Ep 11 Dr. Dawn Demps: Educational Equity Through the Lens of Black Feminism and Community Cultural Wealth

In this episode of The Inquiry Oasis, host Jeffrey Anthony speaks with Dr. Dawn Demps, exploring her remarkable journey from a high school dropout in Flint, Michigan, to becoming an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, College of Education. Dr. Demps shares her transformative experiences with educational policy and social justice, highlighting the pivotal role of TRIO programs and the impact of community support on her academic pursuits. She delves deep into the realms of Black Feminism, Critical Race Theory, and Community Cultural Wealth, illuminating their importance in challenging educational exclusion and shaping inclusive futures. Dr. Demps underscores the importance of storytelling in research, advocating for the inclusion of diverse narratives as valid data sources. Her vision for the future of K-12 education is one of freedom, community engagement, and inclusiveness. 

Topics Discussed:

• Educational Resilience and Personal Transformation: Exploring the transformative journey from high school dropout to academia.
• Intersection of Race, Policy, and Educational Leadership: Examining how these elements interplay in shaping educational landscapes.
• Empowerment through Black Feminism and Critical Race Theory: Delving into the impact of these frameworks on understanding and addressing educational inequities.
• The Significance of Community and Cultural Wealth in Education: Highlighting the role of community support and cultural knowledge in enriching educational experiences.
• Storytelling as a Powerful Tool in Academic Research: Discussing the importance of integrating personal narratives and community stories into scholarly work.
• Advocating for Inclusive and Community-Based Education Models: Envisioning a future of education that is inclusive, community-centered, and liberating.
• Scholarly Activism and Its Role in Transformative Educational Change: Emphasizing the importance of activism in academia for driving systemic change in education.

Resources:

• Journal of Negro Education: Blooming In the Shafts: A Black Mother Scholar’s Tale of Flipping Pandemic Precarity to Educational Possibility
• Derrick Bell: Brown V. Board of Education and the Interest Convergence Dilemma
• Brittney Cooper: Link to Resources
• Octavia Butler: Link to Resources

Book Recommendation:

• Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom – By Bell Hooks

Transcript

Host: Jeffrey Anthony: 0:01

Welcome to the Inquiry Oasis, the University of Arizona College of Education's podcast, here in the heart of the Sonoran Desert. We bring you conversations with our esteemed faculty members and staff, whose research impacts lives from southern Arizona to the far reaches of the globe. We explore the transformative power of education in this border town, where diverse cultures and ideas converge, weaving a tapestry of innovation with compassion and a sense of wonder. So join us as we journey through the sands of curiosity, unearthing insights that enrich and inspire. Sit back and relax as we invite you to dive into the Inquiry Oasis. Welcome back to the Inquiry Oasis, I'm your host, Jeffrey Anthony, and today we're honored to have with us assistant professor Dr. Dawn Demps from the Educational Policy Studies and Practice department here at the University of Arizona College of Education. Hailing from Flint, Michigan, professor Demps brings with her a rich tapestry of experience in community organizing and development and influenced by the collective wisdom of her community peers and elders. With a robust academic journey that spans a B. A. in African Studies and Social Sciences from the University of Michigan Flint to a PhD in Educational Policy and Evaluation from Arizona State University, her scholarship critically examines the nexus of race, policy, and educational leadership through the prisms of Black Feminism, Critical Race Theory, and Community Cultural Wealth, professor Demps interrogates the mechanisms of educational exclusion and the resistance movements that seek to redefine the parameters of educational leadership and craft inclusive futures. So without further ado, let's dive into this journey of exploration and discovery with Dr. Demps here in the Inquiry Oasis. Dr. Demps, it's wonderful to have you with us today.

Dr. Dawn Demps: 1:49

Thank you so, so much for inviting me. This is definitely an honor, and I hope that I have something to share with everyone about my research and my journey.

Host: Jeffrey Anthony: 1:57

I'm sure you will, and we're very excited. your journey from Flint to academia is quite compelling. Could you share what inspired you toward the intersections of educational policy and social justice?

