Exciting new from The Teach Out's headquarters!!!
Unit Six will wrap this 🗓 Sunday, January 29 🗓 by soaking in the powerful final chapter of Karla Cornejo Víllavícencío's work The Undocumented Americans. For those who were able to join us, it has been a punk rock, evocative, beautiful, and vulnerable (I don't have all the words) story of struggle for justice in the US, specifically from a cartographic lens, taking us from Ground Zero (literally) to New Haven and back again, never looking away from the personal tolls of xenophobia, racism, and misogyny woven into legal and social infrastructures of belonging in America.
If you weren't able to join us, do yourself a favor and pick up Víllavícencío's book and save it for when you have a chance to read it. It's powerful.
The Teach Out has been in conversation about where we go next. We are launching our hip hop open online course project (more on that here, spread the word, and please, do join us for a joyful, vibrant, and uplifting series together!).
And so we announce: UNIT SEVEN! Rolling out Sunday, 2.19.23 at our same time, same space, 5pm PST.
Our guiding question/call comes from Tricia Hershey, author of one of The Teach Out's favorite books of 2022, Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto...
Imagine a world without oppression.
Take more time here. Visualize softness.
Breathe deep.
Envision a world centered in justice.
Stay here.
For Unit Seven, we will make our best effort to embrace this call. We will do so by pairing the work of two innovative, beautiful creators, essayist Tressie McMillan Cottom and poet Ross Gay.
It goes like this:
We will meet bi-weekly. Each week we will involve each of us committing to take a moment of respite, to read a pairing of one of Cottom's essays alongside one of Gay's pieces. Soak them in, read them not on the run and preferably not on a screen. Sit, make some tea 🍵 , or drink 🥃 , or whatever you most enjoy. Allow the works to wash over you, opening up your center of imagination. Engage them fully. Then, on a Sunday when we have planned, gather with fellow Teach Out community members, and let's share space and talk about them. What avenues did these pieces offer us to think about liberation? About justice? About ourselves and our communities? What imagination space did they open up for us?
I've been asked, many many times, what ways one may "get involved" or "what we may do" as we live in the wake of so many sites, systems, and acts of injustice (as I write this, headlines of Memphis fill our media and imagination spheres). We often talk about organizing, long term committed community relation with others. We will vigilantly continue our commitments around these goals. It's time to also think about how we forge imaginations that resist what we've been limited to see, hear, & create; to explore how we think about artistic revolutions that have re-formed what it means to be human, and to demand justice.
Our schedule is as follows:
Sunday 2.19: Cottom, "Thick" from Thick with Gay, "The First Incitement" from Inciting Joy
Sunday 3.5: Cottom, "In the Name of Beauty" from Thick with Gay, "We Kin (The Garden: The Third Incitement)" from Inciting Joy
Sunday 3.19: Cottom, "Dying to Be Competent" from Thick with Gay, "Dispatch from the Ruins (School: The Eleventh Incitement)" from Inciting Joy
Sunday 4.2: Cottom, "Black is Over (Or, Special Black)" from Thick with Gay, "Went Free (Dancing: The Twelfth Incitement)" from Inciting Joy
Sunday 4.16: Cottom, "The Price of Fabulousness" from Thick with Gay, "Share Your Bucket! (Skateboarding: The Fifth Incitement) from Inciting Joy
Sunday, 4.30: Cottom, "Black Girlhood Interrupted" from Thick with Gay, "Grief Suite (Falling Apart: The Thirteenth Incitement)" from Inciting Joy
COME ONE, COME ALL!
Invite your friends, your colleagues, your community. All are welcome.