GOOD KID, M.A.A.D. Research: Culturally Sustaining Research and Decentering the White Gaze with Kendrick Lamar

Thursday, Oct. 14 | 3:30-4:30 p.m. | 118 Graves Hall and Zoom

The College of Education Office of Diversity Initiatives and Faculty Development presents this talk featuring Dr. Casey Wong, UCLA. One of the central principles of culturally sustaining pedagogy is the need to decenter the white gaze. H. Samy Alim and Django Paris have invoked the “white gaze” in the tradition of Toni Morrison. They have invoked the white gaze to theorize how systemic processes of white supremacy enact influence by forcefully projecting European-rooted epistemologies and ontologies as the way we should “see” and “be” in the world. We will interrogate the current regime of knowledge production and investigate what it means to engage in education research outside of the politics normalized within guides like AERA’s Signifying on how rapper Kendrick Lamar accomplishes this epistemic labor in his hip-hop classic “good kid, m.A.A.d city,” we will critically center and sustain hip-hop approaches to gathering, assessing, and sharing knowledge outside of the white gaze, and come out with understandings of how our epistemologies, ontologies, and axiologies are bound to systemic processes of injustice. Registration is required to join the talk via Zoom. The Zoom link will be sent to registrants on Monday, Oct. 11.