Heller Community Reading for Social Justice

As a community dedicated to the pursuit and diffusion of knowledge advancing social justice, we are launching our first Heller community reading initiative this academic year. Throughout the year, beginning with incoming students at Orientation, we will read and discuss “From #Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation,” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, published in 2016. This ongoing conversation will include everyone in the Heller community: faculty, researchers, administrative staff, students and alumni. Our conversations will take place in a variety of online gatherings, such as faculty and staff meetings, academic program and research committee meetings, town halls and events convened by the Heller Student Association. During each conversation, we will strive to identify key points and insights that emerge and “cascade” them across various group meetings for discussion over the course of the year.

As part of of this initiative Heller's Sankofa Conversations presented a community-wide anti-racism conversation on Oct. 1, 2020, featuring a discussion with the book’s author, Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Watch the recording.

There is much to debate or discuss, as evidenced by, for example, the first quote within the book: “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.  The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” -- Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation Speech, Rochester, N.Y., 1857.

Access to the book is available free of charge to members of the Heller community. For information, contact Joanne Beswick at beswick@brandeis.edu.

Committee Members:

• Carole Carlson, Senior Lecturer and MBA Program Director
• Jon Chilingerian, Professor; Director, Executive MBA Program; Director, MD-MBA Program in Health Management with Tufts Medical School
• Susan Eaton, Professor of the Practice and Director, Sillerman Center for the Advancement of Philanthropy
• Andrea Harris, PhD Candidate and AHRQ Research Training Fellow, Heller School
• Kate Kaplan, Director, Development and Alumni Relations
• Ravi Lakshmikanthan, Lecturer and Assistant Dean, Academic and Student Services
• Maria Madison, Lecturer and Associate Dean, Equity, Inclusion and Diversity
• Monika Mitra, Nancy Lurie Marks Associate Professor of Disability Policy and Director, Lurie Institute for Disability Policy
• Cindy Thomas, Professor and Associate Dean for Research
• David Weil, Dean and Professor