#DSBC- Community As Rebellion

Join us to discuss " Being La Dominicana" by Rachel Afi Quinn, faciliated by Gina Goico 

Purchase this book via our bookshops on Amazon or Bookshop.org

Weaving personal narrative with political analysis, Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for students and faculty of color within academia.  Much like other women scholars of color, Lorgia García Peña has struggled against the colonizing, racializing, classist, and unequal structures that perpetuate systemic violence within universities. Through personal experiences and analytical reflections, the author invites readers—in particular Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women—to engage in liberatory practices of boycott, abolition, and radical community-building to combat the academic world’s tokenizing and exploitative structures. García Peña argues that the classroom is key to freedom-making in the university, urging teachers to consider activism and social justice as central to what she calls “teaching in freedom”: a progressive form of collective learning that prioritizes the subjugated knowledge, silenced histories, and epistemologies from the Global South and Indigenous, Black, and brown communities. By teaching in and for freedom, we not only acknowledge the harm that the university has inflicted on our persons and our ways of knowing since its inception, but also create alternative ways to be, create, live, and succeed through our work.

About the facilitator: 

Gina Goico is a multidisciplinary artist, educator and self-proclaimed necia. Through their work, Goico navigates their identity and the spaces where they exist in the Dominican Republic and the United States. Through their career they have come to create a diverse body of work that ranges from embroidery to installations, ink drawings and performance. Goico also facilitates spaces for temporary communities and dialogues around healing in the current status quo.

Goico was a Van Lier Fellow and artist in residence with Smack Mellon. They also participated in AIM fellowship at The Bronx Museum of the Arts; The Laundromat Project, Kelly Street Resident Artist, among others. They have exhibited in the US and the Dominican Republic, and continue to actively support socio-political initiatives in the island and in diaspora. Goico holds an AAS in Fine Arts and Illustration from Altos de Chavon the School of Design in the Dominican Republic and a BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons. They also hold a MA in Arts Politics from NYU and is a PhD student in Performing and Media Arts at Cornell.