Dr. Dawn Demps: 2:07

I feel like I've told this story a lot, but long story short, I dropped out of high school at 16. I was heavily into the arts when I was in school. That was honestly like one of the few classes I would go to and then leave. And it was not, difficulty with school. It was the ease of school that I was, I was entirely bored and I would walk over to Flint Central Public Library across the street from, Flint Central High School our public library across from Flint Central High School. And that's where I would skip. Now, not all the time. Sometimes I went to the mall, did teenage things. But, for the most part, I would go in there and I would just read, deeply these books that were not offered to me in the school. Read about things that I did not see, in my regular classroom interaction. And I was told that because of my absences, I would have to go to alternative ed school and I probably stayed there from two weeks to a month. Don't quote me on that. But I remember the day I walked out because it was so horrendously doldrum and like elementary. I remember when I first walked in, they gave me like a packet of papers and we're pretty much like here, do this, turn this in and then you're done. There was no teaching happening or anything. It was a bunch of worksheets and I was like, I can do this on my own and it was horrible and just the chaos that was going on around me when I was in there. And I left and I walked out and I thought I could make it on my own, 16, you know, we think we know everything. I have a 19 and a 21 year old now. So, and I made some bad decisions and some missteps and were it not for grace, I probably wouldn't be here today on many levels, but have always loved learning. And so I would be all the places at friends parties and everything in a corner reading a book. Right? So that was always me. Got pregnant with my daughter when I was 26, figured out that a 10 an hour job just wasn't going to cut it for me and I would have to go back to school. So, went and got my GED, didn't study for it. Just went and took it 9 months pregnant and of course, passed it and everything. And after my daughter was born, I went to a community college in the state I was living in at the time I was in Colorado and moved back to Flint and transferred to my community college in Flint, Michigan, and finished out that process there, a friend of mine who worked at the University of Michigan, Flint, who I knew was employed through TRIO programs. And the TRIO programs, the historic programs that were created in the 1960s to deal with the inequities, also one of the, initiatives in the war on poverty to increase the amount of students of color who were getting college degrees and becoming faculty and all those sorts of things. And he worked for a TRIO program and they had set up a table in the basement of the community college and he called me over and he was like, go on and apply. And I was like, I can't apply. I dropped out of high school. So in my mind, I felt like because I had done this thing, the furthest I would be able to go was, you know, community college, probably an associate's degree. There's no way I could get into a university. And he was just like, apply anyway, and it costs money. And he said, Trio will pay for it. You don't even have to pay an application fee. And I applied. I got accepted and the rest is history. Just university life was very different than high school life for me and the types of questions I was able to ask and the people I was able to interact with and I was addicted for lack of saying a better word. It is a particular type of a lifestyle and it is a life of the learning and I really enjoyed that. Now mind you, I had two children when I went to U of M Flint and the TRIO programs were a savior for me. Because I would go to class and if I didn't have a babysitter or whatever, like they would watch my two little ones. And so my kids came up in the university and knew it just as well as I did. And had multiple professors and other people in the TRIO program who were extremely encouraging and I can go on and on about them. Who really started planning in my head that not only can I get a bachelor's degree, but Dawn, you could go all the way. You have the ability to go all the way. And I thought it was impossible, especially at that point, being a single mother with two children like that. That's impossible. I had never seen that happen in my community. I wasn't surrounded by people with PhDs, right? And they just really encouraged me. I went on and I moved forward and got a master's and got into a PhD program. And I'm here as an assistant professor at the U of A, a path that I never, 20 years ago, I would have never guessed that this would be where I would land at all.

Host: Jeffrey Anthony: 6:55

That is a remarkable story and incredibly inspiring. Also, the idea of community, how important that was and central to your success and also building your own counter narrative to these master narratives where we're told, you're not really supposed to do that. it's just a remarkable and thank you for your perseverance. So the framework of your research, you engage with Black feminism, critical race theory, and community cultural wealth. Could you unfold these concepts for our listeners and explain their relevance to your research?

