“i have the word home tattooed on my breastbone, and friends remind me why I got it. the truth of it, that home is there. but this is also about land and gentrification, colonialism that has blown and continues to blow me and my family all over the planet and puts me on someone else’s land where they did not ask me to be, race and class, banks and profit, the desire to stay in a magic queer brown city and the reality of push-out when our narrow slices of survival.  it is about all the ways as disabled and chronically ill folks, as black and brown and broke folks, we find to try and find some stable sweet place to live where we can just live.” – Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (homeplace)

There’s no place like home. Home is where the heart is. You can never go home again.

Home can be a place, a feeling, a concept. It can be comfortable or contentious, nurturing or toxic, constant or nonexistent. It can be somewhere we belong or somewhere we don’t.

As a global community, we see the connection between social justice and home during this critical time when issues of migration, nationalism, and xenophobia dominate the news cycle.  In Baltimore city, the legacy of redlining and racial inequity has created divergent realities for its citizens depending upon whether one makes their home in the “White L” or the “Black Butterfly.” As we consider what it means to be at home in our communities, our identities, and even our own bodies, we reflect on the familiar feminist slogan “the personal is political” and we’re reminded that social justice calls for us to look beyond solely what’s happening “out there.”

In honor of UMBC’s 50th Anniversary, this year’s CSJ theme of Home recognizes UMBC as a home to many of us.  As we celebrate and contemplate UMBC as a home for learning, activism, and social change, we embrace the opportunity to invest ourselves in creating meaningful change here on campus in addition to taking our newly gained insights and knowledge with us back home, wherever that may be.

It is in this spirit that the fourth annual Critical Social Justice aims to create space and learning opportunities to consider the ways we can challenge, explore, and redefine the concept of home based upon our individual and collective histories as well as our intersecting identities.

CSJ: Home keynote speaker Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

We’re excited to announce that our keynote speaker will be Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, a queer disabled femme of color writer and performance artist whose work on disability, survivorhood, and transformative justice speaks to the many complexities inherent in navigating our way home. The keynote lecture and reception will be held on Tuesday, October 25^th at 6pm in the UC Ballroom.

Critical Social Justice: Home will be held on October 24th through 28th, 2016. Follow the CSJ blog, Facebook, and Twitter for updates on scheduled events and other news. For more information about the Critical Social Justice initiative, or if you’re organizing a related event that week that might be included on the CSJ calendar, please email womens.center@umbc.edu.

• Our workshops and discussions are scheduled via the campus Google Calendar according to facilitator availability.  
• Once oriented, our presenters are given access to our box file library of low, medium and high risk diversity and social justice exercises, simulations and other materials to put together training outlines tailored to our requestors learning goals and outcomes. 
• Student Life's Mosaic Staff take workshop requests on a rolling basis throughout the year from UMBC student organizations, offices and departments. 
• In 2016-2017, we hope to offer training to undergraduate students who will be paired with our faculty/staff presenters to help support their diversity awareness, knowledge and skill development. 
• In future semesters, we envision offering workshops to the campus in the same fashion as our Safe Zone program sessions.  

Kimberly Moffitt, an associate professor of American studies, joined The Baltimore Sun’s “Roughly Speaking” podcast with Dan Rodricks on July 20 to discuss reaction surrounding recent shootings across the country.

In a lengthy segment that covered a range of issues, Moffitt described how she has been talking about the news with her children.

“I’m speaking as a mother right now by saying I really struggled with making the decision to even watch and put those visual images in my head because I knew I then had to process what this means for my own children,” she explained. “This is my mantra in my classroom as much as it is in the realm of being a parent is trying to talk to them about how human beings right now are really struggling with how to treat each other fairly and nicely in many respects…that whole sense of humanity seems at a loss for many people.”

Moffitt also responded to reaction and criticism surrounding President Obama’s remarks at the Dallas police officer’s memorial.

“He at the end of the day is still the leader of this country, and we need to hear him lead,” Moffitt said. “To offer his condolences, that’s part of it, in terms of the healing beginning, but there is also a need for our leader to lead us by saying here is what we need to set our sights on, here is what we need to be thinking about, and here is what we need to be working toward in order to move past these types of major and horrific incidents.”

Listen to the full podcast titled “Black lives, blue lives, and what we tell our kids,” on The Baltimore Sun website.

Image: Kimberly Moffitt speaks to students in her class. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11. 

This story, by Max Cole, originally appeared here.