As organizations and institutions responded to calls for racial justice fol­lowing the murder of George Floyd in 2020, many did so in performative ways that maintained the racial status quo. In this article, the author argues that such performativity has been both pervasive and intentional. Drawing parallels be­tween her experiences advocating for racial justice in a nonprofit organization and in an English department, the author explores the type of liberal boutique ac­tivism that, already common in nonprofit spaces, directs much of the discourse on (anti)racism in academic settings and squashes more substantive efforts to challenge white supremacy. The author also explores how her positionality as a white Jewish woman impacted her ex­periences as an antiracist activist in an academic department, illuminating how linkages between racism and antisem­itism are covertly weaponized in white spaces by those who profess interest in social justice but really seek to uphold white supremacy.

Contributors to this symposium, current and former two-year college teacher-scholar-activists, reflect upon bell hooks’s legacy share the lessons they have learned from her work, and consider how hooks’s teachings might inform our praxis and move us forward as a profession.

In this article, I analyze the trigger warning, a pedagogical practice often framed as student-responsive and trauma-informed, to elucidate the ways in which trauma-informed pedagogy functions rhetorically to pathologize and individualize experiences of racism and other societal inequities that cause collective trauma. I draw upon original interview data and rhetorical analysis through a systems framework to explore how reductive pedagogical practices developed within the confines of a white, western notion of trauma may subsequently perpetuate students’ marginalization. Finally, I highlight the potential for more comprehensive, inclusive pedagogies to address student trauma, acknowledge societal conditions that impact individual experiences, and shift popular discourse that pathologizes trauma.

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This provocation addresses the prevalence of “scholarly laziness” in academic reading and considers its effect on scholarly writing in ELA and teacher education classrooms. The essay is constructed as twelve theses (a nod to the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation and the contemporary propagation of standardized rubrics as doctrine). Blending narrative and scholarship, these brief statements consider possible reasons for this so-called laziness, ways it manifests in education and scholarship, why it is a problem, and possible approaches to encouraging more critical reading and writing practices among students, preservice teachers, and scholars.