Communities en Movimiento: Cultivating the Politics of Listening and Sharing
Chican@ Studies Graduate Student Association Conference, Fall 2007

Recently within Chican@ Studies, academic conferences and questions have focused on “activist scholarship” and the issue of how we transfer the knowledge of Chican@s Studies from the university to the community. After thirty years of focusing on the task of opening up the university space so that Chican@s could attend and develop and document a Chican@ epistemology that counters the dominant, Eurocentric epistemology of the Western academy, many scholars now argue that the future of Chican@ Studies must focus on how we get back “out to the community” as activists and disseminators of this epistemology.

However, this reformist construct is problematic, in that it replicates the dichotomy of academic space/community space. Our conference seeks, then, to deflate this dichotomy, by focusing on already existing practices, networks, strategies, tools, and concepts, that subvert the binary division between “university” knowledge and space, and “community” knowledge and space. This focus seeks to “connect the dots” and recognize a different set of definitions for “community,” “university,” and “knowledge,” definitions based on the fundamental awareness of a rich experience and history of radical spatial practices by Chican@s and other oppressed peoples. We recognize that these practices have always used creativity, imagination, performance, role-playing, conversation, storytelling, music, ceremony, and other art forms, to deconstruct the binary bases of dominant spaces, and to take the risks necessary to activate alternative, radical space. We also recognize that these practices function through the construction of networks of support that include multiple sites of knowledge production/exchange, and sharing of resources. This alternative space allows for connection, decolonization, re-humanization, and love, and is based on a conscious engagement of all spaces as possible sites of resistance and learning, as well as on a fundamental understanding of all space as being connected, despite dominant efforts to compartmentalize and segregate through spatial regulation.

Rather than looking for answers from within, holding more conferences, and “exploring” these topics with other academics, then, we propose that we need to be drawing from this rich history and its existing networks of epistemological production and exchange, and actively participating in it, together. We invite participants to not just academically “explore” these practices, but to activate the space of the conference through a participatory, “active learner” approach that will include workshops, art, music, performance, discussion, sharing, and listening. Workshops and other activities will include the voices and participation not only of graduate-level students and university professors, but of community college students, activists, community members, youth, artists, and others working to raise consciousness through grassroots work, critical theory, praxis, indigenismo, and action research.

Therefore, in the indigenous spirit of inclusivity, listening, and sharing, the CSUN Chican@ Studies Graduate Student Association invites participation from all persons interested in working towards a raising of consciousness based on the fundamental resistance to, and rejection of, all forms of oppression, including neo-colonialism, capitalism, hierarchy, classism, homophobia, heterosexism, and all other forms of gender and sexuality oppression, as well as general and institutionalized racism, environmental racism, ecological destruction, and the oppression of indigenous peoples.