Dr. Dawn Demps: 7:23

yeah. So, so kind of going back to my story, when I was told that I, could not continue attending my regular high school, right? It was a policy issue because just that year in the last couple years, they had changed the state policy in the state of Michigan, where students had over 10 absences, it was automatic fail, right? And going at that rate, because I had those amount of absences, I would not have passed on to the next grade. And so that's why they suggested that. So this was a decision that was made based on policies that were made somewhere else, right? No one came to speak to me to ask me what was happening in my life, what else was going on, how can we assist you? Like no one ever had that conversation with me. So as an adult, and working, in between my lives here as a professor, and what happened with me as a young person is I did a lot of community work. I wrote my first grant at 17. I engaged in community all of the time with young people who are being also pushed out of school. And at the time, I didn't know the terminology school to prison pipeline. I remember when I learned it and started going more in depth into recognizing what that was and reading up on it. I was working at the Urban League of Flint at the time and there was an incident that happened with a group of young men who came to my program all every day, pretty much like we were their second home and they were put out of school. So, when I was researching these things, I started connecting the threads of policy, of the decisions that people make who aren't even in places that are being impacted by the policies. Right. But then also the people are pushing back against those so black feminisms really is intersectional is multifaceted in its nature. It's not just about freedom and liberation for women, it's not just about freedom and liberation for black women, but really it's about freedom and liberation for everyone. So it merges these things about class and race and gender and ability, right, and all these other things. It is philosophical. It's not just action oriented. So when you look at some of, the individuals, when we think about black feminisms, like Angela Davis, and even going back far to Sojourner Truth, when you look at her speech, that was really a philosophical speech, right? So these are women who thought very deeply about these inequities and not just how they impacted them themselves, but how they will impact their children, but how they impact everyone, how they impact the world. So I was really taken with, that as a theory. Critical Race Theory, and I know it's controversial now, and that could be a whole nother podcast, but I read up on Derrick Bell, who is actually one of the pioneers of critical race theory, which is so interesting that you hardly ever hear his name in these conversations, in these public conversations, which is why I always say his name, because I think how he was so important. He was a professor at Harvard who stood his ground and You know, push back against the institution when they refuse to hire, we want to word it, to hire any black women faculty in the law department, right? And he lost his job, right? Like, died on that hill, as some people would want to say, but he was what you would really call a principled scholar, a lot of scholars write about a lot of things, but they don't live those things, those principles that they write on. He did. And so he looked at critical race theory. He helped create critical race theory with other, scholars in legal jurisprudence and that sort of thing to look at how it is we create laws and the decisions that are made legally that do not consider race and what that means when we are blind to that impact. And we say that it doesn't have an impact. easiest to look at are like housing discrimination laws, right? And someone could easily say, Oh, well, this person can't live here because, they don't have the income or whatever, but actually that's not it. When you add in the race component and you look at the other individuals that live there, right? So there will really push back for us to look at all of the, facets of inequity. um, not just the school prison pipeline, but the Brown v. Board decision. He was one of the first critics and received a lot of backlash for his criticism of the Brown v. Board decision. But when we look forward now, 50, 60 some odd years later, a lot of the things that he said when he first started writing about the Brown v. Board decision have come true, that there was a focus on the integration or the mixing of people sitting together in the classroom, but not really a discussion about resources and how it is we have equitable resources and make sure that no matter who's in the classroom, they have what they need to learn best, right? And then, community cultural wealth, I souls of community cultural wealth. I loved how and I love how it says that there is knowledge inherently in different cultures, just period. There is not this idea of only one type of culture has value, but all of these cultures have value. You may not see it in the same way. So going back again to when I was a young person, I made a lot of bad decisions, a lot of bad decisions, but I was still able to navigate systems. And one of the things that I understood from my culture is the importance of networking. I came up in a community where it was important to see and look at people. In the black community, They want to look at you. They want to see you in your eyes and see that you're telling the truth. And they also understand that people are looking at you. And so I understood the value in being just a really authentic individual from the examples that I was surrounded with. And I think that's one of the things that has helped me navigate the academic realm in a way that some other folks would not be able to. And that was wealth that I got from my community that learned in my community the gift of gab and I can definitely talk as you see, but coming up in the black church and understanding the value of storytelling which I use a lot in my research storytelling. Again, that's something that came from my community and so yes, those community cultural wealth just pretty much says that your culture that you came up with has value. And how do you use that value? I've tried to pivot from that. And how do I use that in academia?

Host: Jeffrey Anthony: 13:51

Oh, that is a remarkable story. the idea of communities having their own knowledge systems, that's, that gets to the idea of epistemology and the way that knowledge is created. And this also resonates with a earlier podcast we recently aired, with the ITEP program and indigenous knowledges and how those knowledge systems are constructed. And also how powerful that could be for our own system here, in the Western tradition, which came out of the Enlightenment. for our scholars here who are listening, that has a very specific epistemological, framing, which can erase other ways of knowledge, and then can cause epistemic harm, as you can say, because you can say that these ways of creating knowledge don't count because they don't fit within the Western frame. I think it's really important to understand that we have such vibrant and, deep and depth of knowledge that exists within our existing communities here in America right now that we can leverage to grow and make our world better.

