“As I was reading Hooks and Freire, a colleague recommended Adrian Rich's essay "Teaching Language in Open Admissions." It was in that essay that I first read about her experiences teaching at CUNY during open admissions, learning that she taught alongside June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Toni Cade Bambara. Eventually, that essay led me to their archival teaching materials. I was really excited because I found in those materials concrete teaching methods, things they were doing in their own classrooms that I then started trying in my classrooms as well. I also really liked their educational philosophies, thinking about what it means for college to be free and the fact that they were teaching during this revolutionary era. What would that look like today? What would it mean? What could free college bring to our society? What does free college make possible? All of those things coming together led me to the project.”
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Danica Savonick about her marvelous book entitled Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College. This is a riveting and deeply inspiring story of how each of these luminaries in the fields of literature and feminism found their way into the City University of New York in the 1960s, when community activists had forced open what was called the Harvard for the proletariat to admit new classes of Black, brown, and other people of color. Savonick shows through copious archival research how Bambara, Jordan, Lorde, and Rich each came to find radical teaching methods in collaboration with these new students, and how their experiences with this new pedagogy affected their creative and other writing in profound and lasting ways. This is a critical history we can and must learn from today, when federal and state governments have added to the damage and violence done by the neoliberal university. We find exactly the tools and models we need to create spaces for education for liberation both within, but also outside, the Academy.

Danica Savonick is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Cortland. Her current project focuses on the radical writers and artists who taught at the experimental Livingston College (part of Rutgers University) in the 1970s. Her research has appeared in MELUS, American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Radical Teacher, Keywords for Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, Public Books, and The Chronicle of Higher Ed.

https://speakingoutofplace.com
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
Instagram @speaking_out_of_place

“I work in between archeology and anthropology in this field called either historical archeology or contemporary archeology. At the heart of that is the relationship between objects and humans. How do we write about the past or the present in terms of listening to human voices or evidence from things where maybe human voices have been erased or haven't left as much of a mark on the written records as others? Wrapped up with that, though, is always the risk of dehumanization, of the treatment of human lives as if the boundary between a subject and an object is one that is permeable, not in a sort of positive way, but in a more sinister way. There is a long history of people being treated as things.”

In this episode of Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Dan Hicks about the present’s responsibility to itself. How do not only monuments, but also the very idea of monumentality, serve to mystify and perpetuate beliefs that maintain social orders that deserve to be strenuously re-evaluated? Archaeologist and anthropologist Dan Hicks traces the development of a particularly virulent strain of monument-worship, that which emerges out of what he calls “militarist realism,” which harnesses technologies of war, particularly colonial, white supremacist war, to build institutions, disciplines, museums in its image in order to permanently maintain a border between those deemed human subjects and the object-worlds of the non-human—which includes racial others. Rather than grant the past immunity, Hicks argues that we need to decide for ourselves what we chose to remember, and what deserves to be forgotten.

Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at Oxford University, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College. He has written widely on art, heritage, museums, colonialism, and the material culture of the recent past and the near-present. Dan's books include The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, colonial violence and cultural restitution (Pluto 2020) and Every Monument Will Fall: a story of remembering and forgetting (Hutchinson Heinemann 2025). Bluesky/Insta: @ProfDanHicks

www.palumbo-liu.com
https://speakingoutofplace.com
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
Instagram @speaking_out_of_place