Negotiating Your Existence: The Intersectionality of Respectability Politics
6Great Minds, Brave Spaces
Drea Finley from Colgate University
March 15, 2019
Drea Finley is a black, feminist scholar and activist born and raised in Buffalo, New York. Drea graduated with a dual degree in Sociology and honors in Women’s Studies from Colgate University in 2013. Currently, Drea serves as an Administrative Dean for administrative advising and Director of First Generation programs at Colgate University and is in the process of completing their master’s degree in Cultural Foundations of Education at Syracuse University. Drea lives their life as an openly proud Black, queer, differently- abled, woman who focuses on holistic interpretations of healing justice and radical activism. As a deep intellectual, Drea works to interrogate systems of oppression through community organizing and higher education platforms.
In this workshop, Drea investigates what it means to navigate respectability politics within higher education. Finley specifically looks at how respectability politics are a continuum of behaviors and attitudes that reproduce dominant norms and how those norms play out on certain bodies within higher education. Respectability politics depends on acceptably performing gender, race, class and other identities in order to maintain social, professional, academic and economic capital. So this begs the question of change. Is true resistance, change, inclusion and social justice possible within Higher Education if we are all subject and bound to these politics?