At the 2012 Imagining America National Conference, Marta Vega avowed that what we call communities are real, lived worlds. The conflicts and power relations inherent in the processes of owning and naming these worlds are never gone. The spaces we occupy and the language in which we are trained both support and impede our efforts to do engaged, public scholarship and work in opposition to inequitable distribution of power. A shared "inquietude," not unlike what Dr. Vega articulates, brings many of us to Imagining America (IA) and the conference.

What follows is a series of exchanges, catalyzed by Vega's presentation, among two distinct but intimately tied networks that IA has helped to connect: graduate students of IA's Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) program and members of Ashé College Unbound—a college degree program run at and through the Ashé Cultural Arts Center. These reflections are followed by notes from an IA panel—"Learning to Speak, Learning to Listen"—that bookends the conversation Vega's remarks launched. Themes include:

• What is community?

• What does "community" see?

• What is an appropriate language of community building within and connected to higher education?

• How can graduate students best reposition themselves within the academy and within Vega's discourse on community and power?

• Who is at "the table"?

Simply recognizing this shared disquietude does not substitute for action. Discomfort has been an impetus for change, collaboration, and new liberatory practices, and needs to continue to serve as an important call for both IA and the academy at large.

         —Adam Bush, the 2012–2013 PAGE Fellows, and Ashé College Unbound

[Editor's note: Not unlike the community arts university without walls that Vega calls for in her talk, College Unbound recently established a degree-granting program at Ashé Cultural Arts Center.]

Introduction by PAGE Fellows

Talking about university actions that lead to neighborhood gentrification, Dr. Vega asks, "Are you developing partnerships with and destroying communities at the same time?" We, as PAGE scholars, ask that same question of ourselves and the university environments where we study, work, and live. Are the terms of community engagement destroying our ability to acknowledge the complex, political nature of the issues in which we are engaged? As we strive to build community with each other and across multiple institutions, we search for redefinitions of what community is and can be, and what higher education can become through the organizing work of Imagining America.

Introduction by the Ashé Cultural Arts Center

We are Ashé College Unbound—a group of artists, educators, and culture bearers associated with the Ashé Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. For the past two years, we have come together in a new way and with a new, shared cause—to create and support one another toward a college degree. Through service-learning projects and volunteer opportunities, we have helped others within universities get their degrees. Now we create a new space to help one another and look to provide a new model for colleges everywhere.

Dr. Vega says that Ashé is a higher ed institution . . . because it is one thing to build an institution within a community that you reflect and it's another to document or observe the experience from the outside. Thoughts about Ashé College Unbound from the director of Ashé, Carol Bebelle, can be found below.

I. What Is Community?
What Are We Talking about When We Say That Word? How Is the Notion of Community Disrupted by What Marta Vega Refers to as "Inquietudes?"

John Armstrong: To me, a community starts out as something very real. You can feel it in the room, whether it's a small space of a few people, a whole neighborhood, or a shared identity. But a community's imagined or virtual facets play in our worlds as well. This fact of social space is why culture building, dwelling, nurturing, and meeting is so central to the work of engagement. For example, on the cultural districts tour at the Imagining America conference, we went to the Urban Bush Women. UBW blends dance and spoken word in the work of community building. Not really being a "dancer," it was an uncomfortable space for me to be in, but that's why I chose it. I loved that they approached the question of how you define community by intentionally having communities define themselves. The practice admittedly doesn't lend itself to a neat and tidy definition, but it's important that community is not only defined from the outside.

Shan Mukhktar: Dr. Vega said that communities aren't uniform . . . aren't homogeneous like milk, but varied, like threads in a tapestry. What are those threads? How do we see them both as separate from and a part of the whole? For political purposes, for survival sometimes, the definitions of community that get constructed within a group can be exclusive and not expressive of the diversities within that group.

