Good afternoon, and welcome. My name is Steve V Weg and I'm the Associate Director of the Center for Translating Research into Practice. And it's my pleasure to welcome you to our Scholar of the Month Conversation. The Center for Translating Research into practice was founded by doctor Sandra Petronio, professor of Communication Studies, who's an achieved translational scholar and the director of the Center for Privacy Management at I UPI. Her work and privacy management is particularly pertinent these days as we navigate the increased use of virtual technologies. When doctor Petrono and Chancellor Emeritus Charles Banz first came to IUPI, they recognized our campus was the most translational they had ever experienced. They also noticed that we're a modest campus that doesn't always boast about our good works. That began doctor Petronio's quest to recognize and appreciate the many unique examples of research that seeks to address questions and challenges that solve problems people face in their everyday lives by using meaningful evidence based information to address these complex governmental, cultural, and relational issues that we face. IUPUI is a well known and integral partner with our Indianapolis and Indiana community. Right now, during a pandemic is no exception to the value of these partnerships. There's so much to explore and understand. And translational research is a way to help us to understand these issues. And we're delighted to be able to share with you today in a different way a conversation by sharing some of our scholars and some of their works. So we welcome you today to begin to hear from Professor Lasana Casembe, who's agreed to come and talk to us about his translational work. As we're taking advantage of Zoom, we want to remind you to please keep your microphone muted and your camera off during the presentation until we get to a place of conversation. First, we'll have doctor Kasamb to share some of his thoughts, and then we'll have a chance to hear from each other. You're welcome at any time to type questions into the chat, although we'll have time for some conversation at the end. For those that can't attend or for you want to come back and here again, we are recording the session that'll be available post on our YouTube channel. You'll also receive an e mail afterwards, inviting you to fill out an evaluation and we'll share any follow up information that we have from today's conversation. A couple of updates. We're introducing a monthly newsletter, along with our YouTube channel, coming up next month as a way to stay in touch with all of you about the many things that are happening at IUPUI around translational research. For those of you that are interested in continuing education units, we're working on having this series be part of that to get credit for attending these monthly sessions. So watch for news on that. The best way to keep up to date, of course, besides going to our website at trip py dot EDU to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, where we always have new information. Another feature we have on our website, we like to make sure you know about is our scholars. As we feature them, we have some information about their works, and you can learn more about what they do by clicking on whoever you'd like to know more about, say, perhaps, Professor assembe. And then you can find out more about his work. He's got a little video there to explain it, you can read about it. And really exciting is a whole list of his works that are freely available to you through something called Scholar works here at IUPY, where you can easily and freely access some of his journal articles that explain some of his work. So please check that out on the website at any time. Next month, we have for the conversation series. We're looking forward to hearing from doctor Peggy Stockdale, who's going to talk about when good people harass, why they do it and why we let them. So we'll be back on March 26 at noon for that conversation. But right now we don't want to take away any more time from doctor Lasana Assembe, who is a professor in the School of Education of the Department of urban Teacher Education. He is also a poet and a spoken word artist, and so we're really looking forward to having him be with us here today to share his information and idea and to start a conversation. So we'll turn it over to you, doctor Kasabe. Please bring up your screen and take it away. Welcome. Well, thank you all for attending today and sharing his brief time with us this afternoon. Really appreciate your presence. Present. We promise not to be long, but we promise that we must be strong. We want to I wanted to give some special thanks to doctor Banz For helping bring this together and cultivate this very, very valuable series, and doctor Viewig, as well for all of your support from the very beginning, and with my interaction with Tripp all the way up into 15 seconds ago. I want to really thank you as well for your assistance and insight through this process. It's been a joy. And I also want to thank miss Nuri McLucas, who is easily one part crown jewel, one part quarterback. Wanted to thank you for all of your amazing logistical support and assistance throughout this entire process. This may wind up looking very, very easy and seamless, but there was a lot of behind the scenes work. I just wanted to make sure that we thank and bless the hands that made it happen. So thank you all again. I'm going to get started really quickly. I'm going to leave around maybe 15. If you're good to me, I'll leave 16 minutes at the end for Q&A, so we can have some dialogue with one another. This particular presentation is entitled the Living Tradition. Pedagogy Arts learning and liberatory practice. And what I'm trying to do is essentially give you some insights into the work, and then my approach to the work that I do. From Chicago, I've been in Indianapolis this fall. It'll be four years. My work over the last 26, 27 years has taken place in schools, communities, juvenile detention centers, and prisons. So, as I said, I inhabit these three worlds, the world of education, the world of Africana studies, and the world of art. Arts learning, Arts pedagogy as a spoken word artist, a poet, and a teaching artist. So we have to give thanks though where thanks is due, and in the African tradition, our culture. We always acknowledge San Copa. San Copa essentially is group memory, a cultural memory, and that we should always remember the past for therein lies the future, if forgotten, we're destined to repeat it. So it's always necessary and fitting and proper to give due credit to those who got us to where we are today, and we wanted to always have that top of mind in the forefront of our minds. That the influences that every teacher that we've ever had has helped us to become the person that we are, the people that we are right now. And