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Abstract

In this critical commentary, I describe the influence bell hooks has had on my pedagogy since first reading her book, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, when I was a graduate student in Women’s and Gender Studies in the 1990s. The profound influence hooks’ work had on me, as a first generation, woman of color scholar from a working-class background, cannot be overstated. Her words helped me name and begin to critique and resist the isolation, alienation, and oppressive systems that had, up to that point, shaped my experience and the experience of many women of color in the academy. Her writings inspired me to teach in ways that would engage my students as collaborators and co-creators of feminist knowledge production, to dismantle multiple interlocking systems of oppression.

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