La Tanya Autry: I think that's what Vega was getting at: people aren't specifying what they mean when they talk about community. But even when you specify, like you said, there's still a lot of contested meaning in those groupings. When we talk about "community," we should express that it's a very multilayered, highly structured concept. . . . People do share cultural beliefs and practices—so there is such a thing. But because it's so textured, it's difficult to talk about in a singular way. A lot of people avoid the hard work and instead just use "community" as a blanket term.

Meghan Tierney: This is true across time and space. We are at any given moment the things by which the tapestry is held together, or the things that cause it to fall apart.

John: Then how do these words become detached from meaning? Sadly, the propensity to disregard or disallow feelings as real sites of inquiry and action is compounded by most interpretations of what constitutes productive, academic labor. Gramsci said, "The intellectual's error consists in believing that one can know without understanding and even more without feeling and being impassioned." Similarly, Vega said that when these inquietudes remain unaddressed the relationships of engagement, "the feeling of being in a neighborhood, the feeling of being part of a network is lost."

Meghan: The issue becomes maintaining the meaning behind the word, while also leaving its definition open to many things at once; context and a great deal of fluidity is key. While wanting "community" to mean something, we must still avoid essentializing it to mean only one thing.

Kaelyn Caldwell: This leads to the question, is community defined by place? Does it have to do with social ties? What leads to membership? Community can be constituted in a way that's both inclusive and exclusive.

Shan: That is why remembering and expressing community histories in place, time, and feeling is so important. Otherwise, community is co-opted and redefined into something else . . . apolitical, and without tension. The space of "community" shrinks to the point that it seems as if the social and political histories of this country took place in very discrete places with neat borders and few complexities. It distorts the richness of these 'lived' and loved spaces.

La Tanya: Yes! And we need to be more precise in how we employ "community" so that we acknowledge its textural and conflicted nature and yet recognize that people can and do share collective remembrances. The process of identifying engages a power dynamic.

Janeane Anderson: Dual or multiple memberships in communities can create uneasiness or discomfort. For me, the insider/outsider dilemma is a real and constant inquietude. I struggle with voyeurism of the poor that often occurs, without intentional malice, in academia. As a black woman, I am sensitive to how black communities are portrayed. . . . I wrestle with my own attempts at trying to educate and empower the black women and girls I work with in South Los Angeles, including the after-school program I co-founded with Alex Agloro, Female Youth for Social Change, working to improve their health outcomes while being respectful of their communities and knowledge banks. I frequently remind myself that, although traditional metrics identify them as disadvantaged, disenfranchised, and at risk, they often don't view themselves that way.

Jen Shook: This messiness can also be productive. Jodi Byrd posits "cacophony" (from the Choctaw word "haksuba") as a critical intervention, suggesting that the chaos of difference can serve as a generative creative force in a world of many complicated, sometimes competing, often overlapping, nuanced perspectives. The term "community" has become oversimplified and overused. Yet it still suggests something humans crave. And, yes, an institution of higher education is—like an individual—part of many communities, and contains many communities.

Priscilla Leiva: Still, as Vega said, that fluffy feeling you get when you invoke community serves to mask a number of things, including unequal power relationships between institutions and people, the romanticizing and fetishizing of the marginal, the co-optation of social movements by the university. It has become normalized to be understood as marginal. Invoking the word "community" without precise definitions and understandings of what you are talking about makes one complicit in these processes.

Daniel Tucker: Is the implication that community arts and the organizations that we call community partners were marginal and continue to be? The project of redistribution to the margins has not occurred despite greater representation of underrepresented groups within the academy. Diversity does not mean inclusion.

 

II. What Does "Community" See? Things That Are Obvious to Those Who Can See and Things That Are Not So Obvious

Olayeela Daste: It is comforting to know that Yemanya, the Yoruba aspect of the Creator called the Divine Mother, exists in and rules the head (personality) of many people. Yemanya brings comfort. She brings protection. Through others, she makes sure there is enough.

Why is this comforting, you may ask? It is comforting because of Yemanya's devotion to her children. Who are her children? We are all her children, all people on the earth. You might say, so what! And I would say that Yemaya is reflective and really cares for and is devoted to her children. So she is not going to curse you out; but she will tell you about yourself.

