Spotlight on Care to feature ‘Liberate Your Research’ workshop series with scholar, author Nadine Naber

LAWRENCE — In its eighth semester, the Spotlight on Care series at the University of Kansas will begin with a three-part workshop, led by Nadine Naber, University of Illinois-Chicago professor of gender & women’s studies and global Asian studies.

The “Liberate Your Research” workshop series will take place from noon to 1 p.m. Feb. 1, March 1 and March 8. Register for the series via Zoom.

Naber, whose research ranges from gender justice in care work related to women and queer people of color to the racialization of Arab and Muslim Americans within the contexts of empire and diaspora, has addressed the central question of “How can Arab American studies respond to sexism, homophobia and racism in ways that do not reinscribe Arab-bashing, Islamophobia or Orientalism?” Her current book in progress focuses on how mother-led activism within Black, Indigenous and people of color communities opens new conceptualizations about the significance of care-work to social movements and new possibilities for expanding reproductive justice, abolitionist and decolonial social movements.

She applies this research to the curriculum she has developed, called “Liberate Your Research,” in which she offers approaches for rethinking the university and what she describes as healing from academic anxiety. This work asks how institutions create conditions that inspire habitual ways of thinking that constrain scholars’ ways of being, working and writing, while affirming researchers at all levels of the university who are inspired to do their work independent of those conditions.

Identifying that habitual patterns can lead to burnout, exhaustion and a lack of motivation to do one’s research, Naber has developed workshops to help researchers name and claim their research interventions and why they are uniquely positioned to achieve healing and writing prosperity. Through this work, scholars can change how they show up, gain clearer access to their own inner motivations and talents, and approach their work with a more grounded and fulfilling perspective.

Naber’s workshop series will help scholars at all levels learn to acknowledge and understand the internal forces that prevent them from thriving within the academy and use that knowledge to transform the anxiety and fear into a well of abundance, radical self- and collective love, and writing prosperity. The workshops will focus on overcoming academic anxieties; naming and claiming individual theories, methods, and interventions; and achieving unique research, writing and teaching goals.

This opportunity for students, faculty and research staff is supported by The Commons, the Institute for Policy & Social Research Center for Compassionate and Sustainable Communities, the Spencer Museum of Art, the Center for Teaching Excellence, the Environmental Studies Program and the Emily Taylor Center for Women & Gender Equity, with additional funding support from the Office of Graduate Studies, the Office of Faculty Affairs and the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging.

For more information, see Liberate Your Research.