Sheila Batacharya (University of Toronto-Mississauga)
Kelly Minerva (Utica College)
Lisa Propst (Clarkson University)
At the 2023 “Resilience, Failure, and Academic Identity” Roundtable, we participated in a candid conversation that generated inspiring ideas about “thrivance” and saying, “NO” in multiple and strategic ways. Building on this discussion, the 2024 WGS Sponsored Roundtable “Refusal, Disruption, and Persistence in Academia” focuses on strategies such as refusal, disruption, and persistence in academia from an intersectional perspective that focusses on gendered racialization.
Drawing on the work of Rebecca Subar (2021), this roundtable will engage participants about structural change in their local context by sharing strategies from diverse standpoints. This could mean sharing stories about surviving contract work, probation, tenure review, and administrative roles while coping with and negotiating the demands of everyday life. However, participants can also consider refusal, disruption, and persistence with collaboration and community building in the foreground for systemic change, big or small.
This roundtable will invite attendees to prepare in advance by reading all or some of Subar’s When to Talk and When to Fight: The Strategic Choice between Dialogue and Resistance (2021). The roundtable organizers will structure the conversation to create an interactive opportunity for dialogue – hopefully, action too!
Reference:
Subar, R. (2021). When to Talk and When to Fight: The Strategic Choice between Dialogue and Resistance. PM Press.