So Dr. Vega reminds me of Yemanya. Just like Carol Bebelle reminds me of Yemanya. They are women who care about and are devoted to their people. Dr. Marta reminds me of Auset, the Yemanya equivalent from Ancient Khamit, who travels the earth gathering and remembering the pieces of her husband Ausar's physical body that was cut up into 14 pieces and scattered around the earth. It is said that a shrine grew and rose from the earth every place his body landed. The various religions were founded in those places.

For people of color, so many physical pieces must be gathered and put together to reawaken us to who we are and what our place and purpose are in the world. Like Auset, people of color have and will give birth to information, inventions, and solutions.

There are tricksters in this world. The trick revealed in this speech is that institutions of higher education imagine themselves partnering with community, initiating community engagement, but they most often position themselves as separate and apart from those they are seeking to impact. Centuries of racism and oppression, stereotyping and marginalizing, can happen again and again if all parties in a potential partnership are not living the oneness and connectedness that is a part of what you hope to create. When you see yourself as one with someone, your approach (what you say, do, think, give, and take) will lead to more reflection and evaluation. When I speak of unity and oneness, I do not mean the type that erases me so that I look, act, and speak like you. I am talking about a oneness where we all look like ourselves and truly and consistently value the diversity.

Briceshanay Gresham: Marta Vega's talk of inquietudes has helped me to see my dreams. I dream of a center with no walls, so that the students will have an impact on the community. I attended a university that was removed from the surrounding culture. I thought I was in another city when I was in school. It was isolated, set apart, with its own culture, different from the city that it was in. This made the school boring, and it taught the students that they can use the city and the community to gain wealth and knowledge but not be a part of the community. I think that this is why we have so many students who graduate and move away from the city's rich culture. Attending this school made me feel displaced even when I was in my own city. It was the university's culture of isolation that made me feel disconnected and caused the city to remain stagnate.

I was at another university that had a good community within the school because it was connected to the culture of the city around it. However, it was not diverse. So I felt a surface level of community, but I needed a deeper, richer experience with the community such as the city culture. I think if the universities would help the students to see that we need to use our education inside the community to help in any way needed, New Orleans would grow into a great city that respects the members of the community.  This type of higher education helps, heals, and restores all that is needed to move through the world and effect change.

Olayeela: Community-based organizations, like Ashé CAC and Auset, are gathering those pieces, gratefully praying, learning, and growing at each shrine. Other institutions are distant, opinionated, and arrogant with what they have and do not value or seek to learn from the ones they seek to impact. They have a history, the money, and the information so they are not looking to learn from and discover the genius within anyone. They are going to community but not becoming one with community. Dr. Marta is asking these institutions to be led by community organizations like Ashé and MoCa so even the most basic exchange will contain a renewed language and new thinking in their development.

Why, if universities are partnering with communities of color, do they not work to include our contributions and genius in curricula? Dr. Marta says our contributions to the very building of this nation are critical. Why are our threads not a part of the national tapestry?

Olorun Funmi: The distinguished professor (Dr. Vega!) spoke highly of Ashé Cultural Arts Center, calling it an institution of higher education. She was correct when she noted that people who come into Ashé are exposed to a very high level of education. I ask the same as she does: why is this institution's intelligence not valued in the same way that a university's is? Institutions like Ashé, she says, are still seen as "the other." I would ask, "Why don't we stop seeking approval?'"

Dr. Vega addressed the higher education community when she said that some universities that practice community engagement are gentrifying those very localities and killing community in the process. "Mama Olayeela" said that this is true in her neighborhood, where a university has bought up much of the land without concern for the locals. I have seen this school practice community engagement. I agree with Dr. Vega when she proposed a focus on how we as academicians should have a different conversation that brings us all to the table. The growing number of "minority" and youth faces will force the elite to at least listen to our stories. Maybe then they will see a need to "help us help ourselves." This will promote a more inclusive and democratic America. Dr. Vega raised an interesting question: "Why can't higher ed institutions invest in the places they are sending young people and bring the young people from those communities on scholarship to the university?" Dr. Vega asked how is it that 50 years after the civil rights movement began, the institutions that came out of it are hurting and not valued. My answer is that we don't invest in us.

