Niah Grimes
So I’m never, ever going to be able to sleep, you know, and really rest in that power. And I think I’m just hoping that people who have power or feel like they don’t. They see the power that they have. They meet students needs and the best way that they can their own and students needs, and then they have the courage to transform the environment in ways that feel congruent. Because we do know students tell us we’re able to assess, we don’t have to benchmark all the time and do those things.

Keith Edwards
Hello and welcome to Student Affairs now. I’m your host. Keith Edwards, today, I’m joined by Chris Linder, Niah Grimes, & Nadeeka Karunaratne, the authors of a thought provoking new book thinking like an abolitionist to end sexual violence in higher education, I was fortunate to be able to read an advanced copy and write a testimonial for the back cover, as I shared there. This book offers a critical analysis of the status quo around sexual violence, compliance culture in higher education, and how it has come to mimic the criminal legal system. The authors offer not only critique, but also rationale call to envision for creating a paradigm shift toward accountability, community, abundance, freedom, emergence, love, healing and wholeness. It was a powerful read and a joyful read and an inspiring read. And I’m so grateful that this is now out and available, and these folks have joined me to talk about it. Student Affairs now is the premier podcast and online learning community for 1000s of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays, find details about this episode or browse our archives at studentaffairsnow.com we’re so appreciative of our sponsors at Student Affairs NOW, if you’d like to be one of them and be mentioned here, let’s connect. We have various sponsorship options from a full year to a single episode and everything in between. As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he, him, his? I’m a speaker, author and coach, helping hire leaders and organizations advance leadership, learning and equity. You can find out more about me at keithedwards.com and I’m recording this from my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the intersections of the ancestral homelands of both the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples. So let’s get to the conversation and meet our guests and co authors of this new book. Nadeeka. I think we’re going to begin with you.

Nadeeka Karunaratne
Well, thank you for having us. My name is Nadeeka Karunaratne. My pronouns are she hers. I currently live in the Bay Area on the land of the Ohlone peoples, and work for the with the McCloskey center for violence prevention at the University of Utah. As a post doctoral researcher, my research really focuses on power conscious perspectives to understanding different issues of sexual violence in higher education, particularly how we can interrupt harm and what the healing practices of minoritized college students look like. And I’d say my research is really informed by my background as a student affairs professional. I worked as a prevention educator, cultural center coordinator, and all of those experiences, and particularly the work I did with students, really shape how I come to this work and this research, and also how I engage with it. And I’m also a trauma informed yoga instructor, which also has a lot of influence, I think, on my my research and my teaching and also how I understand healing and this work. So happy to be here. Thanks for having us,

Keith Edwards
and for folks who are watching, you’ve also got the book on your lovely behind you. Great cover right there. Fantastic. Glad you’re here, Niah, how about you? Why don’t you tell folks a little bit more about you?

Niah Grimes
Hi everyone watching and tuning in. My name is Niah Grimes. I use she, hers pronouns. I’m an assistant professor at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, and it’s been a complete honor being an assistant professor there. I actually never even aspired to be a professor. Ironically, being so first gen, I didn’t know Professor was a job. And then I get to college, and I’m like, Well, I guess this makes sense, right? Like you all have to get paid to do this, and it wasn’t until I met Chris that I’d even considered teaching and doing organizing work as an assistant professor. So I just want to state that as like a big part of my journey. How did I get here and into sexual violence. Sadly, it’s because I’m a survivor. So I was assaulted in undergrad, and I had no idea, like how to heal, what to do, and then all of a sudden, just being really spirit led, I was able to find resources, heal, do my own advocacy work, and then I started organizing with homeless, neglected youth, mothers who were displaced from their house, suffering from mental health illnesses. Sadly, I noticed most of them were black and brown, and they all had experience of assault or IP. V and me studying sociology, I was starting to connect the dots between equity and violence, specifically sexual violence, and really reflecting on my own identities and recognizing how that made me a target for violence, and it just led me on this journey of deep reflection and wanting to transform. What I saw was a systemic issue rooted in all these systems of domination that we’re compliant in and perpetuate. And so I was like, well, who’s doing this? Thinking like I am? Because I was in roles in student affairs where people shouldn’t I wasn’t always counseling, so people shouldn’t have been disclosing their sexual assaults to me. And I recognized, okay, there aren’t a lot of safe places on campus if you’re disclosing it to me in this setting, there’s so much power at play. And I said, Okay, what can I do? And that’s what led me to get my PhD and start studying with the great scholars who I was able to co author this book with. So it’s really just an honor to do this work, as much as it’s sad that we have to do it.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, awesome. Thank you. Nia, Well, Chris, you got a little shout out there. Why don’t you tell folks a little bit more about you?