even then, we are in a moment of transcendence, because we're we should be in a mode of constantly transcending what we knew yesterday or even 5 minutes ago. So I'll bid the Sankofa bird goodbye. And then I want to also acknowledge another African cultural concept, which is another cornerstone of the work that I do. And this is a concept that comes to us from Northeast Africa, Kemet, or Ancient Egypt. In fact, it's called Sia exceptional insight. And this is a cultural principle that we practice in our work in our engagement with one another, and especially in our engagement with ourselves, that we need to think and look and think again very deeply about who we are. Are we all are we really who we say we are, and are we all we ought to be? So there's another really important educational theorist that I need to mention as well, John Dewey, John Dewey gives us this principle of the theory evaluation. And what he means by that is that something, anything can be valued immediately in the ear and now, that it can be prized, but it could also be over time, it can be appraised as well. So this is very important educational concept and a theory, a principle of learning and teaching, and knowing, because it is particularly applicable with respect to how something that was attained and its implications for future interaction. So this is very important because in the work that I do, I do a lot of reaching back, into into our past, so called past, to create what I call a usable past. So I'm always talking about and teaching about and writing about how do we understand and bridge the symbiotic nature between the past present and future so that we can become better stewards, better teachers, better listeners, and better educators. Okay? So I wanted to lay that foundation. And also, my work is informed by so many cultural antecedents and giants in our culture, ancestors who when they stood up, they were the heights of mountains, when they laid down, they were the lens of rivers. The great forerunner, doctor Paul Robeson is someone who continues with his long shadow and his deep footprint to impact my thinking, to impact my synthesis, and to impact the way that I approach the work that I do. There's another African concept known as jegna. The Jegna comes out of Mali, and this comes from the Mandinka people. And Jegna essentially means master teacher. So this particular graphic is something I created. With the help, the valuable help. I hope she's listening doctor Mary Price. She met with me on a number of occasions that she really did just a valuable and really a Priceless job, Mary Priceless, did a priceless job of helping me to conceptualize in different ways and stretch my thinking around the work that I do. So this graphic, I don't have time to really go into it, but it was something that I created as a result of the conversations that doctor Price and I had in the thinking that I did afterwards. And this is a graphic that essentially attempts to capture. It's not a finished graphic in any way, but it attempts to capture the nature of the work that I do and the worlds that I inhabit, both the worlds themselves, but also the interstitial spaces that link those worlds. So this is my charge. I'm an assistant professor in the School of Education. I work in Africana Studies. And this is the deep study, the critical reflection, the culturally centered practice that I engage in, as we in our work with pre service teachers, those who are seeking professional licensure, but also in the work that I do as an educational consultant with schools and in those other learning spaces that I mentioned. So I am always talking about, writing about, thinking about how can we push and promote in a sustained way equity and education, positive self and social transformation, and truly the education and upliftment of every child. So, my approach to this is to infuse curriculum into the culture. This is an approach that is the exact opposite. It is the antithesis of the way it's typically done, which is to put culture into the curriculum. Our approach is to put curriculum into the culture. That is to say, the culture is a fixed thing. It is a thing that young students, children, people. We come into learning experiences with a certain set of scripts and heritage knowledge, and memories and traditions, our names, our cuisine that we favor, holidays that we engage in, the ways that we communicate, the ways we walk and talk all of these things represent our culture. So these children come into classroom and to other learning spaces with this deep well of Emic knowledge. And what's missing is skilled educators who are culturally informed, culturally responsive, equity minded, and have the proper dispositions about themselves in the world to be able to tap into the richness that these students bring. So our approach is very simple in our culture is that we infuse curriculum into the culture. For flowing from that is this formula of connecting students to culture and culture to academic excellence. Alright, so we have an approach in our culture that we know as teaching through culture. This comes to us from doctor VV Clark and doctor Joyce King and others. This the ability to this ability to teach through culture that is to tap into the heritage knowledge and diaspora literacy. By Heritage knowledge, we're referring to group memory or what I mentioned earlier, Sankofa. By Diaspora literacy, this comes to us from doctor Viv Clark's 1991 definition. The ability to comprehend the literature of Africa, Afro America and the Caribbean from an informed, indigenous perspective. So doctor Vivi Cark coined this term diaspora literacy back in 1991, and over the course of years, this term has influenced a great number of educators myself included, right? So again, this is a pyramid consciousness model that I've always used in my courses, and it's something that I've introduced students to. And what it is with this pyramid model is essentially a way to understand, locate, synthesize, and then explain and understand massive amounts of information around a particular phenomenon. So when we're dealing with African people, we're the oldest people on the planet, people of creation. And likewise, we have a very complex, a very long story. So one approach to that is to begin with an ontology, that is a being. And that's the Utamawazo. It's a Swahili term. Utamawazo refers to cultural thought. Right? On the other side of the pyramid, the other leg of the pyramid is something that we know as the Utamaroho. Utama Rojo stands for one's spirit like. You can also think of it in the academy sense of an axiology. So we have an ontology of being, an axiology, which is a system of values. And, of course, the synthesis of those two things is our ACL or our cultural essence, okay? We would know that in the academy as the epistemology. So what you have here in this pyramid consciousness model is