Dr. Dawn Demps: 14:45

Yes, no, exactly. and just a little bit more about my work. I just really think that story is so important. And that's another reason that critical race theory to me is very important because and black feminisms, right? They all believe in the, the value and the power of story. And that people's story have resonance and people's stories are valid, and they can help inform all sorts of things, but I'm in policy, they can help inform policy and what would it look like if policymakers were listening to people's stories, how they will make much more well informed decisions about how they craft the way we have to move in the world.

Host: Jeffrey Anthony: 15:27

Well, this leads right into my next question. which is you've chosen a path to weave together the academic rigor with the lived experiences of racialized populations here. Why have you chosen this line of inquiry?

Dr. Dawn Demps: 15:37

So, as I was saying, I think that. All stories get to be told, and I think that historically, there have been people who decided and systems that decided that certain stories don't get to be told, and if they are told, we'll write them as not valid as, like the slave narratives, we can go back that far, and that there's no way in the world that they're telling the truth or that they're telling the truth. this matters or that this is just one individual. So it doesn't matter to everybody else. and there, we get a lot of the, empathetic slave master type of tropes from that. Right. And. So I think that the importance of people will be able to tell their story and in considering their story just as valid as any other piece of data is the way that we change how it is, not only that we make policy decisions, but how we make all sorts of decisions in the educational realm. So parents are telling. principles. Parents are telling superintendents what is happening with their children. And when you choose not to hear their stories, they hear what it is they're sharing with you, and they're telling you that you continue to make decisions that will continue to harm that community. So I really want to try to lift up their stories to lift up the fight in my little world, whatever impact it is I can have as an academic, however, more highly people will consider scholars than they do the parents, which is problematic in itself. I am a scholar and a mother, my children go to the local school district and I use my voice as much as possible because I know that people look at me differently. And that's problematic, already just because of my title just because of the doctor, but I'm telling the same stories and things that are happening with my children as the woman next to me who might have a job working at the coffee cafe right down the street who makes minimum wage. Her story is valid too. And what's happening to her child is not only valid, but probably more problematic than what's happening with mine because I have resources. And so going back to black feminisms, we talk about intersectionality. Right. And I am a black woman, but I'm also a woman who's highly educated, who has access to particular resources that the average person, no matter a woman, man, the average person does not have access to. So I have to recognize that. So how do I use my positionality to help lift up and to unveil what other people are going through? And I think that is the power of story when we choose to listen to some people don't want to hear stories because it's harmful to them or hurts them, or it's too hard to listen to. And I think when it's hard to listen to is when you need to listen to those stories because that. Shows you how important what's happening there is. And I think that's the only way that we really change anything. We've been doing education transformation and school reform for the better part of the creation of public school system. And I think the reason that we have not gotten very far is because we're not listening to the people who are most impacted in these systems, and we make decisions based off of ideas that we have that are often based in tropes and stereotypes about groups of people and what we think they need instead of asking them what they need. So that's why story is so important to me in my research.

Host: Jeffrey Anthony: 19:12

Well, you're doing a fantastic job of leading right into my next question here, which is, uh, so considering the unique position here at the university of arizona How do you believe your work speaks to or could influence our academic and local community here?

