Amid the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements, Syracuse University faculty have created a forum to examine rape culture and other issues related to social justice and civic engagement.

The lecture series, called REAL Talks, was launched by assistant professors Susan Thomas, Biko Mandela Gray and Chris Eng — who arrived on campus last fall feeling like outsiders — to strengthen the SU community. The professors will lead the lunchtime discussions, which aim to be R-E-A-L — or “resist exclusion through activism and leadership.” The monthly lectures include “State Violence” in February, “Economic Injustice” in March and “Rape Culture” in April.

Even in justice-oriented spaces, the professors said, there’s hierarchy, and scholars aren’t always on the front lines. When they have been, the professors said student activists sit and listen to seasoned intellectuals without the chance to engage in a dialogue. Together, the professors are looking to shift the paradigm.

“We come here and we’re excited. We’re new faculty. We’re, you know, new faculty of color,” Thomas said. “And it’s not that the campus is unwelcoming, but we were all quick enough to recognize that there’s a problem with the way they think about difference on campus.”

The idea for the series was born after the professors felt some discord at a faculty orientation in fall 2017. Thomas and Eng noticed that Gray felt targeted at the meeting for his activism, and spoke with him afterward about the tension. This encounter set the table for the REAL Talks series.

“We started thinking the day after this meeting happened,” Gray said. “We were sitting with each other and we said, ‘Well, is there any way we can organize something?’ We were throwing ideas around and nothing quite shook out.”

Eventually, Thomas was the one to get the ball rolling.

“She spearheaded this really brilliant effort of trying to bring something — we thought was going to be small — together,” Gray said. “To have conversations about exclusions and inclusion on campus.”

Thomas broached the idea of hosting student-oriented talks at a cultural foundations of education meeting, and the response was immediate in regard to department support, she said. The reaction was just as prompt from the other SU programs she reached out to.

Among the series’ supporters are the Office of Multicultural Affairs, SU’s Cultural Foundations of Education and faculty in the English, religion and women’s and gender studies departments. The series is backed by SU’s Intergroup Dialogue Program, the SU Humanities Center and the School of Education as well.

Thomas said she was aware of social justice dialogues already taking place on SU’s campus. It was just a matter of providing additional forums for students and, as Eng added, a means to put activist groups “in conversation with one another.”

“You can just feel this need. It’s palpable,” Thomas said. “This need to have these conversations.”

REAL Talks was the product — the “confluence,” Thomas said — of the desire to bridge the gap and strengthen SU as a community. Though SU students face the same kinds of roadblocks and microaggressions, Thomas said she can only speak to what she and her colleagues experienced as faculty.

Eng said there are moments when everything in the community seems to be progressive. There’s a larger climate, he noted, that fosters these moments.

“The university is not a self-contained, isolated space,” Eng said. “It’s embedded within all of these larger, material contexts. That’s something that we want to explore.”

Thomas acknowledged that issues of inclusion and exclusion affecting SU are bigger than the university. But Thomas, who said SU is a microcosm of these issues, emphasized the importance of taking stock of where the university stands.

“Part of what we hope to do with this, by bringing folks together, is to say, ‘It’s not just about the administration,’” she said. “It’s also about: What vision do we have when talking about these issues? What vision do we have when we talk about the notion of ‘university community?”

Said Thomas: “Yes, absolutely, it’s the administration that has power. It’s the administration that gets to make these decisions. But you know what? We actually have power, too.”

State Violence

What: Biko Mandela Gray
When: Feb. 9 from 12:30-2 p.m.
Where: Room 304 in the Tolley Humanities Building

Economic Justice

What: Susan Thomas
When: March 2 from 12:30-2 p.m.
Where: Room 304 in the Tolley Humanities Building

Rape Culture

What: Chris Eng
When: April 20 from 12:30-2 p.m.
Where: Jacquet Commons in Huntington Hall

Published on February 7, 2018 at 12:08 am