Who we are:

“The Athena Co-Learning Collective is a group of graduate students and faculty at the University of Georgia who are committed to living and learning differently in the academy and our communities. […] We seek to engage, share, and learn from a diversity of knowledges, experiences, hopes, and fears as a means to rehumanize our relations and learning communities. We are inspired by the many feminist collectives who have formed inside and outside the academy before us.”
-- Athena Co-Learning Collective (2018)

What we do:

Pedagogy -- our learning space.

We work together to materialize feminist, anti-racist, queer, and decolonial practice in our classrooms. This involves rejecting the toxic masculinity and competitive performance expectations in our seminars and rehumanizing our learning spaces by generating collective solidarity. Intentional co-learning supports this effort through practices such as: collectively choosing texts and other materials with which we engage; creating shared class notes; utilizing small discussions, break out sessions, and in-class journaling to more deeply engage in dialogue with one another; and collectively publishing our work.

Praxis -- our politics.

We engage with scholarly and activist teaching centered on the ontologies of women, POC, queers, and Indigenous people. We also engage with poetry, art, activist writing, and storytelling as critical works, moving us far beyond the traditional, white, male, western canon. We intend this Collective to be a sustainable enactment of our commitment to bringing theory into community. We do this by: Relating to one another as complete human beings inside and outside of the classroom by making space to discuss emotions, hardships, conflict, excitement, etc.; Rejecting efforts to provide a totalizing narrative that erases our own and collective ambiguities, contradictions, and entanglements; Continuing to offer the Collective model as a semester seminar and reading deeply together; Facilitating conversations in the broader Athens community related to our vision and praxis. We connect the way we think to the way we act.

Image (left to right): Jennifer Rice, Commissioner Link, Joey Carter (founding member Linnentown Project), Bobby Crook (Linnentoiwn first descendant), Commissioner Houle, Hattie Whitehead (Linnentown first descendant), Commissioner Meyers, Mayor Girtz, Commissioner Denson, Manager Williams. All are standing in front of the Linnentown Quilt.