Oberlin College and Conservatory

The Revolution Will Not Be Service-Learned

Saturday, February 15, 2014 at 4:00pm to 6:00pm

Price House, Lounge
100 Forest Street, Oberlin, OH 44074

This is a creative workshop by Janani Balasubramanian for Oberlin College students to situate critical conversations around power and privilege in their community service and service-learning (i.e., community-based learning) practices. No, the revolution will not be service-learned, but students committed to redistributing the intellectual and financial capital of their universities can support movement work. We will move intentionally away from 'charity' and 'service' as models and instead talk about strategy and struggle. We will deconstruct how our identities and privileges (university status being one of them) affect the type of service we are engaged in, and how effective we can be at the same. And we will discuss concrete, practical actions we can take to move towards solidarity work that is at once fierce and self-critical. The workshop will be rooted in storytelling, writing, improv, and Theater of the Oppressed techniques. 

Janani Balasubramanian is a South Asian literary and performance artist based in Brooklyn. Their work deals broadly with themes of empire, desire, embodiment, microflora, ancestry, apocalypse, and the Future. Janani is one-half of the spoken word duo DarkMatter and a designer at the RootSpace collective, which consults on transformative projects in the US food system. They write for Black Girl Dangerous, an online forum for queer and trans* people of color. They're currently working on their first science fiction novel, H. You can read more of Janani's work at www.queerdarkenergy.com. 

Sponsored by Third World Co-op, Third World House, the Edmonia Lewis Center, and the Student Finance Committee. 

 

Recent Activity