2018 Urban Bush Women Summer Leadership Institute

Urban Bush Women is engaging in a dynamic and groundbreaking partnership with Projecting All Voices, an initiative launched by Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and supported by ASU Gammage.

Both UBW and Projecting All Voices are interested in discovering ways in which institutions can move beyond diversity initiatives and become organizations that lead in examining structural racism and its impact on our curriculums, programing, organizing and art-making practices.

This July, UBW will bring its Summer Leadership Institute program “You, Me, We: Understanding internalized racial oppression and how it manifests in our artistic community” to Arizona State University, giving UBW the opportunity to strengthen their core values out west and allowing Projecting All Voices to contribute to the changing landscape of Arizona.

UBW often uses the movement metaphor of "Core and Distal" to talk about our dance and community engagement practice. We engage our core — our own bodies, identities and communities — as essential for maintaining clarity and stability through UBW’s “Entering, Building and Exiting Community” (EBX) workshop. We engage the distal — other bodies, identities and communities — so that we do not become insular and secluded.

Through work with the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond’s “Understanding and Undoing Racism” workshop, the summer program will illuminate how we are disempowered by internalized racial oppression as it manifests both for people of color and white people.

We will examine how these manifestations show up in our organizing, creations and collaborations. We will metaphorically explore the beauty of the desert to begin a process of stripping away the impact of racism. We will focus on how we bring transformation and healing to ourselves, our communities and our institutions/organizations.

Does our work challenge or recreate dominant frameworks and systems of policing that ignore history, culture, power and lineage? How can we explode predetermined expectations, restore our full humanity and activate our true strength? Through “You, Me, We,” we will find our individual and collective power together!

Visit urbanbushwomen.org/bold/summer-leadership-institute/2018_SLI to apply. Scholarship applications are due Feb. 26, and general applications are due March 5.