Rowing Upstream

Efforts to Develop an Authentic Transdisciplinary PhD in Justice Studies in New Orleans

Steven W. Mumford, Christopher J. Broadhurst, Kim Martin Long

Introduction: The pursuit of justice in New Orleans

The City of New Orleans in the southern United States has a complicated history with racial justice. Many of the city’s most notable triumphs were borne out of efforts to rectify grave injustices perpetrated on New Orleanians of Color. To note, the United States Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) originated in a strategic act of civil disobedience in New Orleans, yet resulted in the ignominious “separate but equal” doctrine sanctioning racist jurisprudence in the U.S. for more than half a century. After the decision was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Ruby Bridges became a national symbol of the Civil Rights movement as she desegregated an all-white elementary school in New Orleans in 1960, at the age of six. The angry white mobs heckling her inspired the disturbing Norman Rockwell painting The Problem We All Live With, yet Ruby was unflinched by their jeers and likened the commotion to the common New Orleans experience of a raucous Mardi Gras parade. Justice in New Orleans – or in the rest of the world for that matter – does not come easy, and its pursuit is not for the faint of heart.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina exposed additional grave injustices and racial inequities as it flooded 80 percent of New Orleans for weeks. The most vulnerable residents who were unable to evacuate bore the storm’s most devastating harms, including trauma that remains rooted in the city’s collective unconscious to this day. This catastrophic event and its aftermath awakened much of the rest of the United States, and even the world, to the continued presence of until-then unfathomable poverty and racial injustice in their midst, as well as the inability (or unwillingness) of public institutions to do much about it. So it goes, it seems, that lessons of (in)justice are built on the backs of the disenfranchised, and progress is slow, uneven, and meandering, like the Mississippi River that empties to the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans.

New Orleanians of Color might be forgiven for learning to live with, even tolerate, injustice. To call them “resilient” at this point adds insult to injury, because the term alone does not acknowledge the pain they begrudgingly endure, or the sinking feeling that it is inflicted by forces outside of their control. Also like the Mississippi River, injustice in this region is a force of nature, an integral part of the city since its roots in European colonial expansion and the slave trade. Fighting injustice is thus like rowing upstream, deliberately traveling upriver against a primordial current. The effort is exhausting, and the briefest reprieve risks erasing whatever tenuous and hard-won progress was made. This does not mean New Orleanians have stopped rowing, but only that they soberly recognize the powerful currents pushing back, adjusting their expectations and conserving their energy accordingly. As New Orleans has learned to live with the Mississippi River, so the city co-exists with injustice—acknowledging its power and anticipating its wrath while taking every small opportunity to brave its depths for recompense.

Currents of the Neoliberal University

New Orleans is a microcosm of the world, combining disparate elements present throughout the globe. The westernized university too is a microcosm of global European and Western hegemony. An institution rooted in Christian evangelism, commercialism, and colonialism, the westernized university is accused of inadvertently perpetuating – or worse yet, consciously promoting – a problematic status quo, even as its rhetoric claims to advance often-generic ideas of justice through the meritocratic pursuit and dissemination of knowledge. However, normative and collectivist notions of justice – or the aspiration that opportunities and privileges be fairly and equitably distributed within society – dissolve against institutional pressures prioritizing individual career advancement and material comfort. By bringing critical thinkers under its aegis, the university is especially vulnerable to critique.

Like the currents of a river, pressures pull on university actors at multiple depths, flowing from an upstream source of perverse neoliberal incentives that prize revenue generation and efficiency at the institutional (or more aptly, corporate) level. Within this practice, university students are not learners but customers to be satisfied, promising dependable revenue streams to the university. Those who become graduate students are socialized into disciplines within which they compete to “out-present and out-publish each other” (Kezar & Posselt, 2019, p. 217). If they succeed, the most competitive (dare we say luckiest?) students might become tenure-track faculty, where they are pressured by academic capitalism to secure grants and publish research to increase their personal reputation and thus the university’s prestige and ability to attract more revenues (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Ambitious faculty who become administrators are held even more directly accountable for attaining the university’s ever-increasing financial goals (Lincoln, 2018). And so all stakeholders (shareholders) are to some extent subsumed by the neoliberal undertow.