the Utama Wazo, the cultural u Tama Roho, the Spirit. We move back and forth, hence the double headed arrow. And of course, the arrow that's in the center of the pyramid pointing up refers to a process of transduction of inspection, interrogation, of critical thought that leads to a synthesis of thinking, not a finality, not a conclusion, but a synthesis of thinking that it can be improved upon and expanded, we know as a Seely a cultural essence. This is not something that is unique to African people. This is a concept. These are concepts that flow and exist in every culture group on the planet earth. I am looking at it through In African cultural matrix, hence the pyramid knowledge. So we have to give respect also to the grandmaster, doctor Joyce King. We must become cognitively and emotionally free of ideological constraints on knowledge, thought, morallly engaged, action or pedagogy. This is very important because often when we approach the teaching, especially of students who are black and brown and diverse, there's often a kind of a mystified approach to how those children should be taught. And so instead of, I mean, we need a critique. We need a critique of racism. We need a critique of white supremacy, racism, anti Black racism, and inequity. But for me, that's not a final project. My final project cannot start with or terminate with race. It has to emphasize and build on culture. So as a student, of a student, of a student, as a professor, as a poet and spoken word artist. I came and found a foundation, and I stood on it, and now I try to build on it. So, doctor King in her work gives us the six culturally informed principles. Again, these are things that are not unique to African people, but these are principles that exist in every culture group on the planet earth. And what we have to do as educators who are committed and conscientious and who care about every child, we have to actually interrogate these principles, learn how they work, learn how they are connected to student outcomes and excellence and academic outcomes, and then build on that. So, these six principles, as stated here, builds on content and pedagogy that recovers knowledge, census culture, and expands learning. All right, Baraka, one of the grand masters as well on Milkar Cabrals note on culture is that the culture of the people is the repository of resistance to national oppression. That is very important because one of racisms White Supremacy's chief functions is distraction. And I'm not saying again that we do not have the analysis. We have the analysis and the critique. But from there, at least in my view, we have to build on that. And the way to build on that and to fully and richly synthesize and build on that is through culture. So, with my particular work, there are three interrelated zones of my research, my thinking, my theorizing, my scholarship and practice, and one of them is education for liberation, the other arts learning and pedagogy, and a third Pan African in the Black intellectual tradition. These things are not. There's no hierarchy here. Each of these things exist as a thing as a phenomena, as a world that I both inhabit and that I'm in constant interrogation with. So the interrelated zones to expand on each of these zones, the African and Black intellectual tradition includes these and other areas. These are the main areas, building on the teacher mastery with the Jagna tradition, building on Marone. That is exploring and interrogating, not just in the traditional historical sense of the Maroons who ran from, but what are we as maroons running to? Okay? The Maroons built independent cities and towns in Sirnam. There were maroons in Texas. There were maroons in Jamaica and Illinois and Kias. But so the Maroons not only built physical formations, and Maronge in the 21st century sense, we're still talking about building physical formations, but also ideological formations or cultural liberation, if you will. Black education Excellent. And the like. And so with arts learning to expand on that zone of my research, that includes my research, my deep research into these six global Black arts movements, Art ART, a revolutionary tool, culturally sustaining arts pedagogy and geo literacy among other things. With the third interrelated zone, that is urban education, education for liberation, there is the concept and inquiry of culturally sustaining pedagogy, liberatory education practices, reflective teaching, and, of course, black curriculum orientations. And as you see there the critique on and the work in terms of dismantling, not just understanding and coping, but dismantling white supremacy racism and anti Black racism. All right. So I wanted to now move deeper into the Black Arts theoretical framework. This was something that I articulated and conceptualized about 15 years ago, actually, when I was doing my work. The three aspects or three pillars, if you will, of this Black arts theoretical framework, deal with black, what I call Black arts aesthetic critical literacy. And this essentially means looking for ways to hack the standards, looking for ways to bust into traditional wrote school curricula that largely leads black and brown children out of. And when it does put Black people in it it tends to marginalize and reduce the footprint. And it creates and pushes a narrative of a long, European self congratulatory narrative that makes Black and brown people footnotes in history and alienates them from their own culture. So instead of rallying against that, instead we have the critique for that, but we move to looking for those openings in the curriculum where we can exploit those openings, hack the standards, and begin to build Black Arts aesthetic critical literacy building on African cultural knowledge and our folk traditions. Black arts inquiry and pedagogy. This is an enterprise that analyzes and looks at Black arts cultural production. So students are not just learning about names, dates, places, and faces. They are actually making building, producing, not simply consuming art. But they're also looking at the origins and the precedent, the antecedents. They're also looking at the thrusts that brought our poetics, our history, and what I call an Africana literary genealogy. So we want to introduce students to that genealogy, but also to the possibilities of that genealogy. This is the project. And the third one, to do with Black arts aesthetic philosophy and poetics. This framework, this part of the framework calls for the creation of propagation of a vision for an articular alternative curricular paradigm that leverages African cultural memory, Sankofa, the mo, the concept of the nomo, which is the generative and restorative power of the spoken word. The concept of the so called grio the ji, okay? And what we want to do is interrogate and leverage those things and find out how those things are shaped for the artistic