"Hollywood" Delahouysse: Unbound, to be liberated, uninhibited, uncontrolled, emancipated. Unbound, to be without limits, open, unconventional, free. Seldom in life do we allow our passions to become our practice. Ashé and its college have afforded me the opportunity to be both successful and significant; to push both my art and passion to the forefront and bring about a change, a transformation, a revolution. The idea of returning to school, however, brought about feelings of apprehension and intimidation after so many years of teaching and program developing; it seemed quite daunting.

Damia Khanboubi: Our work and our focus at Ashé College Unbound lie in the betterment of OUR community, the Central City neighborhood of New Orleans. Many of our readings, assignments, and subjects are tied into community issues.

It's very interesting to be forced to think about the way people use the word "community." As Marta Vega states, it is most often used to describe marginal groups, a "them." Most Ashé College Unbound students work and/or live in Central City. We don't study the community through video lens or tours or textbooks; we are the community.

As College Unbound, on-the-ground experience is the core mode of expanding our knowledge (with secondary researching and the like being important supplements). Higher education institutions like ours produce scholars well equipped with the tools to effect social change—not only in a confined circle that we call "our community." We will realize that community is a set of concentric circles that reach outward from a neighborhood or special-interest group to the entire world population, our global family.

III. What Is an Appropriate Language of Community Building within and Connected to Higher Education? What Do Terms Like "Community Building, Outreach, Engagement, and Partnership" Invoke? In Critiquing and Enriching the Definitions of "Community," How Does Vega Also Challenge Us to Contend with It Both as a Mission and a Practice?

Kaelyn: Ivan Illich's To Hell with Good Intentions, George Sanchez's Crossing Figueroa Street, and now Vega's speech, all reinforce the critical need for us to form clear commitments to doing community engagement in a more ethical fashion, to develop "reciprocal" processes with the "community." Vega, Illich, and Sanchez agree on the need to change the social and material realities that demarcate university spaces as exclusive and highly regulated territories that unilaterally determine who is and is not worthy of valuation, who does and does not exemplify allowable forms of "difference" within the academy, and who can and cannot claim and accrue benefits from a legitimate "higher education."

Durell Callier: Taking this thought further, we have to consider even how an ethics of care and love shape our relationships of accountability within our own institutional practices, as well as within the partnerships created. I am cautious in my own teaching practice of sending students into the community to utilize art as a medium to foster dialogue about an issue of social justice. Who invited them? What happens when they leave? How are they qualified? I am also cautious about credentialing individuals to do this sort of work. What does it mean that community work could essentially become another market, and although this might be better than not receiving proper recognition, it is universities that are invested in credentials—communities have other means of validating expertise that also should be valued.

Eleanor Mahoney: Universities engage with communities in many ways that we often don't think about. Some of these are through the Office of Community Engagement or Outreach. But some universities have medical schools and hospitals. We need to be aware of these programs as well, that may help or hurt the lives of community members. Just saying "higher education engagement" flattens campus–community interactions. "Community engagement" often occurs in venues far afield from a particular office in charge.

Cecilia Orphan: In that same vein, it's important to remember the large network of universities within higher education that do not struggle with the same issues as elite research universities. I have worked with state comprehensives (teachers colleges, minority-serving institutions, Hispanic-serving institutions, historically black colleges and universities, etc.) that do not see boundaries between themselves and their communities. They view themselves as being enmeshed with community life. The vast majority of faculty, students, and staff grew up within 100 miles of their campuses and will live their entire lives in those communities.

Tony Innouvong: One theme that stood out to me in Vega's remarks was valuing different forms of intelligence as well as different institutions of "higher" education. That is, the mission of elevating human knowledge and building capacity for leadership are not exclusive to universities. There are other modes and systems of education that promote learning and the rise of the community.