Chris Linder
Hi everyone. My name is Chris Linder. I use sheher pronouns. I identify as a queer, white, cisgender, non disabled woman from a working class background, those are all parts of my identity that I think about really frequently in this work, and it’s surprising sometimes when and where they come up, but they’ve been really important to me and trying to better understand myself and the work that we do around sexual violence. I currently work at the University of Utah, which is on the homelands of the goshute Paiute deshoni and ute peoples, and have worked in higher education. I am coming up on 20 years. Friend No, almost 25 years. I know. Sorry, Keith, I have. I started out in fraternity, Sorority Life, and then very quickly moved into working at a Women and Gender Center where I was a victim advocate. I was a victim advocate for almost 10 years, and so those are parts of my career that I carry with me, always, always, always. I actually did my PhD while I was working full time. So I did my PhD at the University of Northern Colorado, what I was a victim advocate at Colorado State University, and I actually did not do my research, my original dissertation research on sexual violence. I had been I had experienced a ton of secondary trauma, and like Nia was talking about it at that time, Student Affairs didn’t have as a as a field, not, I’m not, I’m not putting the responsibility on any singular institution, but as a field, we hadn’t done a great job yet of figuring out ways to support student affairs practitioners who are managing secondary trauma. And so that became, I was managing a lot of trauma, so I said, I don’t want to do sexual violence work anymore, so I stopped doing it. And then actually, Dr Jessica Harris invited me back into the work early on in my academic career, she wanted to do some research and some work around the intersections of identity and sexual violence. And so she knew I had this background, and we had worked together on a couple of other projects. And so we started working on a book together, I think was published in 2017 or 2018 so then that’s when I came back to this work. Then I came to the University of Utah in the fall of 2018 which was the year that Laura McCluskey was murdered by a former dating partner at the University of Utah that academic year, we had two additional students who were murdered by dating or domestic partners. And so I the president’s office figured out I was here, and that I did work in this area, and so they started reaching out to me, asking for help. And that’s when we started working towards creating a center for violence prevention. And one of my strategies has been to move away from teaching potential targets of violence how to avoid being targeted, and to shift that perspective into focusing on teaching people who are causing harm to stop causing harm by attempting to intervene earlier on in that process, so that people students become more aware of when they’re engaging in poor behavior around ignoring people’s boundaries and those sorts of things, so that it doesn’t escalate into the more violent behavior that specifically we saw at the University of Utah that year.

Keith Edwards
Well, thanks to for those introductions, you’ve given us a lot of context, and would love to get into a little bit about this book specifically. And all of that context. So I’d love to hear from you a little bit about how this project came to be, like you’ve alluded to. But Chris, why don’t you begin and frame this?

Chris Linder
Yeah, so gosh, there so much has has happened. I think for me, one of the biggest ways that this came about is that I, of course, like I said, I’ve been doing work around sexual violence for a long time, had also had tried to do a good a better job of recognizing my white feminist roots, and really get in touch with understanding the ways that violence is intersectional and that people with minoritized identities experience even higher rates of violence than pretty white cisgender women who are primarily focused on in media and research, actually. And so I tuned in, and when I was at the University of Georgia, that PhD program is majority black student, so it was more than 50% of the students of that program identified as Black or African American, and those students both welcomed me into that community and challenged me into that community, making me really do my work around my whiteness. And so I also started paying a lot of attention to what was going on around Black Lives Matter movement how police brutality was really impacting people that I loved and cared about. And so those two pieces coming together, thinking about police brutality and how it intersected with sexual violence, was really important for me. I started doing a lot of reading around abolitionist work. And then I thought, wait a minute, these are things we need to be doing on college campuses. We act like we can’t. We act like we don’t have any agency over what’s happening on our campuses around the criminal legal system or the criminal punishment system. We act like we don’t have any power around these policies, but we actually do, and so I immediately reached out to Nia. We had hamburgers at ash.

Chris Linder
um, and we talked about what this book could look like. And so I started getting more and more excited. And then I had always wanted to work with Nadeeka on a project, and Niah and Nadeeka and I had worked together and known each other through lots of sexual violence related kinds of things. And at that time, Nadeeka was also starting as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center. And so we, just the three of us, started talking about this, and it was beautiful.