and political goals of these 20th century Black arts movements that I interrogate. Alright, the genealogy that I spoke of earlier, coming out of the Global Black Arts movements, G BAM. This genealogy is comprised of several different lenses. I see them as mirrors, but I also see them as windows, building on identity, history, time, memory stands, and voice. Okay. And what we're after here, again, is restorative language arts, literacy, and critical discourse practices, particularly with younger children. I'm talking fourth grade up to high school age and through high school age. But mainly those critical ages at that period to get them introduced to literature at a very early age, and to understand that this approach to literature is actually building on their history, this importance of the lessons, the deep structure of culture that's built into African literary traditions, and to understand that literature, Africana literature, black literature is completely connected with one's origins, and it is completely connected with one's roots. Right? So again, going deeper into the framework is this Noit matrix of a Black arts inquiry and pedagogy. This is what it can look like or does look like in practice in the wild, A right? And it involves these major areas of pedagogy, restorative language arts practices, and curriculum development, the creation of Black arts cultural circles, and literacy, communities of practice, and critical literacy and practices and curriculum theorizing. All of these things and more One of the central tensions within the global Black Arts movement, I don't have time to go into the history of that, but one of to break it down really really at its root is a central tension that exists, I call an asthetic tension, where you have for the non Africana approach, it emphasizes or prioritizes form over content. It prioritizes style over substance. My approach, our approach into the culture is to say that form is critical, but content is principle. That is, and what we want to do is attempt to create an equilibrium between form and content style and substance. This is true with our poetry. This is true with our music. This is true with our pedagogy, our curricula. Another tension, and this is something that comes out of the West, again, is this notion of arts for art sake. That's a theoretical and a cultural assumption that is typical in Western media in Western art forms. The Africana approach to that is to look at art, not just art for art sake, but art as functional, collective, and committed, okay? And that right there, that tension, that dichotomy, that dialectic is what goes into my work and my approach to curriculum development. So these are just some of the aspects, if you will, that flow out of the art for art sake approach and the art as a did I say, artists functional, collective, and committed. These are just some of the aspects and some of the push pull factors that exist within that. And so my approach to curriculum development and to facilitation is to emphasize the political thrust of art and to emphasize this building or creating of an equilibrium. So Wadsworth Gerald, who was one of the great Black arts movement painters, visual artists gives us this definition of the Black aesthetic as a lexicon of physical constructs, emanating from a philosophy, consciously subscribing to Africana approaches to making art, right? So in my research on Global Black arts movement, its literature and its ideology. Again, we're looking at origins. We're looking at art that is functional, collective, and committed, art that was developed and brought into the world by young Black artists in Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, New York, during the Harlem Renaissance, Chicago, during the Black Chicago Renaissance, and of course, the Black arts movement, 1965, 1975. However, those are not finished movements. Those are just the ones that I study and explore. Those six movements during the 20th century. But a modern day expansion of these movements would be the hip hop movement. So our art, when we look at it, when we look at the political thrust that brought these artistic movements, these cultural movements into being, our art started with the fact that we were an oppressed people, and we were dealing with enslavement, and we were dealing with imperialism. We were dealing with white supremacy. So and that's why in this country in the United States, the first the very first Black writing in this country was the slave narratives. That is you can break up the formation of literature, Black literature in the United States into three periods. And the first period was that period of Black people writing about their experience in slavery. Same was true in Haiti. Same was true in Jamaica, same was true in Cuba, the Dominican Republic. Coming out of that experience of subordination, now moving to a period of alienation and then revolt, and then self affirmation, rediscovery and independence. These six formations are actually reflected in the global Black Arts movement curriculum that I developed, which I'll talk about later. So two thrusts come out of my work in this regard. One is that we examine and interrogate this psychological response, that we had to the social and cultural conditions of the colonial and enslavement situation. And the second major thrust is a fervid quest for a new and original orientation and expression in the world. That is to say, this is a repeat, a restatement of what I said earlier. We need the critique of racism and white supremacy, racism, and anti Black racism, and in. We need the critique of neoliberalism. But I don't like to stay stuck there. I like to instead put our emphasis on the growth and the development and the affirmative interrogation around our history and our culture, because we've been on the planet longer than any other group. And so we cannot engage in an endless analysis of dominance and domination. We need that critique. It's very important, but we also need, I think, to turn our gaze to culture and to begin looking at culture and how culture contributes to the development of the human being. So four aspects of the Black arts movement, curricula and facilitation, interrogation and research deal with the textuality, visuality, performance and orality of those black arts movements. This is an interpretive intellectual genealogy that flows out of my research into those movements, looking at its interpretive frameworks, the historical experience, the sentient voices, and theoretical frameworks. And then, of course, the artistic genealogy, which is somewhat related, dealing with the actual poets and the poetics, as well as the poetry. Looking at, again, institution building, and the theoretical frameworks, the visual and performing art, the audio politics and the sonic culture, which came out of Africana people as well. So one traditional formation is