Back to Normal” and Continuing to Grow: Resources, Opportunities, and Relevant Notre Dame Policies for Community Organizations in Fall 2021

August 19, 2021 | 11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m. | virtual event

Dave Lassen, Ph.D., Program Director, Community-Engaged Learning Program

Lulama Moyo, M.A., Assistant Program Director, Community-Engaged Learning Program

Fall semester 2021 is almost here and it brings with it an exciting development: a return to in-person community-university partnerships! Please join us to kick off the new academic year with a conversation about new possibilities, current Notre Dame policies, and community preferences for collaborating in 2021-22. This event will introduce new resources and offer space for any questions you may have about working with Notre Dame students, faculty, and staff this year.

Like you, we are excited and relieved to begin a year that will once again include in-person engagement and community events on-campus. After more than 18 months of limited engagement, we are eager to have Notre Dame students, faculty, and staff collaborate with South Bend area organizations more fully and in-person once more. We will forever be grateful for the adaptability, ingenuity, and patience shown by so many in recent months. While COVID-19 will continue to be a part of our lives for the foreseeable future, your continued commitment, insights, and innovation have allowed us to make significant progress in returning to usual patterns of collaboration. 

At the same time, of course, “back to normal” is only a starting point. The Center for Social Concerns is committed to working energetically with members of the community to continue to improve, expand, and elevate the size and quality of our community partnerships. This Engaged Learning Forum will therefore present new resources and engagement possibilities we are developing based on what we have learned in recent months. Please join us to learn more about these resources and lend your voice to their continued development. As always, we remain committed to positive community impact and your perspective is essential in that process.

Beyond Sanctuary: Changing the Subject to Immigrant-Led Movements for Justice

July 8,  2021 | 11am-12:15pm | virtual event | join via Zoom

Dara Marquez, Volunteer Field Organizer with Movimiento Cosecha

Jason Shenk, Quaker Minister and Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS) course instructor

Janna L. Hunter-Bowman, Ph.D,. AMBS Assistant Professor of Peace Studies and Christian Social Ethics

“Excuse me, what if what we need and want is not to go into your sanctuary but for you to join us in the streets? Will you do that?” asked Dara Marquez, during a 2017 gathering with faith communities that were preparing to provide sanctuary in their buildings.

Immigration is a major issue for the North American churches, and projections of climate migration suggest it will become an even larger one. The sanctuary movement has been the primary model for churches responding to immigrants since the 1980s. In it, churches are the subject and immigrants the vulnerable beneficiaries. This poses a problem for Movimiento Cosecha, a national immigrant-led movement that uses strikes, boycotts, and other nonviolent means to fight for dignity, respect and permanent protection for undocumented immigrants. Many of the immigrant leaders constituting Cosecha’s base are people of Christian faith. Yet Cosecha members find that churches tend to ignore immigrants’ agency, including with movements like Cosecha.  This propensity has contributed to various forms of disconnection, including between Cosecha members and their nourishing communities. This participatory research project aims to expose limitations of common approaches to immigrant communities and the troubling assumptions that often accompany them. For example, the sanctuary model alone is no longer viable due to assumptions about agency and vulnerability that govern it. The initiative explores approaches that center immigrant agency.

This conversation will be led by engaged research partners Dara Marquez, Jason Shenk, and Janna L. Hunter-Bowman. They look forward to discussing their model of engaged research, which delineates the relationship between practice and research, as well as the initiative’s contributions to both. As a campus community that strives to build relationships of love and justice informed by Catholic Social Teaching, this is an opportunity to consider how we show up for immigrant populations and how we can be more accountable in our community-university partnerships.

Anti-Asian Violence in South Bend and Indiana: Understanding and Combating Discrimination in Our Communities

June 29, 2021 | 11am-12:15pm | virtual event | join via Zoom

Tengfei Luo, Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, University of Notre Dame

Black Lives Matter South Bend Representatives

Sharon Yoon, Assistant Professor of Korean Studies, University of Notre Dame

Kristine Yuen, LinkedIn Design Manager, Notre Dame alumna, and former South Bend resident

Lulama Moyo, Center for Social Concerns, University of Notre Dame

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, people of Asian descent around the world have experienced increased attacks, discrimination, and unfair blame for the development and spread of the coronavirus. In the United States, these attacks continue to rise exponentially with perpetrators emboldened by the normalization of racial slurs such as “China virus” that give tacit encouragement for bigotry and xenophobia.

Of course, Anti-Asian bigotry in the United States is nothing new. From the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to the recent Muslim ban, anti-Asian discrimination has been written into government policy that, in turn, has normalized everyday expressions of discrimination.

As recent the high-profile killings of four Sikh men in Indianapolis and food truck driver Shane Nguyen in Fort Wayne have shown, this discrimination is occurring in our state, our region of Northern Indiana, and in South Bend. 

Crafting New Tables: Reimagining Our Research Community as it Relates to Racial Justice in South Bend

June 15, 2021 | 11:00am-12:15pm | virtual | join via Zoom

Amaryst Parks, University of Notre Dame PhD student in Peace Studies and Sociology

Debra Stanley, Co-founder of Imani Unidad

De Bryant, Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Social Action Project at Indiana University of South Bend

Lulama Moyo, Community Engaged Learning Assistant Program Director, Center for Social Concerns

Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to the United States Congress in 1968, once said: “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” This metaphor, in its many manifestations, has helped propel conversation surrounding power, privilege, and positionality. But we are realizing that it’s no longer enough to get a “seat at the table” anymore especially when we are crafting strategies for intersectional racial justice work in Black and Brown communities and bringing these narratives to the forefront of the academy. This is especially important when the academy is seen by many as a silencing colonial space and “[…]scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonized peoples” (Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith 2012). When navigating effective participatory research we need to advocate for rebuilding our tables together. Please join us in reimagining our own community-university tables. The conversation will be led by Amaryst Parks, a University of Notre Dame PhD student in Peace Studies and Sociology. Their research concerns paths to liberation (especially for young Black people) and intergenerational, learning- and learner-centered education spaces. Amaryst will be joined by Debra Stanley, De Bryant, and other expert colleagues from the consortium universities and community.