Dr. Dawn Demps: 19:25

Yeah, so, again, my daughter goes to the local school district, and I am part of the PTAs and part of, African American Student Services here in the district, and I work very closely with that, group, that organization, and that department. I help with training parents about organizing. We're working on right now, creating a weekend or retreat style type of training for parents to know how to contact the school district, get their concerns met, and if necessary, organized to push back against things that they see that are happening that they are unhappy with. So. In that way, I'm able to use my knowledge, but it's not just my academic knowledge, right? Because I did organizing before I came here. I had other people who trained me in community organizing and that sort of thing. So merging those two worlds, I think, is important. The other thing is there are resources here. So for example, one of the grants that I've just, applied for, the Bridge Building Initiative, is to work to, bring like African American student services in T. U. S. D. school district and the African American student association here on campus at U of A together to work on different things. So parents in the school district can meet with students here that are actually on campus, talk about their experiences, talk about what it feels like, what it means, the resources that are available to them to support their Black children if they were to come here, and also where the safe spaces are. Because I think every person, especially at this time, we are seeing all of the stores. We are seeing all of the trauma. We are seeing all of the pain. And yes, we have to go grow through this pain. And yes, we have to let it, scab and heal over. But at the same time, you have to have a space where it can get some air to it. Right. And so it can heal. And I think in that way, safe spaces are important because they allow you the space to breathe so that you can heal so you can continue doing this work. And I think that black parents and parents of marginalized students are always concerned when they send their children off to college about will my child be safe. Will my, my, my young one, my love be okay in this new space. And so the bridge building initiative wants to show these are the spaces that your child can come to where they will be safe with they will be supported. And also, these are the resources that we have here at the university. That can help them navigate this college track. A lot of these young people are, first generation students, so that's one of the ways I believe I am trying to pivot my position or launch from my position to help the community. It again, community cultural wealth. I came up in the black community and just a cursory knowledge of black educational history knows that the black community has always believed that you use education to help the wider community. And so I came into this understanding that it is my job and my work to help the community of people that I came up with to have access to the resources that I have access to. Right. I cannot deny that things in my life have changed and look very different than they were when I was a 16 year old black girl in Flint, Michigan, dropping out of high school, not listening to my mom. And so how do I help other people get access to these resources and understand how to navigate this system, which seems so secretive, but it's really not. Right. There's an undercover curriculum, and I want to unveil that. And being here at the university, I think that is one of my commitments. not just to write for journals, I have to do that, of course, and it'll get out to the scholars who read it, but also to continue that community work, and, putting my hand out and, walking people through, like, look, this is what you can do, and these are the possibilities, and look at this whole new world, because when I was a young person, I did not have that until I got into the university system. Did I see these possibilities? And you can't grow to be a thing that you've never seen, right? Correct. So I want, I'm hoping that I can be that thing that people, parents and young people see and say, Oh, we can do that. And, Oh, and she's helping to show us how we can do it. Right. So, yeah. Well,

Host: Jeffrey Anthony: 23:49

good luck on that grant. Who is that with?

Dr. Dawn Demps: 23:50

So, I am working on that with, let me make sure I remember everybody's names, Dr. Regina Deil-Amen, Dr. Julio Cammarota, Dr. Ashley, Dominguez, Dr. Desi Way and I believe I have said everyone. So I'll charge. My mind, not my heart. If I forgot anyone.

Host: Jeffrey Anthony: 24:08

Well, that's a rock star crew right there. So

Dr. Dawn Demps: 24:11

yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And everyone's bringing, particular pieces to empower the community. And then, that's really another thing is young people understanding that you can go all the way to a PhD. Now, PhD may not be for everyone or to a doctoral degree, but to be able to see those people. And so that's why know, the group of people we have working on the bridge building initiative, I think are just inspiring just in their presence because we serve as mirrors, right? We want to be mirrors to young people so they can look and they can see themselves and say, you know, I can go all the way. So that's one of the goals of that initiative.

Host: Jeffrey Anthony: 24:47

That's a beautiful phrase, mirrors to young people. I love that. So, so throughout your research journey, have there been any insights or discoveries that have notably shifted your perspective or approach?

Dr. Dawn Demps: 24:56

So honestly, the thing I have with stories, but not only story but with telling your own story. So my last major piece was an autoethnography that was published in the Journal of Negro Education, and it's autoethnography about some things that I went through with my son at the same time that I was doing my dissertation study. So it just so happened that these things were happening while I was studying this, group of, women who, had created the nonprofit organization and grassroots organization. And then my son was also going through, school exclusion issues and was pushed out of his school program for a long suspension for something. And so it just was telling that story. Had I not done some of the work that I've done since being a PhD student reading about ethnography in general, in general I do ethnography, but autoethnography and the importance of auto ethnography and narrative. And storytelling, even though I personally felt that those things were important. I did not think that in terms of the academy that they were scholarly, right, that they were not able to be used, as data and as evidence or as rigorous scholarship that they were not rigorous enough. So that probably is one of the biggest shifts, I would say, in my own belief system, and I try to help the students that I teach, and I've only taught graduate programs at this point, and so many of those students feel the same way, and they have so much knowledge, and they come, they share their stories, and I was a principal here, and I was a teacher here, and these things happened to me, and I want to study this thing. I was like, well, how come you aren't incorporating what happened to you? Into your research. Well, I didn't think I could. Well, why can't you because it's having an impact on you even choosing this topic, right? And I think that all also researchers, one of the things I'm noticing that's changing academia, I hope it's changing, is this idea of bias and by, trying to appear unbiased means that you show that you are 100 percent objective and you have nothing. You are totally distance from this topic that you're studying. And I push back and say that if you were distance from it, you would not be studying it. There's some reason that you have chosen the topic you have chosen. And so just giving that to my students so they understand that it is okay to weave your story, to acknowledge how your story has impacted the topic area that you've chosen, because it has. I have an aunt who, just retired recently, but she is in the, what we call the hard sciences, and she was a researcher, and she spent the better, as long as I can remember her doing this work, researching Alzheimer's. That was her research. Well, because she's my aunt, I know that she was researching Alzheimer's because her mother, my grandmother, was having symptoms of dementia, right? If she was a qualitative researcher, I would say write that in there. Write that this is part of your positionality. This is part of what has informed why it is you're choosing this thing. So this idea of being unbiased and, an objective, just a plain objective observer. I hope that we are pushing back against that understanding that we are all influenced in some way in some parts of our lives to study a particular thing or research a particular topic because it has some impact on us and just acknowledging it.