Where does this leave the manifold pursuit of truth and justice? These espoused societal goals are too often suborned by individual incentives. In essence, higher education professionals are discouraged from engaging in social justice and equity work and instead “initiated into a system that encourages or forces them to focus on careerist goals and priorities” (Kezar & Posselt, 2019, p. 217). Programs in disciplines that are at the forefront of engaging in social justice are often in precarious situations and vulnerable to closure; financial justifications can be given to end such programs without recognizing their important role in combating inequities (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Working towards an equitable society is an integral part of the public good, which the neoliberal university sees as conflicting with the core concept of education as a private good. Worse yet, those actors who successfully pursue social justice and equity within the university’s existing incentive structure may actually reinforce neoliberalism, “thereby reifying the very systems that they are designed to disrupt, deconstruct, and combat” (Kezar & Posselt, 2019, p. 210). As an example of this, faculty that pursue research grants and produce traditional forms of scholarship, prized in the neoliberal university, may avoid engaging in forms of research, such as community-engaged scholarship, that can have a greater impact on equity yet are less incentivized in tenure and promotion. Instead, their scholarship becomes cloaked in the rhetoric of justice theory while diverting resources and attention from its practice in real-world contexts.

In a neoliberal culture that promotes efficiency, educational leaders have limited opportunities to engage in reflection and dialogue—two foundations of democratic decision-making. The consequent top-down decision-making often lacks inclusion of marginalized voices needed to foster social justice and equity. The perverse incentives perpetuated within the neoliberal university threaten the potential for transdisciplinary graduate programs, particularly those aiming to advance social justice. By “transdisciplinary,” we mean programs that guide students in integrating intellectual contributions across a variety of academic disciplines, developing a unique “scholarly identity,” co-producing knowledge, and pursuing an action research agenda that actualizes their values (Steward, 1990). Such programs rely on resourcing an inclusive and dialogic process of program design (McFadden et al., 2011) and demand attention to faculty self-care (Sellberg et al., 2021). Under such severe constraints, what are the prospects for justice-focused, transdisciplinary doctoral education in the neoliberal university?

Justice Studies at the University of New Orleans

It is within this neoliberal context that we attempted to answer this question and to develop and implement an authentic transdisciplinary doctorate in Justice Studies at the University of New Orleans (UNO), “rowing upstream” as it were against strong cross-currents.

UNO is an urban, public research university serving about 6,500 undergraduate and 1,500 graduate students across four colleges. Upon its founding in 1958, UNO became the first racially integrated public university in the South, although we will discuss how this superficial moniker glosses over the ugly history. In an attempt to further realize this founding vision and catalyze positive change in the surrounding community, university administrators proposed a doctoral program in Justice Studies in 2019 and gained state approval for its continued development and implementation in summer 2020, leading to the launch of its inaugural cohort of seven students in fall 2021. The flexible curriculum, adapted from the Social Justice PhD program developed at Arizona State University (2021; see Cavender & Lauderdale’s chapter also in this volume), consists of 57 credits comprised of core coursework in justice theory and research methods, electives centered around one of four concentrations – social, criminal, educational, or environmental justice – and a dissertation. The program was intended to transcend disciplinary boundaries across the social sciences and humanities and unite decentralized faculty around a shared vision for justice.

Complicating attempts at creating new academic programs were the state’s significant budgetary challenges and disinvestments in higher education during the prior decade. In 2009 at the start of the global financial crisis, and not long after Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of UNO’s lakeside campus, state funds provided about two-thirds of total higher education revenues in Louisiana, with the remaining one-third covered by tuition and fees (Louisiana Board of Regents, 2019). However, by 2019, the funding mix was almost exactly reversed, placing greater financial burden on students and universities. Partially as a result, UNO had downsized faculty, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, and eliminated doctoral programs in Political Science and Sociology. Any new program would need to fit within tight budgetary constraints and demonstrate evidence of a positive economic return on investment in terms of graduates’ increased personal income, thereby contributing to increased state revenues and savings in state expenses on social programs.

