Liberation Pedagogy: bell hooks and Teaching/Learning as Emancipatory Practice
Thursday April 27, 2023 | 5:45 – 7:30 PM | University Center
The 2023 Convocation featured TLC Founding Director Jody Greene. From its foundation, the TLC has drawn inspiration and wisdom from the work of the late bell hooks, educational visionary and early proponent of active and activist learning. According to hooks, our practices of teaching and learning can and should be as transformative and revolutionary as what we teach. More than three decades ago, not long after she finished her graduate work on this campus, hooks offered us a roadmap to transform educational practice to be equitable, student-centered, relationship-rich, and dynamically engaged. In this talk, Jody revisited hooks’ influence on recent efforts to reshape teaching and learning at UC Santa Cruz as it takes up the challenge of being a genuinely minority-serving institution.
About the Speaker
Jody Greene came to UC Santa Cruz in 1998 and has served as Professor of Literature, Feminist Studies, and the History of Consciousness. Their research interests include seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature; non-dualist Western philosophy, especially the work of Spivak, Derrida, and Nancy; human rights and international law; queer studies; and the history of literary discourse and literary institutions.
Recent publications include a collection, co-edited with Sharif Youssef, The Hostile Takeover: Human Rights after Corporate Personhood (Toronto, 2020), and op-eds in publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed. They are the recipient of the UCSC Humanities Division John Dizikes Teaching Award (2008), the Disability Resource Center Champion of Change Award (2018), and, twice, of the UCSC Academic Senate Excellence in Teaching Award (2001, 2014). In 2016, they were appointed the founding Director of the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL), and they now serve as UCSC’s first Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning. From 2021 to 2025, they served as UCSC’s first Associate Campus Provost for Academic Success.