chair /

• Anthea Black, California College of the Arts

Amidst a powerful wave of transgender cultural production and visibility, anti-trans rhetoric and legislation has also reached threatening new levels. We and our trans students, colleagues, and families are under attack. How do we ensure that trans kids actually make it to our colleges/universities? How do we defend academic freedom to include trans scholarship and art in our curricula? How do we—as trans and queer faculty, academics, and artists—survive in this deeply hostile political climate? Session one will invite our transgender and queer academic and artistic communities at UAAC to gather for a closed roundtable. A second session, open to all, will offer practical steps and resources for building solidarity with trans people across art, craft, and design education. This session builds on “HANDBOOK: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art and Design Education” and borrows its title from an ACT UP rallying cry central to the AIDS activist movement. We resonate across decades of queer, trans and BIPOC liberation and solidarity work, to arm academics to take concrete practical ACTION in our classrooms and beyond.

keywords: trans studies, queer theory, pedagogy, activism, rage

type of session: roundtable + workshop for trans/queer people