Meeting Facilitators: Dr. Ryuko Kubota and Ashley Moore
In the last series of meetings for the LLED Antiracist Caucuses (BIPOC Caucus, White Caucus), we began to interrogate and reimagine the construct of excellence when applied to the first two activities of the traditional framework for academic jobs: research, teaching, and service. In this meeting, we conclude our discussions (for the time being!) by considering the last activity: service.
Stimulus Texts:
Please read the following short stimulus texts (just 12 minutes in total) before our meeting on October 25th.
- Ryuko’s personal anecdote of a recent service-related experience (2 minutes (p. 3 below)
- What Is Faculty Diversity Worth to a University? by Patricia A. Matthew (6 minutes)
- White Men Must Learn to Say Yes, by Shannon Portillo (4 minutes)
Optional Stimulus Texts
- The Tax Put on Scientists of Colour, by Virginia Gewin (10 minutes); This has strategies suggested by scholars of colour for mitigating the time taxes they face.
- Balancing research and service in academia: Gender, race and laboratory tasks, by Candace Miller & Josipa Roksa (2020)
Discussion Questions
- Which experiences and ideas struck you most from the stimulus texts?
- Have you had experiences of service that have been shaped by race and other intersecting identities?
- What kinds of activities do you think come under the category of “service”?
- When you envisage typical notions of “excellence” in terms of those activities, what does it look like?
- From an explicitly antiracist perspective, how might we challenge or expand those definitions of excellence in service?