Graduate Symposium on Healing

By Casey Shevlin

Dr. Pierce-Baker on campus at UTSA

On March 27th, the English graduate students at the University of Texas at San Antonio had the pleasure of hosting their annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Symposium, which was framed around the topic of “Social Healing.” Throughout the day, approximately 100 guests stopped by to attend several graduate student panels:

•  “Food Justice and Activism: Community Gardens, Decolonizing Urban Diets, and Alternative Food Systems”
•  “Fantasy, Music, and Dystopia: How Art Shapes the Female Image” 
• “Representations of Healing and Healers across Literary Genres” 
• “Negotiating the Body and Spirit: Questions of Corporeal Healing”

All of the panels consisted of new, important, and instructive work related to the topic of social healing.

It is our keynote address by Dr. CharlottePierce-Baker that I haven’t stopped thinking about, though.  Like much of her work, Pierce-Baker’s talk on “Gender, Rape, and Race: A Grammar of Violence” powerfully discussed the topic of violence against women and gave voice to the differing iterations of that violence—a different “grammar,” as Pierce-Baker says, for expressing and understanding women’s varying experiences with and contexts of violence and assault.

During the Q & A that followed Pierce-Baker’s address, it became obvious to me that—as Pierce-Baker had explained—almost every woman in the room had a grammar for violence. Hand after hand went up; every woman in the room had a sister, a daughter, a colleague who had been raped, assaulted, threatened. Though I know the statistics—1 in 4, I think—I was blown away and horrified by how pervasive this violence felt in that instant.

But, I was also moved by and grateful for Dr. Pierce-Baker’s bravery. Her insistence on breaking the silence surrounding rape and her courage in sharing her personal grammar of violence had given each woman in the room courage to do the same. And moreover, Pierce-Baker’s talk pushed me personally to think about bravery in the academy—especially the need for it.

I’m honored and grateful that I was there to hear her speak. She’s encouraged me to do embodied work in the academy. To try to be brave like her.

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Casey Shevlin is a second year English doctoral student at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a co-chair for the English Department's Interdisciplinary Graduate Symposium.  Her research interests include 19th C African American literature and print cultures, women's studies, and contemporary activist pedagogy.