The doctorate in Justice Studies, proposed and championed by the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Education, and Human Development (hereafter “College”) who co-authored this chapter, was not narrowly designed to foster economic benefits for graduates or the state. Rather, our program was an attempt to catalyze a direct response to obvious social injustices plaguing New Orleans and the surrounding region (Stickney, 2020), including racial and gender disparities in socioeconomic and educational outcomes, the highest incarceration rate in the world, and acute environmental threats. The program was conceived as a vehicle for encouraging faculty and students to conduct research and build partnerships prioritizing the community’s urgent needs, equipping students to apply sharpened critical thinking skills towards questioning assumptions and creating new actionable knowledge within a circumscribed – though not necessarily disciplinary – context. A doctorate in Justice Studies, then, might prepare graduates to identify deeper antecedents of injustice and employ careful, empirical experimentation to help deconstruct and reverse them.

However, such noble rhetoric is easier said than realized. At every turn, the program risked – and continues to risk – being coopted by neoliberal forces, eager to water down its authentic values to attract external funding without challenging an unjust status quo. From our experience, programs that do not quickly turn a profit lose the support of leadership, while those that achieve financial sustainability risk being targeted for their resources. UNO’s strong International Education program, for instance, was recently dismantled partly because it achieved self-sustaining financial stability and was subsequently drained of its resources, both in personnel and facilities, by administrators eager to subsidize programs viewed as more mission-critical. In our roles as guardians of our fledgling program, we the authors pledged to nurture and preserve the program’s authenticity, to the extent we might claim it, often against our own best interests and organizational incentives as determined by the neoliberal currents deluging us as university professionals.

Edgewalking

In the proceeding sections, we describe the particular institutional pressures on each of our roles, as the founding Dean of the program, a tenured Associate Professor who advised the program while directing a successful and potentially rival doctoral program in Educational Administration, and a tenure-track Assistant Professor enlisted as the program’s founding coordinator. Using the first-person, we reflect and share how each of us rowed tirelessly “upstream” against these currents but always felt inadequate at the task. Furthermore, we discuss the risks involved in our efforts, not only to ourselves, but more importantly to authentic pursuit of the program’s espoused mission, and to the students and broader New Orleans community we hoped to engage and support.

Like the concept of “edgewalkers” (Beals et al., 2019), we are simultaneously “of” the proverbial river as we attempt to row against its downstream currents. We share a common self-concept as academics, with professional training and employment histories in public and higher education administration, as well as theoretical doctorates in the social sciences and humanities that have socialized us into our disciplines and the neoliberal paradigm. We strive to be transparent and self-reflective in sharing our experiences of developing the program, while accepting the constraints to our candor created by the very institutional incentives we critique. We are also white, cisgender, able-bodied members of the educated, professional class, transplanted to New Orleans, all characteristics that afford us great privilege, but that ultimately close us off from the lived experiences of the majority Black residents of New Orleans, and to all those who endure the city’s most egregious and persistent injustices. While we desire to speak with authority, we recognize that such authority is bestowed upon us by unjust forces. Like edgewalkers, we self-consciously walk these boundaries, and humbly acknowledge that others’ work for justice in New Orleans and beyond is more steadfast, risky, and personal than our own.

Kim’s work: Currents pushing against the founding Dean

Administrators of the neoliberal university are foremost pressured to realize increased revenues, such that “financial scrutiny increasingly drives behaviors” (Kezar & Posselt, 2019, p. 4). In the context of the State of Louisiana’s defunding of higher education in recent decades, UNO anchors its budget on student enrollment numbers, which translate into tuition dollars, as well as federal and private grants. As Dean of the university’s largest college, to create a new PhD in Justice Studies, I first had to demonstrate to the university’s President and the Louisiana Board of Regents that the program would be budget neutral and eventually revenue-generating, not to mention potentially attractive to donors and private grant-makers.

The Louisiana Board of Regents is a 15-member board appointed by the Governor to plan, coordinate, review, and budget public higher education statewide (Louisiana Board of Regents, 2019). Similar to other states, all new academic programs launched by public universities in Louisiana must first gain approval from a majority of the state Board through a yearlong process of submitting a letter of intent followed by full proposal, describing the proposed program’s purpose, curriculum, need and relevance, projected student enrollment, faculty involvement, administrative support and resources, and projected costs and revenues. Critical factors considered by the Board include strong projected demand and enrollment, in addition to the program’s contribution to the state’s wellbeing by meeting workforce development needs and non-duplication of existing programs.