known as critical media literacy. This is an area of inquiry that has emerged in educational technology, and it is something that is a nod toward the hyper investment that we have today. I mean, we're doing it now. We're in what we call screen culture mode right now. So, critical media literacy refers to this ability to access and analyze a variety of communication, digital print and non print messages. So what it is is a formation that's folded again into my framework for looking at not only how students understand and learn about global Black arts movements but how they as creators, how they as young poets and writers actually write about it, as well. So, the program of research, the research program or project is known as Elevate. And what it is is an exploration of 20th century global Black Arts movements, the N De geste movement coming out of Haiti in the 1930s through the 50s, the Negritud movement, the Negrizmo movement, the New Negro movement slash Harlem Renaissance, the Black Chicago Renaissance and the Black Arts movement. Collectively, you're looking at nearly a century of Black, expressive culture, song, art, dance, drum, music, as well as. So we don't just look at the artistic formations, the poets, the essays, the visual culture, the sonic culture. We look at with each of these various movements, we look at the political thrust, the socio cultural and political thrust that brought these artistic movements into being. So I'm going to skip this a little bit. You can read about this on the trip website. I'm going to just skip it for purposes of time. Some of the desired learning outcomes from the project is to introduce students to the historical political and the socio cultural interconnections that emerged and flourished between the United States, Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe during the 20th century. Again, I wanted to show this bullet to show that this is not just a static sort of engagement that we do. I am working with Well, I've, in the past, worked with two IPS schools. This semester, I'm working with one school, and I'm working with a group of seventh graders, and they're learning about the NDG State movement, and our project, which is generously funded by the White Hill Clues Foundation, is going to last until, I believe the fall of 2023. So this is the work that we're engaged with right now with the young people at Riley School. All right. And again, I wanted to show this because these are some of the images of visual culture that the students are introduced to in the program, not only learning about the art, but also learning about art criticism, also learning about the function of art and looking at the way artistic formations came together, looking at the messages, right of artists and the messages that go into creating this art, looking at what were, again, the particular conditions that brought this about. The image in the my upper left corner is an image called Aunt Jemima and Pillsbury Do boy. And so when I engage with students around that and asking them to think about connections and make connections between the past and the present. Here it is, of course, it's a natural sort of a leap that people on this call can probably made just by virtue of looking at the image. But this is a way, again, using the four forms of art criticism and engaging students around not just a particular piece of art, but also again, the cultural and the political thrusts that brought this art into being. Right? And then, of course, I mentioned sonic culture, all of our movements from the NDG State movement where students are introduced to the drum of Haiti and the music of Haiti, all the way up into the Black Arts movement where they're introduced to the free jazz, the Avan garde and the Av gutbucket, jazz of the 1960s. And, of course, the music of the earlier 20th century with the Harlem Renaissance and we cannot teach art or art classes or literature. Well, we can teach them, but I think they're more richly taught when we involve multimedia forms. And so this is something that the students are engaged in active critical listening. And again, contributes again to the other part of the framework, I mentioned around critical media literacy. And, of course, this is the literature. This is just a sampling of the literature that the students are introduced to in the research project. And these are books that a lot of people have not even heard of these people. Amie Rocca and Sterling Brown, Larry Neil, and, of course, Addis and Gail junior. But this is literature that these students would not typically encounter, is particularly in public schools. So our goal in the program is to reacquaint them again with this enormously rich and fabulous literary genealogy, connect them to it, and then connect that to academic outcome and increased engagement. One of my newest corners that I'm turning in terms of my research is now looking at what I call Maron spaces and Black intellectual fugitivity, Black independent institutions in the Black Arts movement. So this was something that I unveiled at a conference once. And again, it is another just a branch of the research that seems to be emerging. Again, I wanted to close with these final slides by talking about some of the other work that I do. I'm a scholar of Africana Studies. O maybe I've been teaching Africana Studies for over 20 years now. And this is a program that I have I called Intro to Africana Studies. It's actually a 20 week program that takes place that involves an interrogation of Africana history from the 1400s all the way to the president. I'm very proud of this. This is something that I've taught at the higher education level. I've taught it at the community, grassroots level. I've taught it in high for high school age people, and for even younger students, right now, I'm engaged in an independent study with my own daughter who asked to be introduced to her history. So we've been engaged for the last eight weeks of walking through her history, which is our history. Alright, So I'm very proud of that program. This is another formation that I developed called Check the Rhyme, the cultural political roots of hip hop. This, again, is an interrogation on the history of the Hip hoop Movement Circus, 1972 to the present. I'm sorry, 1972 to 1979. This particular one Check the Rhine P two, the corporate theft of Hip hoop deals with hip hoop post 1979. And this is a workshop that I've registered also with the Illinois Humanities Bureau. And this is, again, something that I usually do at the community grassroots level. Write to B is a book that I wrote that I edited. At the Good Fortune to edit it, but it was written by a group of writers that I encountered in a program I taught at Stateville Prison. It was a creative writing project called writ to B. And this, again, is what I refer to as confinement literature for our brothers who are on the