Janeane: And that see the skills and assets a partner (or an entire community) brings to the table, not just the gaps.

Alex Agloro: I've been co-designing a digital media curriculum with students and staff at Los Angeles Communities Advocating for Unity Social Justice and Action (LA CAUSA) in East Los Angeles. We've called the class Social Justice Media Tools. In the first year, after each media lesson, the students critiqued the content and the usefulness of the media tool in a class wiki. For example, the students created PowerPoint presentations to show their research on their dream colleges and used Excel to chart out the cost of a four-year college. In the wiki, students noted that learning how to use Excel was hard, but they could see its value especially when looking for a job. The final project was collectively redesigning the syllabus to incorporate the feedback the students had written from the wiki. In the second year, we taught the class to a new group of students using the revised syllabus and tried to get students from the previous year to come in and co-teach their favorite lessons. It was important for the students to feel like they had a stake in their learning process, and it was important to me for the classroom to embrace a democratic process where opinions are heard and implemented into action.

John: A project I work in called Food Dignity is really explicit about being community led—highlighting those skills and assets Janeane mentions. That's a hard shift for many academics involved in the project. Nearly two years into the project, we are getting to a space where we can create collective possibilities to support engaging work. Trust building takes a long time, and inequities in resources exacerbate the difficulty. But we've committed to naming and addressing those inequities on a daily basis, and as we follow through on that commitment, the feeling and energy of trust, our collective interests in nurturing more just and sustainable food systems, is starting to move forward.

Adam Bush: This need for a third space also drove the creation of College Unbound—an attempt to create collaborative and reciprocal spaces of higher education that help to build capacity and honor knowledge-making within organizations like Ashé. It is long past the time Ernest Lynton called for us to "rethink our conception of the university as a detached and isolated institution."

Daniel: Then the movement Vega calls for may have better luck plotting, planning, and starting new institutions in the shell of the old than trying to get a seat at the table in a room while its walls are falling down.

IV. How Can Graduate Students Best Reposition Themselves within The Academy and within Vega's Discourse on Community and Power?
 What Does It Mean to Be Part of Imagining America's Publicly Active Graduate Education Program in this Context? How Are Graduate Students Positioned within the Academy and within Vega's Discourse on Community and Power? From What Position Do They Contend with the Inquietudes of "Partnership"?

La Tanya: What community do we, as graduate students, belong to? Someone at the conference asked me what community I belong to, because I've moved around so much. When he saw that it was hard for me to answer, he laughed, "Oh, you don't have a community." It was somewhat unsettling, but I thought, well, geographically that's kind of true. However, in other ways, it's not.

Shan: As graduate students, we are positioned within institutions that by Vega's and our own determinations must change in critical, substantive ways. So, how do we construct counternarratives and counterstructures for collaboration and redistribution when we're socially, economically, and academically rooted within the space of the university?

Alex: I think about George Sanchez's Crossing Figueroa Street, in which he discusses who's in the university. Especially for professors and graduate students of color, what does it means to be in the university? Does the university expect us to sever our ties to the community that we're from in order to establish legitimacy? He also brings up the notion of false generosity, that these acts of "service to a community" are maintaining the status quo. That as a university, we're not really empowering people to stand on their own two feet, because we would render ourselves obsolete. That's something to think about as we're talking about community and what our role is as people within the university, within the academy, and in the outside world.

John: I feel like I'm in a family, and my parents are fighting all the time. Members of the community that I work with will position university researchers in a negative light. But because I'm still a student, I'm not viewed in the same way. I'm less threatening. Similarly, when I'm at the university, people will "other" this community and homogenize it in really nonproductive ways. So being a graduate student has saddled me with—or given me as a gift—the ability to be a shuttle diplomat. Does anybody else ever get the sense that they're caught in the middle?

La Tanya: Yeah, totally. Sometimes people in community contexts are reluctant to speak with me. Stressing my student status . . . my in between position, has helped me to develop trust. Sometimes, I'm troubled by getting access to a community in this way.