Keith Edwards
Nadeeka. What do you want to ask? Yeah,

Nadeeka Karunaratne
I love that that journey, talking about your journey, and then kind of a little bit about our collective journey, I guess I’ll just add a little bit about how I came to learning about and understanding things like frameworks like abolition feminism, carceral feminism, and the ways in which are practices, both in higher education and at large in society, our responses to sexual violence and relationship violence has been really dominated and fueled by carceral responses or punitive responses that in addition to being really harmful for minoritized communities, are also not working to end violence or effectively respond to survivors needs, and so that kind of my first introduction to that was actually as a student affairs professional. I was working at UC Irvine, and there was the law school actually had this initiative to end family violence, and they brought some incredible speakers. One of the years that I was working there, who were doing, like, scholar activists, organizers, who are doing work around the intersections of like, really talking about carceral feminism and responses to sexual violence, that were, again, as as you said, Keith in the intro, like mimicking both in higher ed and not like mimicking our criminal punishment system and relying on that system. And so that’s kind of my that was I was really fortunate to be on that campus and as a professional, to get to attend some of those, like lunchtime talks and things. And that’s really where I started reading and learning. And as the years went on and I started my doctoral program and engaged in a lot of my dissertation research, which is with women and non binary femme students of color at a couple different institutions, only one of the of the 35 students who participated in this qualitative study had engaged in any form with the title nine process on their campus. And while it’s not a quantitative research, I’m not trying to make some generalization. I do think it was telling the ways in which those even that that student that did, but most of the students had to find other outlets and ways and come to themselves and their. Communities for for healing and support, and so all of that kind of shaped my my questions around around this work and around bringing abolitionist perspectives to sexual violence and higher ed. And then, yeah, as Chris mentioned, Niah and Chris and I had come together early in my doctoral experience, nine actually had got to to share it share a room at a critical Campus Sexual Violence researchers Summit. We had some incredible discussions over wine in our hot tub, and became best friends at that point. And yeah, and yeah, was so excited to be joining the center with Chris, and that’s how, yeah, and, as Chris mentioned, we came together for some really great conversations and then some really transformative writing.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, Niah you want to add anything about how this project came to be?

Niah Grimes
I think they both covered it well. Yeah, great.

Keith Edwards
Well, then let’s have you frame this help us understand what it means to think like an abolitionist, and also how that applies to sexual violence in higher education.

Niah Grimes
So for me, I was an abolitionist, and like, had no idea. And so, right, really the power of reading theory and applying language to your experience. And so it was so beautiful being invited to do this book, because I was able to put a lot of language to the experiences I was seeing throughout my work. And so I frame abolition at its root. It’s like it’s about accessing and maintaining freedom for every living being, and us being able to meet our needs in holistic, safe feeling ways. And so I think, for me, thinking about in that large umbrella approach, and then you can kind of apply that thinking and practice and infuse it in whatever work you’re doing. I think sometimes we get locked in when we think of it only as it relates to the prison industrial complex, because that’s where most of the abolitionist thinking occurs. And so I really loved when Chris was like, No, we need this in sexual violence, and we need it because of the roots and the web that we talked about. It’s so related, and so I think we talk about this a lot in the book. We try to, in chapter seven, kind of get people to engage in no think about, how does violence really occur? All that is responsible and accountable before that moment of violence, there’s so much that we can disrupt, change, heal, support, totally remove or shift from our environment, and even the fact that after violence occurs, we have no true way to heal and be accountable. We’re not taught to relationship and spiritually, I believe like that’s one of the major reasons we’re all here and exist. It’s to relationship and figure out our our own spiritual work in those relationships. And so it’s a sign to me that systems of domination are working the way they were designed, anytime. We don’t have community. We don’t know what accountability is. We don’t know how to relationship well, people can’t take accountability for the little things they do, and those are the building blocks to violence. And I think we’ve seen this in different ways. When you see like those different pyramids, like rape myth theory and like, violence culture, I think that gets at it, but we are really talking like it starts at birth. It starts with how you’re treating the mother who’s carrying the child in the womb, right? Like attachment theory, like we know so much about healing and illness, and I think that illness is a white supremacist design, like I think it is designed to control and to weaponize, similar to sexual violence. So it’s like so hard to get people sometimes to wrap their heads around it, because they’re like these. All these things seem disparate, but I can’t separate them in my mind, and I think in the book, that’s what we were trying to show. Is like, if we we can’t just see this as a singular issue. If we look at this holistically and change our environment and our culture, the way that we relate to one another, we will start to see this shift finally, because we have it in years, the research shows that, like, we’re not seeing any shifts and changes in this, if anything, institutions are getting more creative in how they hide it.