inside, what I call greater confinement. So, again, this is the work that I've been doing for a long time, at least since 2003 in Juvenile detention centers and prisons. And this is my work also with Third World Press Foundation. These are three of the books, two books that I edited and one book that I contributed an essay to on Ameria Morocco. So Third World Press is an organization I talk about now is the founded 1967 by doctor Hakimada Bodies, the oldest continuously publishing Black publisher in the world. Doctor Madobui founded it in 1967 in his basement apartment. He's now 79-years-old, looking to sit down, and he selected the three of us, doctor Rome Crawford, doctor Michael Samanga and myself to be the new collaborative leadership face for Third World Press, taking it into the next 54 years. This is one of the books. This is a book that I'm coming out with this fall, looking at the recollecting the liner notes that Amara Barraco wrote when he was alive from the end of 1959 all the way to 2014. So this book will be published by Third World Press. We're going to have. We're going to fingers cross. Quest Love will write the introduction one of the forwards for us. So we're going to really really use this book to promote the press and to serve as a way to bring attention to the press and the new leadership model. So this is something that I'm working on, and I'll be very, very excited when this book drops this fall. My work in the School of Education with pre service teachers is also around on culturally sustaining practices, anti racism. And my work actually reflects the mission that is in the School of Education, which is one of the reasons I'm so fortunate to be here and such great colleagues and leadership in the School of Education. But pivoting off of that, I've had a long distance interest in the way other people and other disciplines are taught, particularly in medicine. So I do a lot of work around race and understanding racism, white supremacy. And so we got asked by the School of Medicine here at Indiana University, a colleague of mine, doctor Joseph Tucker Edmunds, and I developed a program for their ICare series. And this is a program that is a mandatory program for their cohorts, students, faculty, leadership, administrators who participate in this 1 hour workshop that we have on historical origins and perspectives on race. Communal and ancestral knowledge for our Black children's development. This is a presentation that I did with some colleagues in the School of Education, doctor Flowers, if she's listening, doctor Christina Santa Maria Graf, and doctor Sina Skelton. And this was a program that we did with Indianapolis, Black Expo and Indiana University. And, of course, I'm a member of a grant team inside the School of Education. Doctor Tamer Jackson, our Illustrious dean, and doctor Ann Timon are the PIs on a grant that we received from the Indiana Department of Education. And we're working with teachers all throughout the State of Indiana around culturally sustaining practices and what we call education for what they call cultural competency, but what we call education for liberation. So we're very proud of the impact that we're having, not with just these teachers, because it is not simply like a talking head pundit model, but this is a trained trainer model, where they actually expected to implement the things that we share with them in these workshops. We begin that second summer, or second year of work with them this summer. So we're very excited about this as well. My work also extends into the community, the broader community. IUPUI is in the community, too. But my work is with Asante Art Institute. They reached out to me, miss Kisha Dixon, who is the executive director, mis Deborah Asante, who's the founder of Asante, reached out to me because they came out with a new play, and they wanted to tap me to write a curriculum guide. So I wrote a 100 page curriculum guide, which is on their website and free to distribute to whoever wants to use it. But it's a play that Deborah Asante wrote called Journey and Search of Justice. And the play looks at five different time periods in Black life in the United States. And I developed a curriculum, wrote and compiled a curriculum guide for teachers. And this was a project that was sponsored by a funded in part in large part by McDonald's Corporation. So very proud of this work as well. One of my newest projects is something that I'm doing. This is an educational consulting piece that I'm doing with Butler University faculty around building and Fostering frameworks of pedagogical Excellence. I have a program, also. It's actually a presentation called Arts Midwest that's registered with the Indiana Humanities Bureau. And this one is an exploration, really a meditation on the lives of four Black Hoosiers, Freddy Hubbard, West Montgomery, Etheridge Knight and Maury Evans. So Very proud of that. And my latest production is Blues Poetry opera called the Voodoo of Hells half Acre, the traveling Genius of Richard Wright, from Natchez to Chicago, Blues Poetry opera. This is a serious interrogation, and artful meditation with spoken word poetry and live music. Looking at the, the arc and the travels, the art, the life, the legacy of the great Richard Wright. So we chart his journey out of Natchez, Mississippi, and it charts his migration north during the first great migration. And, of course, the ten years that he spent in Chicago learning how to become a writer. This is a Blues portray opera that I wrote back in 2015, and it involves a group of local musicians, Indiana musicians. We had our performance not performance, presentation at the Cabaret on February 5, the Blues portray opera debuted on YouTube, February 10, and it was filmed and produced by W FYI, and it will be airing this spring, I think, sometime during the first half of April on PBS, so people will be able to see it as well. So it's a 90 minute opera done in six sequences that essentially looks at the life, the art, the legacy, and the living imprint, the living tradition, if you will, of the Great Richard Wright. My charge, as I've finished with these last two slides, is given to me by the great Cech Dia, doctor Chechnt Dia, easily the most important African intellectual of the 20th century. He said that only a loyal, determined struggle to destroy cultural aggression and bring out the truth, whatever it may be, is revolutionary and consonant with real progress. And then, of course, my other charge comes from the grandmaster, doctor John Henry Clark. He said that no people, no people are really free until they become the instruments of their own liberation. Each generation must take and maintain its freedom with its own hands. So I wanted to end there, leave time for questions. And again, thank you very much. Thank the organizers and conveners of this very special session. It is my honor to share with