Abstract

tatiana Jefferson's face shows on the large screen. Carmen Kynard looks straight at the audience packed into the Irvine Auditorium at University of Pennsylvania and asks us to consider how our teaching, our research, and our activism respond to the life and murder of Jefferson, a 28-year old Black woman fatally shot by police in her own home a week earlier. Kynard posed this question during her keynote address at the third biennial Conference on Community Writing as part of her overall challenge to community writing and literacy scholars, teachers, and activists not to confuse the job with "the work. " In her essay "' All I Need Is One Mic': A Black Feminist Community Meditation on the Work, the Job, and the Hustle (& Why So Many of Yall Confuse This Stuff), " which expands on her keynote address, Kynard argues that a Black feminist imaginative is essential for dismantling white supremacy in our classrooms. Since Kynard's keynote in October 2019, many, many more Black people have been murdered by police, in the streets and in their homes. The antiracism protests happening daily in cities across the country as we write this Introduction in Summer 2020 only heighten the urgency of Kynard's question. How, in everything we do, are we addressing white supremacy and the unrelenting violence against Black and Brown lives? Through a series of meditations and counterstories, Kynard navigates her own and imagined classrooms to investigate why she has "been sent" to do the work she does. Her advisor, Suzanne Carothers, urged Kynard, "do not confuse the WORK with the JOB. " Ultimately, Kynard finds a violence in universities that we must counter through radical and disruptive antiracist work, which we must do often in spite of job requirements or the professionalization obligations that Kynard calls "the hustle. " In fact, "the work, " the real work of justice, "the healing and regenerative practices" we're called to, may in fact run counter to our jobs insofar as these jobs are tied to the violence of institutional, linguistic, and pedagogical racism. How do we center Atatiana Jefferson in our work? Celebrated, award-winning artist Michelle Angela Ortiz has spent the last twenty years as a public artist, community arts educator, activist, and filmmaker, using art as a tool for social change and cultural expression. In "Amplifying Community Voices through Public Art, " her CCW keynote address originally delivered at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Ortiz shows us and explains several of her large-scale mural projects from around the world. In places as varied as Philadelphia, PA and Buenos Aires, Argentina, Ortiz has worked alongside populations such as patients living with mental illness and farmer's market vendors. Ortiz explains how through word and image, her murals highlight the culture and memories of indigenous peoples in the United States and immigrant families separated from one another. In this essay,