What bell hooks taught me…
What bell hooks taught me was that I needed to love myself. Before I could love myself, I needed to see myself, to see those who reflected expansive representations of Black, sexual, and gender identities. I have worked in higher education for many years and over 18 years within units focused on diversity. Although I […]
Coming to Voice” or Blatant Disrespect? An Epistolary Offering to My Mother for Understanding and Our Freedom
Dear Ma, You may be wondering where all this “talk back” has been coming from these past couple of years. Well, I got permission from bell hooks. It all started with her. Prior to my first graduate degree, I devoured everything I could get my hands on written by bell hooks. For me, reading and […]
Decolonial Love as a Foundation for Creative Business Practice
My fundamental connection with bell hooks has been through her book All About Love: New Visions (hooks 2001). Hooks’s “love ethic” goes beyond superficial romantic constructs and conceives love as a transformative energy that emphasizes social justice. As a scholar and designer, I’m interested in businesses that emphasize anti-capitalistic social change and transformation based on […]
Land, Kinship, and Healing
“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion”All about Love, 215 I wrote those words in a notebook on the plane to Aotearoa six years ago as a nervous graduate student attending my first international conference on Indigenous research methodologies. Though my background was in colonially-informed natural […]
Observations of Knowledge and Landscape from the Margins: An Indigenous Bunun Woman-centered Perspective
Twenty years ago, as a kindergarten teacher, I adopted an “orthodox” pedagogical model of professional early childhood education as the basis for teaching my students and interacting with their parents. Over time, I reflected upon the differences between the educational theories I had learned and my own early childhood experiences, which led me to contemplate […]
An Offering of Gratitude
Introduction The loss of bell hooks in the closing months of 2021 felt deeply personal for many. But for some of us, as Black Appalachian womxn academics, our lives would not be possible without her trailblazing work. She made our existence possible while simultaneously naming the structural barriers that kept this truth bound. The legacy […]
Coming of Age in Black Feminism and the Influence of bell hooks
To come of age as an aspiring Black feminist in the 1980s was, to quote Toni Morrison, “shee r good fortune.” The urgencies and stakes of the 1980s were exceeded only by the brilliance of Black women scholars of the time whose scholarly interventions at the intersections of feminist studies, African American studies, and Black […]
bell hooks’s Memoirs
Feminists of color in the 1980s such as bell hooks showed that theorizing is not a disconnected, abstract practice, but that it develops in a complex relationship to experience. They centered women of color feminist thought in books and essays mixing non-fiction writing, poetry, and theory. Hooks and others sought to reach a larger public […]
Rebirthing My Girlhood Space: What bell hooks Taught Me about Writing and Love
I feel safe in these pages–and in the pages of all the beautiful books. It’s me and my thoughts. So free. One of the few places I can say and be exactly what I want.Journal Entry, Age 31 Three years after writing this journal entry, I experienced a series of life-changing losses—starting with the traumatic […]
Penning Balm
I wanted to disappear. I had literally dreamt of being told that I was not smart enough to finish a PhD, but my dreams neither included a classmate saying my ideas were not creative nor my professor expressing gratitude for the critique. That, however, is exactly what happened. Though I was fully funded, due to […]