Keith Edwards
So yeah, what would you add here? Nadeeka

Nadeeka Karunaratne
yeah, I think. I guess first, I also want to say we had a lot of conversations and talk a little bit in the book about. How, why we frame it as thinking like an abolitionist, because to have true abolition in higher ed would require dismantling higher ed as we know it. And so, which we’re not saying, we don’t necessarily want that, but that isn’t exactly what we talk about in the book. And so I think I want to, I think it’s important to name that too, that we use this language of thinking like an abolitionist to really draw on the wisdom and the lessons and the principles that abolitionists, for years, have written and spoken and done like taken action around. I think, if I think a lot of what we like, what thinking like an abolitionist looks like, is rejecting a lot of the the kind of penance or ways of being that white supremacy culture promotes, which Okun has written, or there’s incredible website, we’ll drop it in, share that resource. But things like perfectionism, this idea of, like, false urgency, competition, like, bigger is better, right? Like those ideas, I think have we in there are in all kinds of organizations that, I think, in our Student Affairs, in our institutions, and in our Student Affairs culture at large, in a lot of ways, and so what we’re talking about is, is working toward rejecting a lot of that, particularly in the context of sexual violence, work in response and prevention, work in higher ed and Niah touched on a lot of the we talk about, some of the principles of abolitionist thinking, like accountability as a way of being right, really thinking about our internal work, like self awareness, decarcerating our own minds, and how we think about these issues, but also how we think about our interactions and relationships. So I’ll that that’s I’ll kind of stop there and see Chris might have some, some more to share as well.

Niah Grimes
Did I interrupt one thing? So the the reference Nadeeka made to coons work, it’s a digital book. So it’s a website that they made. It’s a digital book that is in the form of a website, so that it’s always like a breathing, changing document. I just wanted to note that, because I think it just gets at like the principle, like the principles, the congruence and trying and changing and and you like, I know Chris will hit on this, but we don’t do that well in higher ed. We do not change well. So

Chris Linder
it Yeah, I think we heavily rely on Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s idea that abolition is about presence, not absence. Think we often think of abolition as tearing things down, but most of the abolitionist writers and thinkers that we read heavily talk about abolition is about building and creating the world that we want. And so I think that’s a really important component. The two other things I would add that we haven’t touched on quite yet. One is Nadeeka talked about both Niah and nadee to talk about carcerality and how we needed to decarcerate our minds. So for me, I’m just going to say plain and simple, and you will never hear me waver on this comment, ever that we are not going to policy ourselves out of sexual violence in higher education, there are three federal laws dedicated to addressing sexual violence among college students. For me, that is the that is a huge problem. They’re in conflict with each other, and they all say the same thing. And why do we think we have three laws directed towards college campuses? It’s because our perception of who college students are are pretty white, straight, cis women, and those are the women in our culture we’ve determined are worth saving. And so I will retire when some of these laws are either repealed. I mean, I just feel so strongly that we have made it worse instead of better, by constantly adding more and more policy. And that’s the example of carcerality. Carcerality is about control and surveillance and trying to we believe that, as part of white supremacy culture, that if we control people, we can control outcomes. And we know that’s not true, and so that’s for us where abolition comes in. And then just the third point I would make, one of the other principles we heavily rely on and talk about in the book, is Miriam Kaba, among others, but I really appreciate kavas work around no human is disposable, recognizing that when people engage in harmful behavior, the vast majority of the time they’re they’re acting on their own unresolved pain and trauma. And for those of us in higher ed that can be really difficult for us to get our brains around, because many of the people who engage in harmful behavior are cisgender, straight white men from wealthy families, right? And so we have a hard time getting our brains around. What kind of trauma do they have? But it goes back to what Niah was talking out about at the beginning, and Susan Rafa talks a lot about this in her book, liberated to the bone, that people with a lot of dominant identities have had to have been required, have had to. Separate themselves from their feelings, from their ways of being, which results in lifelong trauma and detachment and isolation, which then results in them causing harm to other people, even though they still have access to a ton of material privilege, they’re also managing their own hurt and trauma that might look different than what we’re used to talking about pain and trauma looking like.

Niah Grimes
And I I’m sorry, I think we need to belabor Chris’s last two points. Because one, I was verbally attacked for, oh yeah, yeah, for really, just stating in a conference that people aren’t disposable, and it’s not to say that the person that harmed you you need to forgive. Like. I’m not going to tell anyone who has been oppressed or harmed how they should heal other than like. Don’t harm yourself and don’t hurt other people outside of that healing whatever ways get you whole. My issue, though, is when we dispose of people and when we are trying to abolish these systems of oppression towards freedom and equity and liberation and meeting our needs, we cannot, and I think this is a large like point of our book, we cannot take on the same actions and roots of Our oppression, and that’s what we do when we when we dispose of people because they do harm. And it’s, it’s almost judging and saying, like, well, the way I do harm isn’t as bad as you do harm. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are some predators and perpetrators where it’s like, I say that language because I have a hard time thinking of how they could do that much harm and get away with it, and like I’m struggling to heal, right? So I don’t need to do that work there. But it isn’t to say that, like we all don’t deserve for our humanity and the fact that as long as we live, we can change that to be recognized. Now natural consequences are very different than carceral practices, and I think we need to nuance that. So sometimes people will hear us say, well, then what do we do natural consequences? Like we’ve all grown and lived like, you know, what happens if you touch a hot stove, you get burned. And so it’s just to say, like, we need to reconceptualize our relationship to punishment and that that isn’t going to to get us to our goal collectively. And then I’ve seen auto ethnographically over and over on campuses, people not understanding the history of the policies. And so we’re getting all of these Clery Act reports, so we’re showing that the campus is unsafe, and then you have people not accurately reporting assaults that are happening. And so it really just creates more fear, which is connected to white supremacy culture, which begets more violence. And so we’re in this toxic loop of a cycle, and we have to break out of it. And we have the power to change the environment. As student affairs professionals, that’s what we have the power to change the most. So I think we need to enact our power and stop being scared. What are they going to do without us? You can’t teach people without you can’t run a university without like they can’t we need to walk out. I’m sorry. I got somebody take over Nadeeka that

