Kansas State University

Shireen Roshanravan, assistant professor of women's studies, co-presented "Para La Imaginación Zurda: A Workshop Celebrating Jotería Consciousness" at the Association of Jotería Arts, Activism and Scholarship 2012 national conference, hosted by the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, Oct. 19-21.  

The conference centered the activism, art and scholarship of queer Chicano/Latino peoples to celebrate and create spaces where queer Chicano/Latino (jotería) consciousness can illuminate pathways to building healthier communities and effective pathways for social justice.  

Roshanravan joined fellow popular educator, Laura DuMond Kerr of the Escuela Popular Norteña, and Ernesto Martínez, associate professor ethnic and women's and gender studies at the University of Oregon, to present an Escuela Popular Norteña popular education workshop designed to initiate dialogue within communities of color about the ways queerness can offer ways of being and loving that effectively challenge gender and sexual oppressions, regardless of one's sexuality.

The workshop focuses on shifting away from the homophobic and heterosexist imagination to consider what is good about living in "el mundo zurdo" or "the non-straight world." The Escuela Popular Norteña, of which Roshanravan has been a member for more than a decade, is a folk school based in northern New Mexico for radical movement and political education against cultural, economic, racial, gender and sexual oppressions.