Dr. Durryle Brooks
Durryle Brooks, Ph.D is interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner and a social justice educator from Baltimore, MD. He is the Founder of Love and Justice Consulting, an organizational and leadership development firm that provides leaders with social justice learning opportunities. He is recent WK Kellogg Foundation Community Leadership Network graduate whose work focuses on racial justice and healing. He is the author of (Re)conceptualizing Love: Moving Towards a Critical Theory of Love in Education for Social Justice, which articulates a vision and framework for re-conceptualizing love in ways that produces intersectional justice for people of color, communities, and our society as a whole.
Presentations from Facing Race 2022
Operationalizing Love: Utilizing A Critical Theory of Love In Our Fight for Social Justice
Love within the US context is often defined in overly individualistic, anemic, and depoliticized ways. It is discussed almost exclusively in the context of romance and its familial dimensions. Why and for what purpose? What of love and its role in social transformation? Grounded in Black liberation theology and Black feminist thought, this session will interrogate the Westernized construction of love. It will analyze the ways in which the everyday notion of love operates as a tool of oppression and perpetuates white supremacist ideology to shape our social realities, desirability, and diminishes our possibilities for social transformation. Instead, this session will offer us all an opportunity to interrogate what love is, how we have been socialized by it, and how it shapes our capacity to lead change and hold each other with loving accountability within the moment. Ultimately, this session is about reconceptualizing love in ways that helps us resist erasure and dehumanization, and defining it in ways that helps us heal. We will explore a Critical Theory of Love framework to interrogate our own social justice practices to ensure that we are not perpetuating oppression, but instead helping ourselves and others discover their power and heal.
Speakers: Dr. Durryle Brooks