Events

“Canon Building is Empire Building,” a phrase attributed to Toni Morrison, a renowned American novelist, essayist, editor, and professor. Morrison, known for her profound works exploring Black American life and culture, critically engaged with the idea of literary canons and how they reflect and perpetuate cultural and power dynamics.
The workshop “”Disrupting the Western Canon”” invites students who feel isolated in their graduate journey and research due to the lack of diversity in resources and the over-reliance on the Western canon. At CGU, students likely interact with dominant scholars in their courses and may identify the exclusion of historically overlooked scholarship as problematic.

A plethora of research approaches and methods emerge from historically pushed-aside communities, such as oral histories, ethnography of refusal, counterstory, and alternative written forms like autoethnography and poetry.

This ADC workshops offers practical ways to disrupt the Western Canon, such as:
· explore other research strategies
· find new libraries and databases
· build community through research and these conversations
· teach and diversify scholarship at work

Our ADC pedagogy offers students language and methods to challenge and thwart the epistemic harm circulating in academia, centering approaches used in a growing movement to diversify literary canons and include a wider range of voices and perspectives. We hope to provide a space for people to learn and grow their research through affirming and anti-racist frameworks.”