This deliciously spacious conversation with three Contemplative and Activist beings/scholars/practitioners explores how we can embody wholeness even in the troubled systems of higher education. Restore your spirit connecting with Michelle C. Chatman, David W. Robinson-Morris, and LeeRay Costa as they talk about their new anthology. Share stories of grounding, healing, and navigating the fraught culture in higher education. Hear how contemplative practices can help diverse communities reconnect, integrate, and reclaim our wholeness. Guest BiosMichelle C. Chatman is a cultural anthropologist, community ritualist, vocalist, educator, and contemplative practitioner. She is Associate Professor of Crime, Justice, and Security Studies at the University of the District of Columbia, where she also serves as Founding Director Mindfulness and Courageous Action (MICA) Lab which advances community-engaged research and training on culturally relevant mindfulness and contemplative approaches. She is committed to amplifying healing-centered approaches that enable us to create organizations, systems, and structures of justice, liberated learning, and equitable thriving. Website LeeRay Costa is a lifelong contemplative practitioner and has been actively integrating contemplative practices into her teaching, research and community work since 2012. Trained as a feminist cultural anthropologist, she is Executive Director of Leadership Studies and the Batten Leadership Institute, and Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies /Anthropology at Hollins University, and the Co-founder of Girls Rock Roanoke (a youth empowerment nonprofit). Her current interests include engaging spirituality, contemplative practices, and creative expression in the service of human flourishing, planetary healing, and transformative social change. LinkedIn David W. Robinson-Morris is a scholar, activist, author, philosopher, human rights advocate, educator, organizer, DEI practitioner, higher education administrator, and student of contemplative practices. At the writing, Robinson-Morris was appointed the inaugural Executive Director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life at Dartmouth College. He is the the Founder of The REImaginelution, a strategic consultant firm working to engender freedom of the human spirit and catalyze the power of the imagination to reweave organizations, systems, and the world toward collective healing and liberation. David served as the final Executive Director in service to the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society (CMind). He is the author of a research monograph titled, Ubuntu and Buddhism in Higher Education: An Ontological (Re)Thinking (2019, Routledge). Websites: reimaginelution.com or centerforthehumanspirit.org Show Notes:Contemplative Practice and Acts of Resistance in Higher Education: Narratives Toward Wholeness, eds Michelle C. Chatman, David W. Robinson-Morris, and LeeRay Costa. Find out more about book and community events Tree of Contemplative Practices, Maia Duerr Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America, Saidiya V. Hartman Transcript
