Equity Book Club Hosts Innovative Thinkers

The SESP Equity Book Club features speakers who have studied and written about justice or equity issues. During 2020–21, the club hosted Bettina L. Love, author of We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom, and Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, whose scholarship focuses on the role of race and diversity in higher education.

The club arose in 2019 from student and staff conversations spearheaded by Claire Mackevicius, a human development and social policy doctoral student, and Shelena Johnson, a former senior academic adviser. The club’s speakers series “challenges us to be a better version of ourselves and to be more consequential in our communities,” Dean David Figlio says.

“ If all you know about Black folx is our pain and our trauma, you can’t do social justice work . . . because our history does not start with this pain, and we do not fight and find our way out of it because of it. It comes from a joy, a love, creativity, and ingenuity.”

Bettina L. Love | Georgia Athletic Association Professor in Education at the University of Georgia

“ Change must be purposeful and intentional. It must be rooted in freedom and sovereignty, with the goals of creating the conditions for all children to learn, free of systems that limit, hinder, surveil, and control.”

Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy | President’s Professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University