Keith Edwards
is fired up. I think one of the things I want to highlight before we move to Nadeeka and some of the shifts is you’re pointing out how systems of oppression harm all of us, including those of us like me who have a lot of privileges. I mean, as a white person, white supremacy culture arms me regularly. We just don’t used to thinking about it or noticing it, because it also benefits me in a lot of ways. And as you’re pointing to abolitionist thinking also frees all of us, and benefits, some of the benefits you were talking about benefit all of us. So that harm, and how harm replicates, and also freedom from that is something that we can all be invested in. We started to point to some of the transformations you all are hoping.

Chris Linder
Can I add one more thing? Absolutely, Keith, yeah. So on this piece, like one of the pieces of pushback. So Niah talked about how she got verbally attacked at a conference. It was specifically a feminist oriented conference, and so it’s really difficult work when even the people we think we’re advocating for are not on not down with this work. But so one of the things I frequently talk about is that this doing work and abolition and focusing on engaging people who either have the potential to or are have already caused harmful behavior to stop. Is survivor centered work the number of survivors I sat with for my 10 year career as a victim advocate who said, Chris, I don’t want them to get in trouble. I just want them to stop. Those are the survivor stories I’m carrying with me that. Does not mean that other survivors are not important. The ones that do need a carceral response because they don’t know of any other options, or that’s what steals the best. I’m not going to discount that right now. I mean, in my dream world, we would get to a place where everybody understood and had access to understanding how non carceral responses are actually better for all of us. I mean, if we think about carceral responses from a survivor’s perspective, it is on the survivor to prove beyond a reasonable the state, but the survivor is the one who has to take responsibility for it, to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that somebody engaged in harmful behavior that is more work for the survivor, whereas if we get engaged in true accountability, what we’re asking for is that the person who caused harm is the one who has to take on more of the burden of the work of rectifying the situation, not the survivor. And so I just want to, like, help us nuance that when we’re talking about engaging people who get engaged in harmful behavior, it’s not because we want to let them off the hook or make it so that they, you know, don’t have any consequences, like what Niah was talking about. But in fact, that is a survivor centers approach. It’s just centering a different kind of Survivor than we’re used to centering because we’re so used to centering people like me, cisgender white women who the legal system was set up to, and not really so women, I’m not but it was more likely that I would benefit from a legal system response than other folks would.

Keith Edwards
I’m so appreciative that you’re bringing in what you’re hearing from survivors, because that’s my experience too. That was my experience when they started the process. But then this very as you say, replicating the criminal legal system push them further and further away from that. And I think it just imagines possibilities. I’d love to hear from you a bit about some of the transformations you hope for and expect. Maybe Nadeeka, you can lead us off here.

Nadeeka Karunaratne
Yeah, I think a lot of this is this has been, I think, my biggest point of learning, also in the process of writing this book and just communing with Niah and Chris is the importance of really our like inner work. And so I love Adrienne Maree Brown, who’s probably honestly one of my favorite authors, a bad ass. She’s real fun. I love her

