The Women of Color Initiatives (WOCI) is an effort to organize events for women
of color and allies on the MSU campus. In
doing so WOCI aims to create spaces for students to be in conversation with each other and engage with women of color faculty, guest speakers, staff, and community members. The purpose of the Women of Color Initiatives is to create a space for a collective
of women of color to focus on pressing sociopolitical issues and critical research in higher education, and to present women of color with an opportunity
to address intersectional issues across race, class, sex, and gender issues facing Indigenous/Native American/Alaskan Native, Black/African American, Mexican/Chicana, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Puerto Rican/Latinx Caribbean women.
This proposed speaker series is the first of its kind in the Midwest (currently, Women of Color Initiatives exist at UC Berkeley and at Rutgers University in the form of a national conference and a university symposium, respectively).
Since spring 2016, the WOCI speaker series has broughtone nationally recognized woman of color academic, creative, and/or political speaker to the MSU campus each semester. To-date,the speaker series has included: a meeting with MSU women of color faculty (particularly targeting junior and mid-career faculty), a graduate student lunch, a creative workshop with undergrads, and a lecture and reception open to the public. In 2018 we hosteda month-long residency which culminated in a series of PSA style photographs of MSU and East Lansing/Lansing community members. Public lectures are recorded in order to create a digital archive and to provide access to an even larger audience. In organizingseveral segments during each visit we have created events that target multiple populations at MSU and that are open to the larger East Lansing/Lansing community.
The Women of Color Initiatives speaker series aims to offer cross-disciplinaryand open spaces for discussion and dialogue that will address some of the issues of representation, graduation, and retention at the undergraduate and graduate level, as well as for junior faculty at MSU. By bringing speakers, workshop leaders, and community members we hope to strengthen the community of women and allies working toward social and racial justice and equity and in doing so, make MSU a Midwest hub for women of color intellectuals, artists, activists, and thinkers.
In Spring 2016, WOCI hosted its inaugural speaker, Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs. For this first event we organized a reception with womenof color faculty, a graduate student lunch, and public lecture which were well attended and received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Building on the success of this event we hosted Dr. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in Fall 2016. A Michi Saagig Nishaabeg scholar, writer, and artist, Simpson is known for being one of the foremost indigenous scholar/activistof her generation. Her visit included a creative writing workshop, a public lecture, and post-lecture reception. For this event we partnered with various units on campus including the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program, the Timnick Chair in theHumanities, the Center for Gender in Global Context, and the department of English. We aimed to include Indigenous community members from the greater Lansing area. Leanne’s lecture was opened with a song by an Anishinaabe community member, Charlene Fox, andwas catered by the Native American Arts and Crafts Council. Simpson’s lecture was well attended and her creative writing workshop was filled to capacity with students, faculty, and staff seated on the floor. Both events were recorded and we began the processof cataloging these events at the MSU Library WOCI archive. In Spring 2017,we hosted Ana Castillo, one of the most important living writers in the Chicanx literary tradition. Her visit to MSU included a craft talk, a public lecture and book signing, a breakfast reception open to all MSU faculty, a lunch for undergraduate and graduatewomen, and a dinner with junior and mid-career faculty. For Castillo’s visit we secured additional funding from the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, the Chicano/Latino Studies Program, the GenCen, the department of English, and the MSU Libraries. These strategicco-sponsorships enabled us to display the viability and cross-campus interest in WOCI. During the summer of 2017 professors Figueroa and Paris reached out to faculty stakeholders and invited Drs. Tamara Butler (ENG/AAAS), Maribel Santiago (ED), Delia Fernandez(HIST), Estrella Torrez (RCAH) and Leslie Gonzales (ED), onto the organizing committee of WOCI with Torrez and Figueroa as initial co-chairs.
In Fall 2017 we hosted the book launch of one of the WOCI founders, Rae Paris, who published her first book TheForgetting Tree. The event included a public reading and book signing and was held at the MSU library which solidified ourpartnership with MSU librarians and staff. The 2017-2018 year marked the first time that we had graduate/undergraduate assistants help with the organizing of the project. In the fall Breanna Escamilla and Rebecca Fussell helped with the digitizing, cataloging,and website building for WOCI. They also helped to scaffold the WOCI residency. In Spring 2018 we hosted our first artist-in-residence: Shani Peters. A multidisciplinary artist based in NYC, Shani Peters, held a month-long residency atMSU where she developed her project, “Sustain: A Demonstration / Modeling Survival and Self Care Tactics as Public Service.” Shani invited MSU and the greater communities of East Lansing and Lansing to participate in conversations and unpack “individual relationships related to anti-Black, anti-Islamic, anti-immigrant, and anti-LGBTQ policies, rhetoric, and state sanctioned violence against these populations.” In addition to class visits and open studio hours Shani had an opening reception, a dinner with women of colorfaculty, collaborated with the AAHD visiting artists (Karen Hampton/Alejandro Acierto), and hosted an arts-based afterschool program at Everett High School in Lansing. Shani’s visit opened up the opportunity for WOCI to partner with Quinn Jiles, a Lansing basedartist and organizer who spearheads the Lansing Youth Video Program. Her free video enrichment program targets teen’s age 14-20 from Lansing and its surrounding communities. The program was held two days a week for eight weeks beginning in February 2018, coincidedwith the WOCI residency. Participants were immersed in media literacy and video artistry, and learned the foundations of film production from conception to the presentation of a completed project. We want to continue with this partnership in the upcoming year.In supporting this critical endeavor we establish ties with women of color organizers and artists in the broader community while also connecting our students as mentors and partners in these youth projects.
The support of the College of Arts & Letters has been crucialin the continued success of WOCI. The primary organizers of WOCI are junior and women of color faculty who are invested in creating welcoming, equitable, and critical spaces on campus for women of color and their allies.