As an educator in a public university in California, I understand the importance of taking an active role in antiracist pedagogy. I value and have actively participated in rethinking institutional policies to include instrumental strategies of Diversity Equity and Inclusion in everything from the tenure review process to metrics for hiring new faculty, and seeking opportunities to support research activities that foster inclusive approaches to innovation, sharing knowledge, and meaning-making.

The San Jose State University community where I currently teach, represents a diverse suite of perspectives as both a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) and Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI) as recognized by the United States Department of Education. It is important to me that the content of my courses, work as Digital Media Art Program Coordinator, Graduate Coordinator,  and now as Associate Chair for the Department of Art & Art History reflect both the diversity of perspectives and experiences that students bring to the classroom and the pluralistic global society in a broader context. I show work that can be challenging and it is important to me to cultivate safe spaces for learning through content warnings and guided discussion of sensitive topics so that the students feel comfortable to share their unique perspectives and constructively challenge one another in ways that expand their skill sets and perceptions.  

As a female-identifying artist who frequently works with tools traditionally associated with STEM fields, I understand the power of seeing yourself represented in leadership positions within disciplines that you might have historically been excluded from. I also understand that it is equally important to underscore that ambassadors of knowledge and skills will have a multitude of pedagogical methods and approaches that might differ from student's expectations. In my classroom, I emphasize that there are many knowledge-making methods that don’t look like those traditionally modeled in US educational systems. I also bring these topics to the fore in department and committee meetings and acknowledge that I need to constantly check-in on my own biases when it comes to my perceptions of academic rigor that rely on inherited models of professorial affect.

In my role as the Digital Media Art Area Coordinator, I organized a series of workshops to facilitate self-analysis of the ways we practice DEI within Digital Media Art, assembled faculty-facing reading materials, created institutional surveys, put together student-facing resources, initiated a collaborative document for shared resources & reflection, and worked with my colleagues in the department to draft a Statement of Support for Anti-Racist Pedagogy as part of the #scholarstrike movement in Fall 2020.

The courses I develop and teach celebrate the many ways my students’ diverse experiences contribute to and expand the learning environment. This can be as simple as naming historically underappreciated contributions in conversations and critiques with the class, but also looks like meeting students where they are and not making assumptions about what they ‘should know’ when they enter the classroom. If there is a skill, historical reference, or critical theory that I think is important to the course, I find ways to bring it into the classroom environment. For some students this is a useful refresher, for others, the additional resources I provide may mean first-time exposure. Providing access to additional resources in my syllabi and online course management systems to help establish a baseline for skills and critical thinking helps contribute to equity in the classroom, increases student confidence and participation, and provides better learning outcomes for my classes.

It is also important to me to provide multiple pathways to success in my classes. Part of fostering inclusive classroom environments means ensuring that I honor a diversity of communication styles. For example in my critiques I provide both 1) a matrix for written feedback as well as 2) frameworks to support oral dialogue such as silent reflection periods responding to a specific prompt followed by round-the-room-quick-shares from all students. These approaches ensure the voices of students who don’t feel as comfortable speaking in large group settings are heard. After major project critiques, I ask the students to reflect on the feedback they received and present points that were significant to them back to the class. It’s clear in these presentations that the written feedback from the quieter students has as much of an impact on the critical review process as the verbal feedback components. This iterative review process ensures that we recoup voices that may be lost otherwise, while at the same time bolstering confidence of quieter students when they see that their feedback is positively affecting the learning process of their peers.

Outside of the classroom, it is equally important to me to ensure that the conversations are as diverse and interdisciplinary as inside my classes. The symposia I organize, panels I sit on, exhibitions I participate in, and the research I engage in are all designed to reveal hidden mechanisms operating below the surface to tip systems in one direction or another. One of the recent panels I organized, The Future of Democracies, focused on the ways bias is addressed from multiple disciplines: and included an experimental philosopher, artist, and writer who is working on an AI to replace congress, a professor in Sociology and Interdisciplinary Studies whose research focuses on skin tone discrimination among Asian Americans, and a professor in the Department of Philosophy who specializes in biomedical ethics, philosophy of medicine and philosophy of race. We recorded the conversation and will continue to document our discussions about ways to integrate methodologies from our various disciplines into systems thinking and design.  