Nadeeka Karunaratne
and her Instagram also, you should all get because it’s incredible. And she does like name roundups, and it’s awesome. Yeah, she, I she often quotes her mentor, Grace Lee Boggs, and this quote of transform yourself to transform the world. And I think that’s one of the most powerful things that I’ve taken away, I think, really in the last couple years and really in this process of writing this book, but how we have to be practicing in our daily lives, which for me, a lot of my daily life is actually not in the work context, like, I mean in the sense of like the my daily life is with my partner and with my family and with my friends, right? It’s outside of this professional context, but practicing accountability as a way of being right, like what Niah said, like, we all harm, right? We all commit harm in various ways as we move through our lives, because we’re humans, right? That and so, but engaging in that, like inner work that doesn’t have to be done in isolation, right? Like inner work with the therapist, with my partner, with community, with Nia and Chris, but that inner work, I think, is, is really, really important to like, be able to bring these ideas to to our professional work. And I think another thing that Chris is, as it says, My supervisor, she’s always, I feel like she won’t like that. I just said that. But as as a mentor figure in my professional role is really and as a Director of our Center, this is Chris is always talking about the importance of releasing false urgency. And like this, work is too important to be rushed, right that we don’t need to be just going, going, going at 150 miles per hour, which I know is sometimes really, especially in student affairs practice, easier said than done. But that really questioning, like, what is urgent, what is necessary in this moment, and often using, like, what is necessary for this human in front of us, right? And the other thing that she really emphasizes in in our work is experimenting and trying things and making mistakes. And we quote a lot from Maryam Kaba, and there’s actually a podcast series called 1 million experiments. But this idea that we need like. There’s a COVID talk that there’s like it may feel overwhelming that everything needs to be changed, but that actually means there’s a million ways to enter this work. And so there’s actually an infinite amount of ways that we can be engaging in this I think that goes back to also that that first point I was talking about our inner, our inner and personal work.

Chris Linder
Just a quick, just a quick note. I didn’t say it’s too urgent to rush. That’s Dominique barter. I want to make correct

Keith Edwards
credit goes to the rest. You are blowing up the show notes. Try and keep up. We’ll do our best.

Chris Linder
I just want to, yeah, but I do say to our staff on the daily, we are not EMTs. Just stop, let it go. Yeah, sorry, what do you want to add?

Niah Grimes
No, I love it. Um, and Nadeeka, I really loved your answer. It’s just really awesome to work with people who you admire and who help you want to continue to transform or transform and learn and grow and be self accountable to yourself. Um, I think in writing this book, I learned that, like, a strength based approach is just the only approach. I don’t think it behooves us to force people to do things that they’re just not good at or not capable or like don’t get good energy from when you have people who are so good at doing specific things in their purpose, and so working with people where we could really, like, congruently, live out what we were writing, as far as the values of, like, the world we dream, that, to me, was just like, oh, like, this is the work. Like Nadeeka said, it’s like, we can only transform ourselves and the environments that we touch that I mean, that’s why I became a counselor. That’s why I teach, because if I can help other people, or whoever listening to have the courage to do what’s right. Like, I think, you know, we talk about all of these values, like honesty, like, I see values that are direct antithesis to oppression and to white supremacy culture. And people will say to me, like, Well, how do we know? Like, how do we know what liberation is? We’ve never felt it. It’s like we might not have felt it like in my lifetime, systemically, but I feel it in moments, and I know what oppression is, and so I know what liberation is, um, and it’s about having the courage to live that and and to just really hold yourself accountable. It’s okay to mess up, like I always tell myself, like you’re learning in real time. You know, you’re understaffed, learning in real time, you know. And it just helps me just humble myself. I think one of the greatest things about working with students is they will always tell you about yourself, like students will always tell you about yourself. So I’m never, ever going to be able to sleep, you know, and and really rest in that power. And I think I’m just hoping that people who have power or feel like they don’t. They see the power that they have. They meet students needs and the best way that they can their own and students needs, and then they have the courage to transform the environment in ways that feel congruent. Because we do know students tell us we’re able to assess, we don’t have to benchmark all the time and do those things. So that’s like the transformation I’m hoping for is courage, meeting needs, doing the self work, like Nadeeka said. And I think you

Keith Edwards
want to say a little bit about with that comes maybe some pushback,

Niah Grimes
the pushback. So we do talk about in the book, I know in the last chapter, but I feel like it might even trickle throughout, just that, when you are doing transformative work, there will be backlash, because people in power fear that they’re losing something. They they haven’t lived in abundance yet. They don’t know that it’s better. On our side, we’re trying to show them the way like really, this is what they want, seriously, like you can have what you want and not exploit and kill people. You do not have to violate people to have to meet your needs. You don’t. And I just think that if people have the courage to do the work and they’re strategic, they understand where pushback might come from. Assess who your allies are, who’s already doing the work in community, in in the institution you’re in. Support the students like I’ve supported many a student organization, an activist group, right? I’ve met plenty student needs that weren’t in my job role. Like I hate the whole that’s not in your job description. You see a need, you have the capacity you meet the need. If you think you’ll lose your job, be strategic about how you do it, or find another job. Like, always have you know your backup job ready? And so, yeah, I think it’s like we are asking people to do check. Challenging work, but if you do it in 1,000,001 experiment, and you do it in these grassroots ways, it’s harder for oppressive powers to target, and that’s what we’re getting at. But I think also, if we help the people in power elite see that, like, really, again, our side is better, like, this is the whole abundant side. And we’re not saying no pain happens here. We’re just saying that we know what to do with pain.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, yeah, beautiful. Well, I’d love to hear from you all you know, you wrote this book over year years, and part of that journey is thinking together and doing research, and then you have conversations about it, and then you’re writing it. What did you all learn in the process of writing this? What’s something that, how did you grow? How did you change? What did you learn? I know you all brought so much to it, but what did you gain from the process?

