email fcdc@ocadu.ca.