Several aspects of the new program made it fiscally feasible while risking its quality. First, the doctoral program would leverage existing faculty and coursework from throughout the university and thus demand few new resources beyond personnel costs for administrative coordination and staffing up to four new core courses. That said, it would depend on sufficient coverage of justice-related issues in each of its four concentrations within the current university catalog and regular course offerings. Additional funds for hiring adjuncts or paying for course overages were scarce, and even rarer for hiring full-time tenure-track faculty, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic depleted enrollment numbers and increased operational costs starting in fall 2020. Existing faculty were enlisted to participate in the program in the name of service and furthering their own research agenda and publication record, which could weigh positively in future tenure and promotion decisions.

On the student side of the ledger, the program’s relatively light credit requirements helped to reduce students’ total tuition costs and promote positive net economic benefits for graduates. The minimal cost of the degree, along with its uniqueness in the region and strong expressed demand among students in UNO’s existing Master’s programs lacking doctorates, such as Sociology and Pubic Administration, promised adequate enrollment absent opportunities for student financial support. That said, no assistantships and few dedicated scholarships were made available to support enrollment and retention of students from marginalized backgrounds, potentially skewing the program’s demographic makeup towards self-funded white students or forcing students to take on the long-term liability of federal student loans with uncertain payoff. Further, a PhD in Justice Studies does not suggest a clear career path or salary benefits within or outside of academia, and particularly in disciplinary-focused academic departments where tenure-track positions are increasingly scarce (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004).

Nevertheless, the program intuitively showed great promise for attracting grants and donations, particularly from private funders who share its justice-oriented mission and place-based focus on New Orleans. UNO’s President implicitly agreed, as he wholeheartedly supported the program and personally shepherded the proposal through the Board of Regents’ review process, despite UNO’s significant financial challenges. The program was framed as the first of its kind in the state and thus non-duplicative, addressing documented problems of injustice. Emphasizing broad precepts of justice in the proposal helped to avoid controversy among Regents of different geographies and political ideologies in a majority-conservative state. By coincidence, the Board of Regents voted on the proposal in summer 2020, when current events including the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police further galvanized support for a program centered on justice. UNO’s PhD in Justice Studies was approved for development and implementation in August 2020, but without a specific fundraising plan for seeding the program’s development.

In this way, the broad appeal of justice was sufficient to engender political support – and silence opposition – to the program’s proposal within the university’s administration and state decision-making apparatus. However, it had not yet cashed in on its potential to generate actual resources, threatening its ability to make good on its promises of delivering a robust curriculum, attracting diverse and well-qualified faculty and students, and cultivating meaningful benefits to students and the broader community. At this point in its development, the “program” – like many idealistic proposals – consisted of rhetoric, projected figures, and use of existing (human) resources. Its implementation would depend on the goodwill of university actors to actualize the vision into a functioning and sustainable program. Strong financial currents pushed against, not with, the program, from its inception.

Chris’ work: Currents pushing against an Associate Professor advising the program

As a recently tenured Associate Professor and director of UNO’s long-standing and popular PhD in Educational Administration, I – the second author of this chapter and an informal advisor to the PhD in Justice Studies – faced a different set of neoliberal currents than the Dean. Tenure affords me a degree of job security and academic freedom. On the other hand, after years earning my place in the university’s hierarchy, I have my own commitments to my primary program, discipline, and School of Education, my own courses that I have painstakingly developed and refined, and my own research that demand much of my time and energy. I do not claim to speak on behalf of other tenured faculty involved in the PhD in Justice Studies, or to always share their particular pressures and concerns, but I believe we face similar incentives when choosing whether and how much we commit ourselves to making this new program successful. As serving as a co-author of this chapter might imply, I determined the program was worth my investment.

From the start, the PhD in Justice Studies was presented by the Dean as a collaborative effort, and the prospect of the university’s centering justice in New Orleans was galvanizing for faculty who had been dedicated to this pursuit for years or even decades. To call direct attention to our shared values, the Dean convened a monthly speaker series in which UNO faculty from across the College discussed how their research and teaching intersect with justice, and participation was robust. It seems that justice is inherently transdisciplinary. Faculty were also invited to collaboratively shape every aspect of the program, from its mission, vision, and learning objectives enshrined in the Program Handbook, to the reading lists emphasized in core courses, to the application requirements and selection criteria for prospective students. The program benefitted from the collective wisdom and interest of the College faculty, elicited by the program coordinator through a series of meetings and surveys.