you. And now I want to turn it back over to doctor Vi Week, and we can field any questions that folks may have. Thank you. Thank you, doctor Kazembe. What we want to do is not turn it over to me for conversation, but to invite our audience to engage in some conversation with you around this amazing work, and we might need a moment to just digest all that. Your energy is amazing, and the amount of work that you've been doing is overwhelming and it's very exciting to me. So there might be many questions or comments. There was one comment in the chat that I will share with you from Chalmer Thompson, who just says, He is very pleased to be a colleague and that you've got great work. Same from Deb Keller, thanking you for your great work. But we'd be happy to open this up to folks and you'll be welcome to um, unmute and turn your camera on if you want to ask a question or engage in some conversation about how we use the great works that have been presented us today or what questions you have or question in my mind is like, where do you even begin? Where do we begin to take advantage of these great resources that you're talking about? How would I know where to start? Professor ew, we do have a question from J W and the group. Yes, Thank you. I didn't want to interrupt your question. But doctor Seb this is Jerry Wise? We Camp recently? Dot. Absolutely. Thank you for the invitation. I'm glad I could attend. And thank you for a great presentation. I'm going to ask you a very selfish question here, which is has your research focused on the role of non traditional education centers related to the art, such as cultural institutions play in the pedagogical approach that you're researching. What role does an institution I could come up with the name of an institution, but I'll just say the non traditional educational institutions such as cultural arts organizations. Yeah. I think that's central because one of the things that happened with Africana studies or Black studies, as it was called then when it was formed back in 1968. Formerly Sani San Francisco State College, doctor Nathan Hair, and and Danny Glover. A lot of people don't know. Danny Glover, the actor was before that, a student and an activist and still an activist, and a student. Anyway, back when they formed it in 1968, with Africana studies, what it did is it went to the academy or was taken into higher education. And the focus was put on developing professorships and chairs, and dow chairs, fields of study, fields of inquiry at the higher E level. And so what happened in the community Is that you begin to see the continued presence of Saturday schools and grassroots organizations, community centers, and the like. And so they have always been, I wouldn't even call them alternative spaces. I would call the university the alternative space. The community spaces in the main community have always been primary spaces that we've done our work. And where all of us have started as artists. I can't think of a single great artist, actor, musician, painter who did not start local with a community space. So Sam Jackson, the great Samuel Jackson, Nick Fury, if you will, before he started before he didn't just become this great actor, he started in Local Black theaters, the National Black Theater in New York and other Black theaters, Lafayette Theater in Louisiana. So, it's always played a great role in our cultural development, and, of course, our pedagogic, because that is where a lot of teaching artists as well have come out of those programs. So we've we've been very fortunate, I think, to see the emergence and cultivation of those spaces over the years, not just in urban centers, but in rural centers and suburban centers as well. I was reading in the paper the other day about Noblesville high school. They just got a $6,000,000 community center that they just built up there just opened, I think, earlier this week and stuff. And so when I read that, I was like, Man, we could use something like that on the far east side, right? That sort of cash infusion and to bring that sort of that money and those resources to a community that very much deserves it and very much needs it. So the function of those so called alternative spaces or community spaces can never be underestimated. And they still exist as really, really right sources of interrogation. Thank you for the question. I have a question. Thank you. Once again, Professor Kazmbe, for your presentation. My question is pertains to. So after you go to the different teachers and you have the training programs, is there like an accountability piece? Do you come in after the training session like a few months or a year later and see if there's been any change or the projects and classroom teachings that they've been doing with the students afterwards? No. No typically. What I do instead is that from the very beginning, I communicate to the principal, the school leadership, and the teachers that I want a long term relationship with your school. I don't just want to be that person coming in with an eight week kind of patchwork program, and then I never see those children again. So with James Wo Combe Riley school, the one I'm working with right now, we have a long term relationship that's being fostered. So I envision that I'll be working with that school at least for the duration. I mean, until they get tired of me and for the duration that I'm here in this area of the country. So, and the good thing about that is that the young people, you know, in in the lower grades, they hear about what we're doing. So as the seventh graders that I'm working with now become eighth graders or transfer out or go to other schools or whatever, now the sixth graders move in. Now then the fifth graders move up. So it's a wonderful thing, I think, an approach to create a long term relationship with the school. And I don't like to use that term mentoring because it's a European construction, a European formation. Our term and our culture that we use is Ji. I'm yeah, Ji. So Ji means a cultural steward, a cultural a steward, and it means one who is in an apprenticeship situation. So we know that in our culture, and it's the same is true in mentoring. It's just you have to have and pursue long term engagement. In order to truly effect and see change. So culturally sustaining assessment as well. I do program assessment, no doubt about it. But I'm there and intend to be there at the school over time to develop a relationship, not just with the students and the teachers and the school leadership, but also with the families, because that's very key as well. Thank you for that. Question. Are there other questions that you see, Nuri? Yes. J W has another question. Okay. Sorry, less selfish question here, but thank you, Professor. So and this is just a question about your research. Have you looked at any comparative comparative diasporatic studies, research, into this