The Social Justice And Storytelling Institute

Apply here for The Social Justice and Storytelling Summer Institute

Dates: June 17-21 and June 24-28
Location: Pollak Library 130

What the Social Justice and Storytelling Institute Summer Program provides:

SJSI fellows will participate in an in-person two-week seminar. Fellows will work with faculty from the Chicana/o Studies Department, the Library, and the Art Department. Fellows learn about Chicana/o Studies and Ethnic Studies through lectures, interactive discussions, and assigned readings. The fellows will explore the disciplines' key ideas, methods, theories, and traditions. Key lessons include the foundational humanities skills and practices that shaped Chicana/o Studies/Ethnic Studies. SJSI fellows will gain an understanding of the various community-based student movements that challenged higher education to transform. One of the program's primary learning outcomes is comprehending the university's conflicted history with social inequality. That learning outcome requires examining the efforts of social justice-inspired activists and intellectuals who commandeered the instruments of power and later invented new tools for liberating knowledge in the service of the social good.

Fellows will develop their scholarly interests with their faculty mentors into research-based storytelling projects. Faculty members have the expertise and responsibility to explain research's formal and informal aspects, apply to graduate school, work with communities, and pursue careers that utilize the social justice skills of Chicana/o Studies. We also encourage fellows to cultivate peer-mentoring relationships with SJSI fellows, current Chicana/o Studies majors, Chicana/o Studies alums, and Chicana/o Studies graduates in History and Spanish who are advancing through school into careers. We hope SJSI fellows become mentors to future and newer fellows as their careers advance.

SJSI fellows are a cohort of 25-35 students per academic year. This selection process intends to build a sense of cohort and community among fellows who enter the program simultaneously so that fellows' growth as scholars can be enhanced by the feedback and support of like-minded peers. This cohort effect is mutually beneficial for all. We hope – and the program's history has demonstrated – that the bonds fellows initially form within their undergraduate cohorts can be the basis of more extensive SJSI support networks that far outlast their undergraduate years.

The SJSI program is part of two innovative educational pipeline programs for students for the Latinx Lab, an initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation. SJSI helps students develop well-informed, solid leadership to help guide their educational journeys from undergrad to grad school to career. SJSI fellows will learn how to bring Chicana/o Studies/Ethnic Studies, social justice, and storytelling into their personal and professional lives as a lifelong skill to connect with broad audiences and to communicate effectively through different modes of storytelling.

Upon completion of SJSI, fellows will receive a $200 completion award. Fellows will also receive parking vouchers and two meals. Fellows in need of a newer laptop will be able to borrow one for the duration of the institute. All reading materials will be provided by Pollak Library electronically. Students will be admitted on a first-come, first-served basis. And we use a GPA-blind process. GPAs do not define a student's intellect or abilities. After completing SJSI, fellows state that they have found or reconnected with their "why" or purpose for being at CSU Fullerton. They develop a new focus and motivation for completing their degree on their terms. A goal of SJSI is for fellows to begin the "academic healing" process through the collective process of "undrowning."

Summer 2024's Storytelling Project: Multivocal Storytelling for Social Justice

"You got to make your worlds. You got to write yourself in. Whether you were a part of the greater society or not, you must write yourself in."

~~~

"I never bought into my invisibility or non-existence as a Black person. As a female and African American, I wrote myself into the world. I wrote myself into the present, the future, and the past."

–Octavia Butler

This year's institute theme focuses on "From my stories to our stories: decolonial imaginations. C. Wright Mills defined the sociological imagination as "to grasp what is going on in the world and to understand what is happening in themselves as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society." Linda T. Smith defines decolonial as "long-term process involving the cultural, linguistic and psychological divesting of colonial parameters." Queer Chicana historian Emma Perez defines the decolonial imaginary requires "changing the representations of these conditions, specifically the representations of conquest and colonialism."

Students will develop projects connecting their family genealogies with larger U.S. history. The SJSI instructional team will include librarian Barbara Miller (Zuñiga Research Collection), Ashley Yniguez (ZRC Intern), and Colleen Greene (Digital Scholarship Librarian and Genealogist) --who will guide students through our databases for doing social justice-informed history and genealogy research basics to create family histories. Artist and Art Department lecturer William Camargo Claudio (or Billy the Camera on Instagram) will teach students how to develop public shareable "communal archives" through mediums such as zine-making or creating a social media archive (e.g., Instagram).

Dr. Gradilla will lead the fellows in discussing the importance of decolonial thinking, racial/decolonial futurisms, utopias, abolitionist practices, and freedom dreaming. We will learn to dream of future utopias where we will all be free.

Graduate School and Career Awareness

Another feature of the summer program includes guidance on writing personal statements,

creating a graduate school plan, and learning the difference between graduate degrees and what degree you need for your specific career goal. Fellows will read from The Latinx Guide for Graduate School and participate in workshops. The Career Center and Latinx Lab Project Manager, Janel Navarro, will lead the workshops. Fellows will work on LinkedIn profiles and develop drafts of statements of purpose and CVs/resumes.

The Transformative Work of the Latinx Lab for Storytelling and Social Justice

Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Latinx Lab for Storytelling and Social Justice is a series of in-person and virtual projects led by Chicana and Chicano Studies Department faculty in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at CSUF. These projects center on storytelling as essential to creating vital and transformative knowledge.

Our Latinx Lab aims to inspire our students to use storytelling to uncover marginalized stories and experiences and share their narratives while building community and engaging in social activism. Our students' stories are more important now than ever in addressing structural racism, finding healing, imagining a more just future, and forging new compassionate and joyful relationships and experiences.

Our Latinx Lab aims to make humanities-based scholarship relevant to students who do not see themselves represented elsewhere and provide our students with narrative tools for social justice projects.

Unlike traditional labs that are often organized within the sciences, we are inspired by the mission of the Mellon Foundation to establish a lab focusing on the humanities and arts as its foundation. Our vision is that oral, sonic, visual, and written storytelling and narratives are fundamental to understanding and addressing social justice problems affecting Latinx communities. The humanities, namely, studying and creating art, culture, history, and literature within our Chicana/o Studies department, is vital for understanding and creating Latinx experiences and expression.

 

Do you have any questions? Please contact Dr. Gradilla, CSUF SJSI Faculty Director.

 

Do you have any questions?
Please contact Dr. Gradilla CSUF SJSI Faculty Director.