Chris Linder
Um, I can start this because it really builds on what Nia was just talking about. So I’m a Gen Xer. I can critique the heck out of things for days. I have worked in higher education for over 20 years, and I’m mad about it. I have a lot to say about what we’re not doing well, and how incredibly frustrated I am, and I will say that that is one of the primary reasons that Nia was someone that I reached out to from the beginning of this is because she’s a dreamer to my practicality. This is Niah was an advisee of mine when I was at UGA. So she and I have been working together for quite a long time, and we just compliment each other really well in that way. And so for me, working with both Niah and Nadeeka, it was a place of hope, and I learned to regain hope and our, the three of us, our the community that was built with each other and how we take care of each other and really show up with love all the time, even when we mess up and hurt each other, we still show up with love and value the relationships over all else. And so for me, that’s what I’ve learned, is the beauty of community, and has been reintroduced to dreaming about, wanna

Chris Linder
but dreaming about what higher ed could be. I mean, I just, I came into this work because I believe in, honest to God, I sound ridiculous, but I believe in the public good of higher education. And I think the work that we’re doing in this regard ties back to that public good. So that’s what I’ve learned from writing this book.

Keith Edwards
Well, you all had me think about Adrian Marie Brown from the beginning, and this is a quote I just recently shared at a conference. I learned in school to deconstruct, but how do we learn to move beyond our beautiful deconstruction? Who teaches us to reconstruct? That’s exactly what Chris was getting at community, hope and love. Okay, well, just that. What else did you learn in the process of bringing this book into the world?

Niah Grimes
I feel like to your quote, I would tell Adrienne Maree Brown, I teach equity in the fall, and we do just that. I don’t like when students critique, but they don’t have at least three or five things that they can offer instead, what do you want to build?

Niah Grimes
It doesn’t matter if it’s like, not going to work or whatever. You’re all right from it. And I also didn’t realize dreaming was like a gift or a strength. I’m like, we’re all right. No, everyone isn’t like, I’ll give you like, you give me a problem, I’ll give you a million possibilities, because I’m not. And I think it’s my queerness, I think it’s my identity that just allows me to see the both and and so we talked a lot about white supremacy culture, especially as it relates to colonization, especially as it relates to sexual violence, right? Of course, we’re talking about white supremacy culture. And so I just think about, like, we have to deconstruct that with within ourselves. And so for me, this has been, I said earlier, a like a testament to practicing and congruence the work relying on the community that like is already around you, like the passive, least resistance that are already around you, and not trying to force what you think should be, and looking at right, like I said before, with white supremacy culture troubling the Both and and then some. And so I think when we’re able to see the good and the bad, or the light and the shadow, because it’s really not bad, necessarily, unless we’re doing harm, then it gives us more clarity about how to move forward. But people feel so much shame. There’s so many shoulds, there’s so many restrictions. Of how and what we should do, and as a neurodivergent queer person, I’m just not interested in that. I’m interested in meeting needs. And so this book has really given me more courage. It’s taught me that I need to go where I’m valued, because we still are working right the dissonance we’re still working in this capitalist, oppressive regime. It’s really what it feels like. And so how do I do this work and not murder my spirit, but feel whole? And so I would encourage people to, like, look for the people who see your wholeness, who love like, love you and work there. Like, don’t stay in places where you are not seen and valued. We do not have to stay in those places. And I believe that in abundance, and I believe that if you ask, you’ll receive. And I ask for this, like, I ask for the community and them. This has been a beautiful experience, writing about something so hard, learning from all the brilliant theorists and then some. And I’m like, Why isn’t Susan Ruffo and like all of these, a million like folks who are riding on abolition, why aren’t they best sellers? And it’s by design. We don’t want to know what they’re speaking on. So I would say, read our book, but read their stuff and really do then do the work. Practice doing the work. Make a bunch of mistakes, take accountability, practicing sorry, showing remorse, like, and then give yourself rewards when you do it like, I’m just like, You know what? We took accountability today. Like, go us. We can trick our brains into liberation. I really believe it. So because we’ve tricked ourselves into being in cages, without a cage so we can, we can do it like, if this can exist, I wholly believe liberation is easier than this. Yeah,

Keith Edwards
I’m glad I don’t have to follow that. And Nadeeka does.