area of pedagogy and art? And if so, are there lessons learned, particularly within marginalized diasporatic groups, lessons learned that can be transported to your research into the same topic in Africana studies and Afrioban studies? Oh, absolutely. That's a great question, too. In fact, I was just talking about this with my students last Monday in my class. I was talking to them about European on European oppression. And the European on European oppression that occurred in Europe. And I told them that prior to the 1800s, when Europeans were coming to the so called New World, as they came in, they were Norwegian. They were Cechoslovakian. They were Scottish. They were Irish. They were all of these things. But when they got here, they became white. And something happened with their becoming white. So we went specific I went specifically into the political tension and the relationship between the Anglo Saxon British, rich white men with property and power, and their oppression over the Ulster Scots and the Irish. The Anglo Saxon British were the landlord, the Ulster Scots and the Irish we were the serfs were the workers. And so that tension in terms of that hierarchy of H and have not or have got and have not, that tension that was existed over in Europe followed them across the ocean into the United States. So one aspect of that oppression is that the British imposed upon the Irish and the Scots that your name is no longer O'saughnesy. It Shaughnessy. You name is no longer Magruder. It's Gruder. So what they began to do as a form of ethnic oppression or ethnic imperialism, they began to truncate and force the Irish and the Scots to truncate their last name. To actually change their names to something that they were not. And so this became a battle of what they call, what's known in history as a struggle over the Max and Os, MACs, MCs, and Os. So, well, we can turn the corner on that, and we can relate to that. As African people who were brought into the New world, didn't come, didn't arrive like the European did, but were forcibly kidnapped across what the Arabs used to call the Green Sea of darkness, 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean, and we lost our names, names, our religions, our oak ways, our morays, our norms, our culture, and we're robbed of the very power of our own being. We can relate to that. Right? And so when we look at that, and we look of not just at what was done to the Irish and the Ulster Scots, but what they did to reclaim that and the joy and the value that they put on a name as a source of identity, as a source of culture? We can relate to that as well, okay? So my name, Lasana Kazmbi, that's an African name, right? Jesse Jackson is not an African name. So I think they're great and many more, beyond that, ways to make these sort of cultural correlates between the different groups to understand, what are some of the common things that bind us together? And what are some of the common sources of human striving? So that we don't see today that the quest for unity and the struggle for unity is something that just Black people or just brown people will benefit from. We, as a human species, are 99.99 99 9% the same. I'm going to say that once more, because we got a few minutes left. We are as a human species, 99.99 99 9% the same. That little bit of infinitesimal difference is where all of our difference in diversity lives. The head shape, the shape of the nose, the shape of the cranial structure, the shape of the nasal root, the nasal aperture, the shape of the lips, the texture of the hair, the complexion of the skin, the dialect that we speak, the way we walk and talk in the word, all of our difference lives in that little bitty infinitesimal piece. But beyond that, we are 99.99 99 9% the same. That is not to say we are the same, but we are the same. All right? And so what I'm trying to do is excavate that sixth principle from the grandmaster, doctor Joyce King, a collective humanity. I hope that answered the question. Excuse me getting excited. I'm just I love your excitement. As research looks like. I love your excitement. And I have to say that as a social worker, I really, really appreciate a couple of things about what you're talking about. First of all, the way you frame this as a way to embed this or to approach infusing the curriculum into the culture. I think that's a great way to just reframe this. And that you talk about the relationship aspect and that we have shared experiences, and that is a way that we can really move into this in a different way. So very much appreciate the conversation and your excitement and them. And you did promise me earlier that you might make available to everybody afterwards, a list of resources so that people can begin to think about from their own discipline and their perspective materials that they might be able to access and use. And we hope that you'll let us know for sure when the program that you mentioned will be aired on PBS because we'd be happy to share that through our social media and other channels so that people have access to see what looks like to be amazing work. Thank you very much. As for the list, I did e mail it to the sister who I identified early as Park quarterback, Park Crown Jewel. Yeah. Miss Gori Mc Lucas. I did e mail her that list. So you have it, and it's filled with resources, not just books, but other resources, Must surf websites, must view alternative news site. It just got a lot of rich information on there. And, of course, I'm easy to find until they get rid of me. I'm at IUPUI, L Kazmbi, at IU. I haven't gone anywhere and no one's asked me to yet. So I'm pretty easy to find. Well, as a reminder, you will be hearing from the Grandwizard, Lurie McLucas, who will send out an e mail to all attendees with the materials, but also a request and an opportunity to respond to a survey to let us know how we did. And I do want to remind folks to please go ahead and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram so that you know what's happening to check us out on our website, and you can find more information there. And please join us again for these monthly seminars or these conversations. And again, next month on March 26, we'll be having a session with doctor Peggy Stockdale, who's talk about when good people harass, why they do it and why we let them. So we want to be respectful people's time today. We thank you so much for joining us, and let's thank doctor Kazembe again for his great work. Thank you. Thank you for sharing with us. You're getting lots of positive messages in the chat box, thanking you for your work. And we hope that you'll stay with us for a really long time. I don't think there's any plan to send you away. So keep doing the good work, and thank you for being part of the center for translating research into practice. Yes, sir. Thank you very much. Everyone have a wonderful week.