Critical of/with/for DEI: an Introduction

Alex Pittman is the Senior Associate Director of the Center for Engaged Pedagogy at Barnard College, where he also teaches courses in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department. Alongside his work on anti-oppressive and dialogue-based pedagogies, his research and teaching interests focus on feminist and queer critiques of racial capitalism that have been carried out through performing, literary, and lens-based art forms since 1945. He has published essays in Camera Obscura, Criticism, Women & Performance, Social Text’s “Periscope,” and ASAP/J’s “Black One Shot” series. He is a member of the Social Text editorial collective.

Melissa A. Wright is the Executive Director of the Center for Engaged Pedagogy at Barnard College, where she also teaches courses in the English Department. Her work appears in Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, philosophies, The Black Scholar, and Penumbra. In addition to her educational research on near-peer mentoring and student-faculty pedagogical partnership, she studies the legal and cultural history of consent, from Reconstruction U.S. literature to the politics of refusal in contemporary film and television. She is a candidate in the Post-Graduate Certificate Program in Psychoanalysis at Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics.

Sophie Bell is Professor and Chair in St. John’s University’s Department of Core Studies. She studies rhetoric and composition, culturally sustaining pedagogies, literacy and education, and race, ethnicity, and culture. Her first-year-writing classes focus on writing’s potential to build connections across social differences. Her 2021 book, Mapping Racial Literacies: College Students Write about Race and Segregation, explores how her students’ writing contributes to and reshapes contemporary understandings of the ways that US and global citizens are thinking about race. She has published articles in Composition Forum, Journal of College Literacy and Learning, Studies in American Fiction, and Radical Teacher. She is a member of the editorial board of Radical Teacher: A Socialist, Feminist, and Anti-Racist Journal on the Theory and Practice of Teaching.