Faculty Panel: Student Identity in the Social Justice Classroom–Challenges and Opportunities

by Poorvu Center: Faculty Programs and Initiatives

Training/Workshop Faculty Faculty Teaching Event Teaching

Tue, Apr 2, 2024

12:45 PM – 2 PM EDT (GMT-4)

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Across higher education, students are increasingly bringing their interests in social justice into the classroom, often rooted in their individual experiences and identities. Faculty and instructors who center social justice in their curriculum, pedagogy and research want learning to be relevant to students’ lived experiences. At the same time, commitments to social change require all of us to be open to new questions, ideas and frameworks. How can faculty honor students’ lived experiences, insights and identities while also fostering a culture of critical reflection, exchange, and transformation? What practices allow instructors to engage student experiences while also supporting their exploration of scholarship and ideas that may challenge their assumptions and experiences?

In this lunchtime faculty discussion, Poorvu Center Faculty Fellow and American Studies Professor Daniel Martinez HoSang will explore these questions with Professor of English and African American Studies, Erica Edwards; Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, Deb Vargas; and Assistant Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, Tarren Andrews. Panelists will draw from the challenges and opportunities in their classroom experiences to set the stage for participants to share their perspectives, ideas and questions. The Poorvu Center’s Teaching Development and Initiatives team is committed to hosting inclusive and accessible events that allow all participants to fully engage. Please contact us (faculty.teaching@yale.edu) if there are ways we can support accommodations or for questions about inclusion.
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Deb Vargas's profile photo

Deb Vargas

Deborah R. Vargas is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her work engages the fields of queer studies, feminist studies, Chicana/x Latina/x Studies, and American Studies with an emphasis on the cultural politics of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.  Vargas is the author of Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda, awarded Best Book in Chicana/o Studies, The Woody Guthrie Prize for Best Book in Popular Music Studies, and an honorable mention for Outstanding Book in Latino Studies. She is also co-editor with Nancy Raquel Mirabal and Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes of Keywords for Latina/o Studies.



Vargas is currently working on two manuscripts. “Toward a Sucialogy of Culture,” (under contract with Duke University Press) explores Chicana/x working-class aesthetic forms and queer gender performances deemed as “cultures of poverty” in relation to normative Latino citizenship. And in “The Lower Frequencies of Brown Soul,” Vargas assembles an archive of Black and brown music and art to explore alternate geographies, queer intimacies, and sonic ecologies.



Vargas has conducted oral histories with Chicana singers for the Smithsonian Institute’s Latino Music Oral History Program and written for National Public Radio’s “Turning the Tables” music series. Vargas has been awarded fellowships from The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, The University of California Humanities Research Institute, The Ford Foundation and The Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science. Vargas received her B.S. in Communications and B.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University of Texas, Austin and her Ph.D. in Sociology (Feminist Studies certificate) from the University of California, Santa Cruz.


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