stef shuster

Interacting with students has been one of the most fulfilling aspects of my academic life. I have had the opportunity to mentor lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students. In doing so, I have explored ways to bridge academics with community engagement work. Integrating my research and teaching experiences, I have worked closely with them on event programming, social justice work, and helped them to navigate structural barriers in and beyond college.

As a queer and transgender-identified person, my personal background has been an asset in mentoring underrepresented students. These identities, that make up part of the fabric of my academic self and compel my personal investment in community engagement work, have also enriched my teaching, research, and interpersonal interactions with colleagues and students. Drawing from McLaren’s call to intervene and acknowledge many ways of knowing, compliments my aspirations as an educator and scholar. “Criticality is not a line stretching into eternity, but rather it is a circle. Knowing can be the object of our knowing, it can be self-reflective, and it is something in which we can make an intervention. In which we must make an intervention” (2008:126).

Event Organizing

Bringing together my academic training and social justice background, I bring social theories of inequality “to life” through organizing events like community art projects which allows for creative ways to address structural problems within institutions and build community partnerships.

Campus and Community Engagement

Based on my experience as an Obermann Center for Advanced Studies fellow, I integrate my social justice event organizing work and public speaking to curate art exhibitions, oral history projects, and slam poetry events. I work with students, staff, faculty, and community members to build holistic intentionally-designed community engagement projects to address the multi-faceted nature of oppression.

Zines

In 2007 when I moved to Iowa City there were few resources for trans-identified people. From healthcare to housing, units across campus and in the community had no knowledge of how to support (or even talk about) trans people. In response to this situation, I founded TransCollaborations, a community and campus-based organization. From the beginning, we were committed to building strong ties with campus and community partners, as well as addressing oppression from an intersectional perspective. One of the ways that we brought together different communities and social issues was creating zines (zines are self-published small magazines) to distribute across Iowa City.

I look forward to building on community engagement projects in my current position. In the classroom, I have also used zine-making as a way to engage students’ many ways of “knowing” to produce a non-academic text that addresses topics from class conversations.