Wilson Okello, Ph.D., IRT ’08, ’14 is a tenured professor at Pennsylvania State University.
To linger, or tarry, in my work has allowed me to think otherwise – to consider more deeply what I am doing and why. Slowing down, for me, has been an invitation to grapple with the entirety of my relationship to my subject matter, to academia, and with it: precarity, terror, refusals, hopes, rebellions, and dreams.
In this moment of shifting national and state policies – policies that call into question how we know and remember, how we live and be – pursuing lines of inquiry that seek to lift the collective “we” higher are often met with suspicion and ire. It takes work to remember, and resolve to do so intently. My hope is that we will remember the way water remembers, as the ancestor Toni Morrison reminded us – always trying to “get back” to valleys, banks, light, and the route of “our original place.”
Continue reading “Journey Through Academia – Alumni Thoughts”
In April 2015, like now, I was a resident of Baltimore City. That spring our city was in turmoil following the murder of Freddie Gray at the hands of the police. I lived within a mile of the place where Gray attempted to flee from the police one fateful Sunday morning, yet our worlds couldn’t have been more different. Me, a mom, wife, and college professor living in the so-called, “White-L”* of Baltimore (Geographer, Dr. Lawrence Brown coined that geographic phrase to indicate the area of the city most populated by White people, corresponding with an abundance of resources that the “Black Butterfly,” where Gray lived, lack). Yet, all of the city residents were shook by what we witnessed and experienced. International media flocked to our city sending out media representations of a burning CVS and understandably angry residents gathering in protest over the death of yet another Black man at the hands of police.
Institute for Recruitment of Teachers 
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