The Future Democracies panel is part of a series of programming supporting the Deep Humanities and Arts initiative for which I am a founding faculty advisor. Deep Humanities and Arts draws on deep structures of history, myth, and culture, networks of language, communication, and interpretation, patterns of affect, belief and bias, representations of cognition and consciousness, theories of ethics, art and aesthetics to develop multilevel, interdisciplinary, cross-cultural models of complex problems in order to reach higher levels of critical thinking, experiencing, understanding, and solving. At the most general level, Deep Humanities seeks to reconceptualize culture itself as a form of (artificial) intelligence that enhances and extends human capabilities. At its most profound, Deep Humanities aims to bring our cumulative accumulated knowledge(s) about the practice of being human to engage the urgent issues of our times.

During the pandemic, several of my exhibitions were canceled. I, like many others at the time, began rethinking my relationship to my studio practice and the privileges I have been afforded. Rather than focusing on my own voice, I wanted to leverage my position within the university to build frameworks that would amplify the voices of other artists. The two grants I received during this period of reflection build on work that I had done with the Deep Humanities group but use my skills and expertise to build porous transdisciplinary support systems within the university: 1) NEA - Hiding in Plain Sight and 2) Knight Foundation - Digital Stewardship Project. These projects provide opportunities for dialogue with artists from historically under-representied communities (Dorothy Santos & Sofia Cordova), but also allow me to hire paid student interns with whom I work in a mentor-style relationship. I hire students who are good collaborators but who may not see themselves in leadership roles. Through the process of mentorship guided by incremental autonomy, the students I hire begin to gain confidence first through belief in their own skills, and then through guided interactions with stakeholders outside of the university. Eventually, if I’ve done my job well, I can take a back seat in meetings and design decisions.

As much as the ongoing personal reflection is necessary for structural changes that support DEI initiatives, it’s also important to address structural inequities baked into the professional landscape for artists and the colonial legacies that many museums and art patrons benefit from. Without a roadmap it can be challenging to find approaches that acknowledge these impacts while at the same time don’t completely dishearten or offend students. I bring these conversations into the classrooms by showing work from artists that specifically address these topics like Gala Porras-Kim, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, the Propeller Group, Guerilla Girls, Haans Haacke, and Hity Steryl. Using specific artworks to contextualize the conversation makes the dialogue specific and concrete; revealing the power of art as an agent for structural transformation.    

My service continues to focus on support for interdisciplinary and public facing initiatives. This kind of work is challenging because it frequently means putting supportive and administrative functions in front of one's own research while new systems are tested and implemented. The work rarely provides the great ‘aha’ moments of the studio and if done well, the organizing labor is invisible. That being said, I know project management is a necessary component of the kind of interdisciplinary research needed to grapple with complex problems facing the world our students are about to graduate into. I have the patience to stick with the work, because I believe the wicked problems of our time will be solved by things that are invisible, mundane, and feel more like a bulky bureaucracy than a single ‘heroic disruptive solution’ of an individual that can ‘pivot on a dime’, no matter how seductive the narrative of a brilliant singular solve can be.

Looking ahead, I want to continue to do the work to reveal my own biases and to prioritize active listening.  I will continue to bring anti-racist frameworks into the courses I design and discussions with my colleagues to buttress and expand existing pathways within the university for success that are as pluralistic as the global communities we serve. I will also continue to explore the overlaps between my studio practice, and the parts of my practice that are starting to engage and organize around social & environmental justice and alternative systems for art production and exhibition within both the local and global communities. These frameworks align with the four themes of Stanford’s vision 1)  IDEAL (Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity in a Learning Environment), Ethics, Society and Technology Hub, Community Engagement, and College (Civic, Liberal, and Global Education) initiatives. I would look forward to working within the department and beyond to find synergistic overlaps between my practices and those supported by Stanford’s robust vision to build durable initiatives, collaborations, and curriculum to help shape the future our students will create.