Durryle Brooks, Ph.D.
Dr. Durryle Brooks
Durryle Brooks, Ph.D is an interdisciplinary researcher and a scholar-practitioner from Baltimore, MD. He is the Founder and CEO of Love and Justice Consulting LLC, an organization that provides leaders with diversity and social justice learning opportunities to increase their capacity to effectively and authentically engage difference.
Through dialogue, critical self-reflective practice, and compassionate communication, Durryle 'holds space' for others to do meaningful work that liberates and transforms the personal and collective for our common good.
Thursday, October 26, 2023 | 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM
Operationalizing Love: Developing A Critical Theory of Love in Our Education 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? 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 help 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.
Participants will leave with the following:
An Operational Definition of Love That Is Based In Healing Justice
A Framework For Applying A Critical Theory of Love To Our Social Justice Work
Principles & Practices of Love To Help Us All Heal From The Effects of Systemic Oppression
