In this program profile, we describe how the FYC program at Texas A&M University-San Antonio is working towards developing an antiracist and decolonial program in response to our recognition of the racialized violence and injustice the program was unintentionally inflicting on our student population. We structure this profile using comadrismo, a conversation between two Latina faculty, to describe their experiences around five themes: labor division and equity, assessment and social justice, revising programmatic documents, professional development, and constraints and shortcomings. Furthermore, we discuss the most salient aspects of this work for programs that may also be interested in seeking social justice through antiracism and decolonization. Specifically, we work through and identify three forms of labor we have learned are necessary to engaging in this work: honest and critical self-interrogation, faculty buy-in and community building, and an understanding that this kind of work is an ongoing process.

At a historical moment when both violence and its mass mediation proliferate, this essay takes as its exigence the reinforcing and troubling relationships uniting violence, image, and vision. It offers rhetorical looking as a pedagogical strategy designed to undermine violence through visual engagement, and it focuses on the atrocity image—a photographic depiction of human-on-human violence—as both a site of violence and a site for intervening in violence. Comprising four interlocking and reciprocal tactics that operate nonlinearly, rhetorical looking performs slow looking, a mode of perception that moves beyond reception and critique to attend to a photograph’s image content and to the perceptual habits by which that content is evoked. By reflecting on its own processes—revealing agency and answerability in looking—rhetorically looking potentially fosters actions that respond to rather than dismiss violence.