I’ve been working for a long time - over 15 years - I have built a fantastic career doing things that I love and believe in. I’ve done some good work and worked with some of the best people in corporate, government and NFP sectors. But, I have had a constant nagging feeling that I don’t know enough. I have a clear
sense of when something doesn’t feel right in equality, diversity and inclusion - HELLO cultural appropriation, men of colour can also be sexist, the importance of lived experience of discrimination and oppression, not centring whiteness all of the freaking time, the exhaustion that comes from doing this work and living in a body of a person of colour, the inherently western rationalist notion of separating mind/body/spirit, recognising that ‘women of colour’ is a diverse and varied and beautiful melange of identities and experiences and not a monolothic ‘other’ etc etc etc.
However, I don’t have all of the language to express all of my lived experience and the things I see around me. I feel that I don’t have enough of a grounding in intersectional feminist, transnational feminist and critical race theories. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to join academia, but it means for me, in order to feel like I have integrity in my work, I need to do some study. This feels like it adds depth to the work we do, understanding the people, the theories and the contexts from which we are reimagining and applying their ideas.
So I am SO THRILLED to have discovered Kimberly B George and Feminism School. Kimberly B. George, Ph.D. is a creative non fiction writer and scholar. She holds a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from UCSD, an M.A. (summa cum laude) in U.S. Religious History from Yale, where she was a Merit Scholar and a postgraduate fellow in Gender Equity and Policy. She has completed coursework for a second Ph.D. in Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice and also has done extensive graduate training in psychodynamic psychotherapy. And she’s the creator of Feminism School where I am taking a course in Intersections of Identities and she is mentoring me.
I was drawn to Kimberly’s work because she’s one of the feminist leaders bringing together mind / body / spirit work. There is reading (of course), combined with contemplative practices and writing that encourages us to feel the texts in our bodies and express our work not only through scholarly writing but creatively through art or movement. She explicitly recognises the knowledges we hold in our bodies. Kimberly is generous with her knowledge and her spirit. She brings enormous integrity to the work that she does and is building a movement for valuing women’s knowledges and feminist theories. Through her leadership, I’m reading and studying with a vengeance and absolutely loving discovering all of these amazing texts, activists, thinkers and work. I can’t wait to share my learning along the way!
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