Host: Jeffrey Anthony: 28:26

Yeah, I think it's really important that's actually come up in a couple of other podcasts, even in the hard sciences, I'm putting that in quotes. the way you frame your research questions is actually normative. There's an entire philosophy of science and how science is conducted. So just because it's, quantitative doesn't necessarily mean it's non normative or neutral, right? Right, right, right. That's really important. So this is one of my favorite questions. So let's say you were to get onto a time machine and you were to say 20 or 30 years in the future, what shifts or evolutions in K-12 education would you like to see in this future?

Dr. Dawn Demps: 29:00

That's a hard question. It is a hard question, but it's an easy question. I would like to see a future where children are free to learn in the ways that are best for them. I would like to see a future where community learning is just that it is a community project. Flint, Michigan is, the originator of the community schools model, a whole nother podcast we can do for another day. But, I think a true community school model will be one where parents are welcoming where everyone comes around and they are having, conversations and opportunities to learn access to resources and it's a freedom that I don't think that we've seen, in education at all. There is a love, there is a sense of family for all children in the schools, so that this is a place that children cannot wait to come to every day. That they cannot wait to go to school because I'm going to learn this new thing. And I'm going to go in depth with this project that I'm really interested in. And I think that we see pieces of that model. But we don't often see pieces of that model in this country. And we see even fewer pieces of that model in communities where children have historically been marginalized in communities. So we're talking poor communities, black and brown communities, indigenous communities. They do not have access to the resources for that type of educational freedom. So that's what I would like to see. Beauty, love, inclusion, and just freedom to learn in the ways that you best want to learn about the things that you want to learn about.

Host: Jeffrey Anthony: 30:46

Yeah. I hope that future does come about. So we are drawing to the close of our conversation. And at the end of every episode, we love to leave our audience a recommendation or two of what about either a particular book or an article that has been pivotal in shaping your thinking. is there one that you could share with us?

Dr. Dawn Demps: 31:04

Um, so much, yeah, yeah. So I, the way I look at things, I think is, very multidisciplinary. So. a lot of people have influenced my thinking, Brittney Cooper, who, writes on black feminisms, is someone who has definitely influenced my writing, or my perspective. I read her. Her one of her books while I was writing my dissertation, which seemed to have nothing to do with it, but really did influence my writing. Octavia Butler, I read a lot of her. I've read almost all of her books. Again, these are black feminists, or who what we would describe as black feminists. Bell Hooks, if I had to suggest a book, so we'll stick to education. I would say anything by Bell Hooks period. But as an educator, I would say Teaching to Transgress in this particular moment I think that we see a lot of swishing. I like that word. Someone used that word the other day and I said, I like that word because this is idea that things are just moving all about and touching each other. They're not disconnected and they're all together. And there's a lot of swishing going on and it's not settled. And so it's making people feel uncomfortable. And I think in this moment. Thanks. Of switching that we have to have people are brave. And I think that Bell Hooks and teaching to transgress touches on that bravery. And I think that educators and teachers need to be brave and I'm talking from preschool on to academia, right? Have the bravery to push back against some of the silences that are being forced upon us. So I would say Bell Hooks. Okay.

Host: Jeffrey Anthony: 32:48

We'll put that in the show notes. And Dr. Demps, your engagement with us today has not only been enlightening, but also a clarion call to the transformative potential of scholarly activism. The depth of your research into educational policies and the construction of educational leadership charts a course or actionable change in the cultivation of inclusive educational environments. Your contribution empowers us to not just ponder, but to actively partake in the creation of equitable educational landscapes. And thank you listeners for joining us today. We hope this conversation with Dr. Demps invigorated your curiosity and broaden your understandings. Remember, we're back on the first and third Wednesday of every month with fresh insights and conversations. So be sure to tune in until next time, keep your curiosity alive and remember, knowledge is our oasis.