But not every step in the program’s development was “smooth sailing.” The collective action most often stumbled because of resource constraints and the limited value of “service” credit among tenured faculty who are already deeply involved in university governance. The top-down budgetary process naturally invites competition among disciplinary-specific departments and programs for allocation of faculty (especially new tenure-track hires to replace retiring senior scholars), funds for paying adjunct instructors, teaching courseloads, and scholarships and assistantships to attract students. While my own PhD in Educational Administration was already over-enrolled, our School of Education lacks faculty to cover the administrative workload, and I was reluctant to potentially lose students to a rival program when “student credit hours” (SCHs) are one of the currencies that drive academic capitalism.

Could this new doctoral program, requiring fewer total credits and including a concentration in educational justice, compete with my own program just as we were hitting our stride? Could its flexibility, due in part to lack of disciplinary norms, prove more attractive to students who want to transform unjust systems, as the PhD in Educational Administration (and my own research) had always emphasized? Despite these rational questions, I helped promote the program by advertising it at a sponsored conference, advising Master’s students to consider it and supporting their applications, and permitting students in the PhD in Justice Studies to enroll in courses offered throughout the School of Education. Without access to our school’s courses to fulfill the program’s large elective requirement, the educational justice concentration would have been anemic.

One decision in developing the new program proved most controversial and contentious among faculty: the details of the program’s two required core courses in research methods. Every social science graduate program in the College – including our two existing PhDs in Educational Administration and Urban Studies – require their own disciplinary-specific methods course sequence. Our School of Education offers a robust suite of qualitative and quantitative methods coursework. Some faculty were uncomfortable with the idea of creating new, potentially duplicative and small, courses in interdisciplinary “justice research.” These concerns threatened to derail the program’s approval by the College’s Courses and Curriculum Committee, made up primarily of faculty, despite the broad participation of College faculty in developing the specific proposals presented to the committee. Ultimately, the case for a transdisciplinary methods requirement (Scott et al., 2022) that not only crossed the social sciences (and related epistemologies) but also humanities was persuasive enough to silence the critics, who were nonetheless unwilling to teach these new courses.

That said, tenured faculty supported the program’s curriculum in other ways. For one, high-ranking faculty offered to teach ad hoc “Special Topics in Justice” elective courses that would highlight their research and interests, and could be cross-listed with special topics electives in their own discipline to preserve SCHs and therefore a portion of their departmental budget. Some faculty tentatively committed to serving on future general examination and dissertation committees within their expertise, aided by the inclusion of a three-credit dissertation workshop course in the curriculum to lessen their advising burden. And faculty helped correct the record on administration’s rhetoric about the program where needed, such as by making clear that UNO’s integration in the 1950s was fraught, featuring the presence of angry white mobs (and sometimes complicit instructors and staff) in the initial years who threatened students of color with violence and segregated the campus. Tenured faculty were and continue to be a critical resource for the program, offering their expertise and untethered voices, often pushing back against currents that pull them towards narrow disciplinary lanes.

Steven’s work: Currents pushing against an Assistant Professor coordinating the program

As an untenured but tenure-track Assistant Professor who served as the Program’s founding coordinator through its development and now first year of its first cohort, I (the first author of this chapter) faced a different set of powerful neoliberal currents. When asked by the Dean to serve in this capacity, I was happy to because it fit with my transdisciplinary research interests on the regional nonprofit sector’s role in promoting equitable disaster recovery, promised opportunities to work with highly qualified doctoral students (whereas my Political Science department had lost its doctorate before my arrival), might benefit from my connections with community-based organizations and place-based funders in New Orleans, and allowed me to work closely with the Dean and senior faculty, building connections, shadowing their roles, and gaining service credit for my tenure application. Although I was advised by some faculty to protect my time and energy to avoid burnout, I perhaps naively threw myself into the task.

At the same time, I recognized my own personal limitations: I was relatively new to academia, having earned a transdisciplinary PhD in Public Policy and Administration with aspirations to conduct applied, community-engaged research, and struggling to publish research initially, which I was continuously reminded is the most important criteria in tenure decisions. I did not yet have a name for myself in my field or New Orleans, and faculty within my own department and Master of Public Administration program had been leaving without replacement since I started at UNO. To overcome these deficiencies and strengthen my hand, I shared the Dean’s commitment to collaborative governance of the program, engaging faculty from throughout the College, the expertise of staff throughout the university (although many positions were vacant or suffered from high turnover), and an advisory group of diverse community members who might help steer the ship in an authentically just direction. By building a committed team, I surmised, I might buffer the program against the inevitable waves of criticism (both warranted and not), and model justice through participatory planning.

