Fall Retreat:

Nobody Mean More to Me Than You:  Solidarity, Violence and the Community Accountable Intellectual

Durham, NC  October 21-23, 2016

Drawing on the legacies of June Jordan, Audre Lorde and so many more, this retreat is especially for intellectual workers who are committed to deep solidarity and transformative presence through and despite their relationships with academic institutions.   At this moment, when campus activism against anti-black practices and legacies, organization and power around contingent faculty workers and adjuncts, and the ongoing legacy of scholars from oppressed communities doing their work in solidarity with communities of struggle around the world (while navigating distance and isolation in their working lives) this retreat is a site of renewal, clarity and strategy.

This retreat will be limited to 16 participants who identify as community-accountable intellectuals from under-represented communities.

To reserve your spot please fill out this application.

and hold your spot with a $100 deposit here:  

The remainder of tuition after the deposit is $450 without housing included and $650 with housing included.  All meals are included in the retreat.   Tuition can be paid at one time or participants can become monthly sustainers of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind for one year at the rate of $45 a month or higher.   We can provide letters of invitation and other materials to facilitate funding from your department or organization.  Deposits are non-refundable.  If your plans change your deposit will support the retreat and the ongoing work of Brilliance Remastered.

Bring Lex to your community or campus!!!!

Have Brilliance.  Will travel.

I am available to facilitate in-person Brilliance Remastered Workshops or Lectures for your student organization, academic organization, department, community organization, progressive think tank, school, community or group of friends based on any element of the Brilliance Remastered curriculum.

Workshops

A Brilliance Remastered workshop in your location can be the catalyst for building alignment and community that will support your vision (and destiny!) of community accountable scholarship.  Brilliance Remastered workshops are opportunities to do hands on work on work towards your vision, in community.   Imagine having access to other brilliant people in your location with a similar set of distinctions and tools to help hold you accountable to your vision!

Available Campus Workshops

Sure You Want to Be Well?: Resilience in Academic Settings

The Sure You Want to Be Well? Resilience workshop is designed to help visionary underrepresented students and faculty at any stage to tap into their renewable resources for inspiration and power.  Through a series of activities and conversations each participant will develop their own self-care plan.  For insight from former participants check out the group poem “Daydreaming is a Renewable Resource.”

Kinship, Memory and Movement: Empowered Mentorship

This workshop is designed to help visionary underrepresented students to identify the forms of mentorship they need, the best mentors to support their visions and the best practices to get and give the support that makes sustainable intergenerational intellectual practice possible.  For an example of how this workshop transforms check out the group poem “Mentoring is More Than A Notion.”

Rigorous Loving: Sustainable Intellectual Community Building

“Rigorous Loving,”a phrase drawn from Audre Lorde’s “Eye to Eye” is a
crucial practice for visionary underrepresented scholars
committed to non-competitive wellness in academic spaces characterized
by competition, scarcity and tokenism.   We will use several
activities based on Lorde’s concept of “mothering ourselves”
to examine and practice what it means to create a sustainable,
community accountable intellectual experience, beyond internalized
oppression and fear.

Backyard Politics: From Community Service to Community Accountability

Many private and public universities are becoming more and more public about “service learning,” and “civic engagement.”  This workshop is for those scholars critical of the ways in which many of these feel-good programs reproduce exploitative and colonial relationships between universities and local communities.   Drawing on black liberation theories of alliance, partnership and self-determination, I offer community accountability as a rigorous transformative alternative. The session will provide concrete steps for engaging in community accountable intellectual practice in synergy with the communities you love and the local spaces you are transforming with your presence.

Remastered Tools 101 (click here to see the webinar version)

The Remastered Tools 101 workshop is an opportunity to examine our relationship to knowledge and our theories of change as they relate to the work we do as scholars and the work we empower with our scholarship.   We will investigate how dependence on systems that are NOT community accountable are cultivated even in the most seemingly radical fields and support each other in creating visions for our own community accountability.

Required Reading:  Audre Lorde’s The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House 

The Angry Intellectual: Channeling Rage for Transformation  (click here to see the webinar version)

The Angry Intellectual workshop is an opportunity for visionary underrepresented scholars to transform our venting about the injustice we experience in the university industrial complex into clarity, decision and motivation in our own lives and in the institutions we want to create.  It is also an opportunity to see connections between the different nonsense that is making us all rightfully angry and to make partnerships to transform the conditions of our outrage.

Required reading:  Audre Lorde’s The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism

Eye to Eye: Radical Collaboration for Community Accountable Intellectuals (click here to see the webinar version)

The Eye to Eye workshop is an opportunity to get real about how individualism, internalized oppression and a capitalism-produced need to seem smart can get in the way of creating meaningful collaborations and useful intellectual partnerships with the communities that we love the most.  It is also an opportunity to find partners to collaborate with and to create plans for becoming the unstoppable, interconnected, community accountable scholars we want to be!

Required reading: Audre Lorde’s Eye to Eye: Black Women Hatred and Anger

 

• Campus Workshop (based on the aspect of the Brilliance Remastered curriculum most relevant to your setting) $4,500-5,000
• Campus Workshop and Lecture $5,500-7,000
• Short Term Campus Residency (series of workshops in one setting based on the specific needs of the location) $8-10,000

Lectures

Brilliance Remastered Lectures are a priceless way to motivate and inspire the people around you to value community accountable scholarship, get conversations starting and shifting in your setting that affirm our brilliance as priceless resources for and from the communities we love!

Fees do not include travel and lodging expenses to be covered by the hosts.

 

• Campus Workshop (based on the aspect of the Brilliance Remastered curriculum most relevant to your setting) $3,500-5,000
• Campus Workshop and Lecture $5,500-7,000
• Short Term Campus Residency (series of workshops in one setting based on the specific needs of the location) $10,000