[Last week was
one of the busiest of my professional career, featuring a series of great
Boston events, culminating in the 51st Northeast
MLA convention. So this week I’ll recap that convention and those other
events, leading up to a special weekend post on what’s next for NeMLA and how
you can get involved!]
On the first of
two great events, and how you can contribute to the second!
It’s been a bit
since I’ve written here about my work with the Scholars Strategy Network
(SSN) and specifically my role as a
Boston Chapter co-leader, alongside my awesome colleagues Tiffany Chenault and Natasha Warikoo—it looks
like the brief mention in this
November post was the last time—but SSN has continued to be an important
part of not just my professional life, but also and especially my sense of
solidarity, my feeling that I’m not alone in the fights that all of us who care
about America are fighting these days. That means engagements with public
narratives and collective memories, the kinds of conversations I’m hoping to
influence and help shape through my own
public scholarly writing; but it also means another central side of SSN:
direct conversations with policymakers, activists, researchers, and all those
who help shape political and social efforts, at the local as well as the
national level.
Last Tuesday we
had our first event of 2020,
and it was a perfect example of those latter goals, as we brought together
folks in all those categories for panels on three crucial 2020 Massachusetts
policy priorities (and proposed legislation related to each): the climate
crisis and carbon tax
legislation; deep poverty and a bill that addresses it; and
ranked choice voting and a proposed
ballot initiative to bring that to MA elections. I was fortunate enough to
moderate the climate conversation, which featured State
Representative Dylan Fernandes, the economist and self-proclaimed “climate hawk”
James Stock, and the
community leader, non-profit director, and activist Dwaign Tyndal. Our
really excellent conversation moved between practical efforts, philosophical
questions, and expressions of collective solidarity in this work (as well as frustration
with aspects of it, of course, but you know what this
critical optimist is gonna emphasize!). As I know was the case with the
other two panels, most of all that conversation modeled the kinds of
connections and crossovers that make SSN such a vital organization, for public
scholars and everyone else in these fights.
Sound good? Well
fortunately for you (and all of us) that was just the first of two such Spring
2020 events! At the next, to be held on Wednesday May 6th, we’ll do
the same for two other significant issues and three proposed bills: funding
for public education at both the secondary and higher ed levels (and the proposed
Cherish
and Promise Acts); and immigration (and the proposed Safe Communities
Act). If you’re in the New England area and would like to be part of those
conversations, please let me know and/or plan to join us on May 6th
at Suffolk University! But wherever you are, you can and should add your voice,
not only as part of those conversations but in the planning stage. So please
let me know if you have thoughts on those topics that we should make sure to
include, folks or types of folks we should make sure to invite (either as
panelists or audience members), or any other contributions to these ongoing and
vital 2020 discussions!
Next recap
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. If you were
at NeMLA 2020, I’d love to hear your thoughts and takeaways as well!
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