The biggest challenge has been the sheer time commitment to lead an endeavor this new and complex. Collaboration takes time, and my learning curve has been steep, in terms of the theoretical and methodological content the curriculum would cover, the bureaucratic buoys to maneuver around, and perhaps most importantly, the personal relationships that would be needed. This outlay of time has competed with my own research agenda and publication record, although volumes like this have helped me find alignment between my scholarship and service. The program promises to attract students and grants later on, but I am currently in a sprint race towards tenure to maintain job security. While time is a finite resource, I have been able to make it available, and my belief in the program’s vision has given me energy, perhaps at the expense of self-care (Sellberg et al., 2021).

The primary drain on my energy has been political concerns. Louisiana is a politically conservative state, and lawmakers have proposed a ban on teaching “critical race theory,” with implications for teaching about justice-related issues. At the same time, New Orleans is a staunchly progressive city. Representing a public university that serves both jurisdictions, I have found the narrow and rocky rapids difficult to navigate, especially as I lack tenure and feel constrained from fully taking command of the oars. This strain has surfaced, for instance, in my co-development of the first core justice theory course, taught by another junior faculty member willing to dedicate his limited time to the effort. After consulting with faculty from a range of disciplines, we organized the course chronologically. At first, the syllabus mostly featured white male authors, especially in the early weeks. Students were understandably critical of this approach, and we wisely worked to redesign the course for its next iteration, arranging topics thematically so that more traditionally taught works are placed in conversation with historical and contemporary critiques and alternative visions of justice (Scott et al., 2022).

I also fear that the program could be viewed as inauthentic by the community, threatening its impact, and more selfishly, my reputation outside of the university. UNO is a predominately white institution that enjoys only limited trust within majority-Black New Orleans, especially around issues of justice that are much more forcefully addressed by local historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). The program itself could be seen to siphon limited state resources and attention away from these already-underfunded universities. Without sufficient scholarship funds and assistantships, I have struggled to attract and enroll students of color – including international students – into the program, threatening its legitimacy, but also the program’s solvency in the eyes of administrators seeking ever-growing enrollments. We risk overselling the economic benefits of a transdisciplinary doctorate in Justice Studies, and undervaluing the opportunity costs. And I lack stipends or other compensation for the community advisory group I recruited with help from faculty, which risks tokenistically extracting their expertise (Fredericks, 2009). Without resources and community trust in the university, I fear the program could reproduce systemic injustices; that is what depletes me, while driving me forward at the same time.

Conclusion: The power of justice

In defiance of the powerful downstream currents in the direction of entrenched injustice, we trudge on. We have found strength in numbers, and the clarion call of justice has helped us row in concert and enlist others on our odyssey. By approaching each decision as authentically as we know how – often meaning in humble collaboration with diverse others – we have started to gain speed, such as by attracting a grant from a social justice-oriented private foundation to develop the justice research methods sequence as service learning courses. As students and community-based organizations lend their passion and energy, our burden starts to lift, although we worry that our reliance on their sweat does not equitably distribute the workload.

Justice is aspirational, setting a vision we may never reach, but perhaps can feel closer to with each collective stroke of our oars. That is the power of justice, and of the broad community of edgewalkers (or in our metaphor, rowers) who tirelessly pursue it. Neoliberal currents seize on individual opportunism to divide and conquer, thereby sustaining unjust institutions. But New Orleans has always transcended the individual, just as jazz, Mardi Gras, and great food blend singular identities into a qualitatively distinct whole, greater than the sum of their parts. We are not so bold as to try to reverse the river’s flow, and we have run out of energy at various stages of our journey. But together we continue rowing upstream, to a beat that is bigger than us and that we did not originate. We hope our small, incomplete journey might inspire others to grab a paddle, catch New Orleans’ infectious rhythm, and start rowing with us upstream toward justice.

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Notes

This chapter was last revised in late 2022 and reflects the authors’ roles, contexts, and understandings at that particular moment in time. The chapter’s contents reflect the authors’ views and not necessarily those of the institution with which we are or were affiliated.