Alex: An inquietude as a thing that make you uneasy, for me has been graduate school . . . the insider/outsider relationships I have with "communities": the academy, the communities I came from, the communities where I work, and the jobs that graduate school is supposed to groom me to accept. It is difficult, especially because the tenure rate for women of color is so low. It makes me wonder if I'm paying my intellectual capital into a system that will never let me into its fold. I see Vega's words as a call-to-action to our generation of young scholars to question the boundaries where we currently see ourselves, with hopes that instead of abandoning the academy we can transform it.

John: We must not allow these inquietudes, Vega's feelings, my feelings, or your feelings to be unacknowledged or hidden from public discussion or swept under the rug of our academic practice.

LaTanya: We can help propel this movement by identifying institutions in our local areas that may be interested in collaborating with us and helping us develop more equitable partnerships. In our own work, we can assert that communities exist everywhere, as do the knowledge and creativities we need to build sustainable movements.

Adam: I think about what Ruth Wilson Gilmore said in her presidential address to the American Studies Association in San Antonio in 2009: "Organize. Infiltrate what already exists and innovate what doesn't." We need to think creatively about how to form new spaces of collaboration and creation.

Too often, these possibilities get silo-ed or marginalized. Universities and their departments were set up that way. It's what Tim Eatman, Susan Sturm, John Saltmarsh, and I were writing against when we published the Catalyst paper on "full participation"; an ethos for a higher education where everyone regardless of identity or position (student, staff, neighbor, or faculty) would have the opportunity to reap benefits, fully contribute, and be able to learn in, and in relationship to, higher education. But this requires ruptures in these institutions on multiple levels at once—as Sturm wrote, it's about redrafting the "architecture of inclusion" and ensuring the university is a space for relationship building and a deep understanding of humanity and citizenship.

"There is a better way, yes?" the graduate student e-mailer asks in the face of what he sees as a scarcity of humanity—and it's that craving for a better way and for rupture that drove the creation of Imagining America's PAGE Fellows a decade ago and continues to push the network's actions, reflections, and programming.

The linking of these spaces—student networks, community organizations, artists and scholars in public life, and higher education institutions—is both urgent and intimate. The front lines of Gilmore's talk and the fight for full participation are parts of a long history of struggle, equity, and social change within and outside of the academy. The call for a space of humanity that the anonymous graduate student wrote of in the e-mail above is also tied deeply to the comments of Carol Bebelle, the founder of Ashé, to College Unbound students on the purpose behind the creation of the Ashé Cultural Arts Center: "I created Ashé so that I would have the right to exist."

V. Who is at the table?
Excerpts from the "Learning to Speak, Learning to Listen" Panel

Carol Bebelle: I start with this notion of, "Who's at the table when decisions get made about using the community in really any way?" To be able to support the learning that is going on, the thing that I come back to is that the university, as it understands the benefit that it can derive from working with community, will be in a position of providing support. As hard as we've tried, we've not been able to sit at the table as real partners. I've said often when you're not at the table you have to be concerned about whether you're on the menu, and I think that often we are on the menu. But enough of us have learned better and have become strong in our ideas and notions about what ought to happen. Enough of us have the capacity to redesign ways of partnering, where there's an equity in both the idea of giving and taking. The benefiting, the research, resource generating: all of that should be shared. We have relationships that are evolving but not enough of them. Often professors who have passion for that work will wind up paying for it in terms of what they're able to do on the campus if they continue in act counter to the culture of a given university. At Ashé we've used the opportunities before Katrina to be a part of a process that connects us with universities, and we have done what we could along with others to require that we be in the conversation.

Graduate Student from Audience: So talking about your metaphor of sitting at the table, and if you're not you're most probably what's being served on the menu. I'm invited to the table a lot as a graduate student; why is that? I don't scare people . . . not yet.

Bebelle: Working on it.

