Photo courtesy of Grant Bell.
Professor and author Gaye Theresa Johnson gave the inaugural lecture for the CRPE department.
By Emma Quirk ’26
Staff Writer
As a part of Building On Our Momentum Community Day, on March 28, 2023, Gaye Theresa Johnson gave the inaugural lecture for the critical race and political economy department. Johnson is the author of multiple books and an associate professor at UCLA, teaching courses in the departments of African American studies and Chicana/o studies. She specializes in topics of cultural history, spatial politics, race, racism and political economy.
Johnson began her lecture by reading Brendan Constantine’s poem, “The Opposites Game,” in memory of the victims of the Covenant School shooting on March 27, 2023. After taking the time to recognize this violence and loss, Johnson introduced the concept of “the politics of where you are … as a means to understanding social justice, teaching and research.”
Throughout her talk, she emphasized the importance of what each individual brings to a community, or their “cultural superpower.” Johnson believes that individuals must ask themselves “what can be my superpower? How can I learn to listen to what’s happening here, so that I can present myself and be of service in some way?” Each member of a community must consider their individual contributions and how they interact with others, as community engagement is vital to social justice work.
Johnson stated that in social justice work, “recognizing where you are and how you show up is a critical tool in seeking full cultural enfranchisement, social membership, belonging and political agency.” This emphasizes the notion of understanding one’s own positionality and what one can do to support community efforts for transformation.
David Hernández, faculty director of community engagement and associate professor of Latina/o studies, was compelled by Johnson’s lecture, particularly by how she highlighted the challenges that exist within our society and in social justice work, but also the good that can come out of them. “I think Professor Johnson’s superpower — to use her term — is to share with the audience about life in struggle. This includes the lessons, wisdom and pitfalls embedded in social activism. But also, Johnson demonstrated … there is empowerment, romance, friendships, personal growth, dignity and justice to be found when struggling for a better world on and off campus,” Hernández said.
Johnson’s message and work align with the new critical race and political economy department. “CRPE offers a curriculum that explores how race, colonialism and capitalism shape the unequal distribution of wealth, resources and power at local and global scales,” Iyko Day, Elizabeth C. Small professor of English and chair of critical social thought and English said. Day, who will be the interim chair of the CRPE department, emphasized that through the curricular pathways of Africana studies, Latina/o studies and CST, “there is both a preservation and augmentation of each existing unit of study.”
The creation of this department has been in the works for about seven years and has been established through the collaboration of students and faculty from the English, CST, gender studies, Africana studies, economics, politics, German studies, Spanish and Latin American studies departments. CRPE’s formulation came largely out of an effort to increase resources for faculty.
“As programs, CST and Africana studies do not have any dedicated faculty lines, which made it challenging to deliver each program consistently. However, as a department with dedicated faculty lines, we will be able to build on our curriculum in ways we haven’t been able to in the past,” Day said. The first tenure track professor in the CRPE department has officially been hired, Maria Ximena Abello-Hurtado, who specializes in Africana studies.
Overall, Johnson established that she is enthusiastic about the creation and the vision of CRPE, a department that is focusing on what “we are dealing with in this moment, in this place, in this time.” She highlighted how critical it is for students to engage “with not just the intellectual lessons that [they] learn, but the lessons of critical practice that [they] take with [them] from here out into the world.” While introspection is critical, Johnson stated that it is also crucial to “always play on the side of the group. … [because] there’s so much power in the collective.”