A Little About Dr. Carol A. Hand

Hello Dr Carol A. Hand,

First of all, I would like to repeat Gator Woman’s statement here!

Borrowing Gator Woman’s greeting aside, I have had the wonderful pleasure of reading about you and your blog, and I found some of the statements particularly resonating, as explained below. Let’s begin with the first quote:

…my primary emphasis included organizational change, community development, and policy analysis and advocacy. Before joining academia, I worked as the aging network supervisor for a state department of health and social services and as deputy director of health and human services for an inter-tribal council. I have also worked in a variety of settings as a program developer, public speaker, grant-writer, program evaluator, and researcher. My passion remains working from a liberatory praxis perspective with individuals and communities that have experienced oppression to transform oppressive social structures through consciousness-raising and non-violent community-directed action.

Your holistic and multipronged approaches as well as your dealing with both individuals and communities are both striking and commendable. They agree very well with my own approaches, some of which can be gleaned from one of my posts published at https://soundeagle.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/facing-the-noise-music-grey-barriers-and-green-frontiers-of-sound-society-and-environment/

The next quote is particularly piquant, especially the question that you raise about identity at the end of the quote:

I am my Ojibwe mother’s daughter, “the one bright star in her life” as she once told me during my fortieth decade. I am a mother and grandmother to a wonderful group of mixed ancestry family. But identity is never that simple. Should we ever define ourselves solely by others’ expectations or the socially constructed roles and statuses we inherit based on the positions into which we were born?

Coming from a very multidisciplinary background, I have also regularly faced similar challenges about my academic, intellectual and social identities with respect to alliances and boundaries, sometimes even at the mercy certain entities and/or as a result of bigotries, hegemonies, conformities, expectations, assumptions, biases and discriminations. You can also gauge the significance of these challenges in the comments and discussions contained in the comment section of my said post.

Thankfully, these issues, as entrenched and intractable as they have been, nevertheless find their (partial) resolutions through our ongoing pluralistic endeavours at our respective blogs, as you vividly pointed out as follows:

This is a place for important creative and critical works that question the status quo. Academic journals and media tend to serve as gatekeepers, enforcing standards that limit works to those that reflect “the ways things have always been done,” thereby screening out creative works (prose, poetry, art and pieces that interweave different media). The intention for creating this blog is to encourage dialogue about possibilities and support for alternate ways of communicating that celebrate the inclusiveness of diversity.

For these reasons, you and your blog now have a new follower. I also look forward to interacting with you at my blog. May you enjoy a lovely Sunday!

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