Graduate Student from Audience: Getting there. I was at a table just yesterday where they were talking about setting the table. I was with the dean of students, the director from the Center for Community Engaged Learning, and the "subject matter expert." And a chief diversity officer. But all of us were white, with PhD's or working on them. They started setting the table for whom? Where do we find diversity and engagement and where do those things intersect? It becomes a question in my mind, and I know you've had this, too: do I just disown this institution and forget about it? Or is there something to be gained through this? Are you about to have a meal or are you about to be eaten?

Graduate Student from Audience #2: For those of us who get invited to the table, what's our responsibility?

Bebelle: The intent is not to have everyone who is like-minded put themselves in a sacrificial place. We've got to use our ability to be at tables, to make things happen. Some of it is education, some is advocacy, and some is being in people's faces. Some is giving people alternative paths when they don't know how else to be and where else to go.

Vega: But they don't want to be different. We're in 2012, how are you having a conversation on diversity and don't have diversity at the table?

Bebelle: Absolutely.

Vega: 'Cause you don't want to.

Bebelle: Absolutely.

Vega: You have to understand that it's not ignorance. I'm at the point that in 2012 if you don't know that there are blacks and Latinos and Asians and Native Americans in this country then, you know…

Bebelle: Yeah, and so the question could just simply be making it clear that, if there's a meal sponsored by the diversity office, then we might not look too good with all of us looking the same sitting around the table, which is as obvious as the nose on your face kind of commentary. But making it obvious to those who don't yet see might essentially move people to a different mind-set than the one they were in. Then you can set new places around the table or make another reservation. So again for me, Marta mentioned our name "Ashé" comes from the Yoruba and means the ability to make things happen. Half of what's important is to walk away with something better than you walked to the table with, you know?

 

Works Cited

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2011. "What Is to Be Done?" American Quarterly 63 (2): 245–65.

Illich, Ivan. 2012. "To Hell with Good Intentions." In Collaborative Futures: Critical Reflections on Publicly Active Graduate Education, edited by Amanda Gilvin, Georgia M. Roberts, and Craig Martin, 75–82. Syracuse, NY: Graduate School Press of Syracuse University.

Kester, Grant H. 2004. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley, CA: University of California, 163.

Kwon, Miwon. 2002. One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 145.

Lynton, Ernest. 1983. "A Crisis of Purpose Reexamining the Role of the University Change." Magazine of Higher Learning 15 (7): 18–53.

Sánchez, George J. 2012. "Crossing Figueroa: The Tangled Web of Diversity and Democracy". In Collaborative Futures: Critical Reflections on Publicly Active Graduate Education, edited by Amanda Gilvin, Georgia M. Roberts, and Craig Martin, 211–28. Syracuse, NY: Graduate School Press of Syracuse University.

Sturm, Susan, Tim Eatman, John Saltmarsh, and Adam Bush. 2011. "Full Participation: Building the Architecture for Diversity and Public Engagement in Higher Education." White paper, Columbia University Law School, Center for Institutional and Social Change.

Reflections on Inquietudes Participants:

PAGE (Publicly Active Graduate Education) Fellows, Leaders, and Allies:
John Armstrong, Shan Mukhtar, LaTanya Autry, Alex Agloro, Alex Olson, Meghan Tierney, Kaelyn Caldwell, Janeane Anderson, Jen Shook, Priscilla Leiva, Eleanor Mahoney, Cecilia Orphan, Nadia deLeon, Johanna Taylor, Kinh Vu, Tony Innovong, Nick Sousanis, Adam Bush, Wendy Nastasi, Emily Squires, Daniel Tucker, Kaelyn Caldwell, Durrell Callier, Hiba Haroon

Ashé College Unbound
Stephanie McKee, Damia Khanboubi, Baderinwa Rolland, "Hollywood" Delahoussye, Olorun Funmi, Clark Richardson, Menhati Singleton, Olayeela Daste, Teja Carey, Peaches Caldwell, Briceshanay Gresham, Adam Bush, and Carol Bebelle, Executive Director of the Ashé Cultural Arts Center.

Learning to Speak, Learning to Listen Panel
Organized by Cheryl Ajirotutu, Marta Vega, and Carol Bebelle