Nadeeka Karunaratne
I know. I mean, I it just, I think it’s telling, because I was going to say the congruent like, now I use the word congruence, and that’s like, this has the the, you know, year and a half, two years that we’ve we came together for this book were, were actually some of the hardest of my, my life, and, like, dealing with a lot of grief and transition and and we’re like, Oh my God. And now we’re writing a book in the midst of it, it’s like, truly and it, it has taught me, like, the importance, like, nice thing, of finding, like, spaces that are congruent, congruent to what I want and deserve and need, but also congruent to like, what we’re saying we’re doing. We were, like, living that out amongst the three of us and, like, what’s actually a deadline that we need to keep? And what do we what can we release? Because it’s we just made it up, and it’s not aligning with what we all need in our lives right now. We just made us a deadline, right? So, like, what?

Nadeeka Karunaratne
Like, what are our like, I don’t know how to write about this thing, but, like, I know that Nia does, and I know that Chris does. So cool. Can you act? Can one of you actually take this up right now, right? So just, I think it’s really taught me the importance of, like, finding spaces that are congruent as I move forward in in my career, but also, again, outside of the work context, and just allowed me to bring, like, my full self, right, like, all of my like pieces and experiences. So that has been, I think, just so transformative for me in like, yeah, that that the beauty of that congruence.

Keith Edwards
Awesome. Thank you all so much. We are running out of time. The we call this podcast Student Affairs NOW, so we always like to end by asking what you’re thinking, troubling and pondering now, maybe related to this conversation and maybe about other things in the world. So love to hear from each of you quickly about that, and then also, if folks want to connect with you, you can share where they can do that. So, Chris, what are you troubling now

Chris Linder
all the things? Yeah, I don’t, I mean, I feel like I’ve shared all those things. The big one for me right now is compliance culture and higher education broadly, but even more specifically, how we are collectively subscribing to compliance culture that is really inhibiting our growth around addressing sexual assault in higher education. So that’s really on my mind. The best ways to connect with me are our email old school. I know most people don’t even check their email anymore, which really bugs me. But I’m not on, at least not professionally on any of the other spaces. I use those for personal but not professional connection.

Keith Edwards
Great, great. Nadeeka, how about you? What are you thinking now?

Nadeeka Karunaratne
Yeah, I think similar to Chris, I think. Think the ways in which kind of compliance culture and the the fear that accompanies, accompanies that that culture, I think, really thinking about the the really carceral and honestly violent ways that our institutions have been responding to student resistance, to students speaking out about genocide, and the ways in which, yeah, the I feel like we’re some of these carceral logics and ways of being are becoming more more and more entrenched, and this fear of compliance and fear of state legislatures and there, I just feel like there’s a lot of fear and and repression. And it’s, I think it has implications for all kinds of functional areas and work we’re trying to do, including sexual violence. And so that’s I have. Yeah, that’s something, yeah, I’m definitely troubling. And thinking about

Keith Edwards
Nia, how about you?

Niah Grimes
So I’m thinking definitely about being on campus, and how it’s just a breeding ground and just relationships. And how can we help infuse a culture of communication boundary setting right and not acknowledging boundaries and then accountability, and just make that like the norm and infuse it into the curriculum, learning development. I think that that could be a huge like. It’s like, if I’m reading the book as a student affairs person, that’s what it brought up for me. I would also say, like, we print these things and they feel solidified, but like, show us grace we were, this was one of our experiments. You know, there’s a ton that we could still write on, think about and change, and in my counseling training, we always say, like, take what you need, leave what you don’t, and that, that’s kind of how I feel about it. So I’m curious to see where we’ll go from here. But right now, I’m really thinking about how we can strengthen, heal relationships, and the practice of being in relationship with each other, because we have to on campus.

Keith Edwards
Wonderful. Well, thanks to all of you for for joining me, for this conversation, for writing this great book, and for sharing your brilliant thinking for the world, and really appreciate your leadership in this space. This is where we often thank our sponsors for the episode. Today, we want to invite you to consider who you’d like to see as a sponsor for these episodes. Do you work with an organization doing amazing work, doing amazing work that you’d love to have more folks be aware of and familiar with? If so, drop us a line at host at studentaffairsnow.com. We’d love to hear from you. We have sponsorships available for the full year to be included on half of our episodes, and sponsorships for a single episode on a specific topic, and everything in between. Let’s connect. And a huge shout out to our producer, Natalie Ambrosey, who dissolved behind the scenes work to make us all look and sound good. We love the support of you our community for these important conversations, you can help us reach each even more folks by subscribing to the podcast on YouTube, to our weekly newsletter, and if you want to leave us a five star review that helps these great conversations reach even more folks. I’m Keith Edwards, thanks again to our fabulous guests today and to everyone who’s watching and listening, make it a great week all. Thanks, everybody.

https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/

https://www.akpress.org/liberated-to-the-bone.html

http://mariamekaba.com/publications/ 

https://millionexperiments.com

Trauma Stewardship: Re-Post

https://adriennemareebrown.net/books/