S2EP3: Joy & Revolution Now with Jennifer Davis
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
Release Date: 04/19/2022
S2 EP8: with Camille Leak: Exploring the Intersection of DEI and Trauma
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“Become a witness to yourself.” - Camille Leak In Inclusive Life, we are continually looking at the ways in which we can reach across differences as a path to connection and liberation. We often explore the impediments to being with one another authentically such as defensiveness, perfectionism, guilt, and shame. Camille Leak brings this conversation even deeper. She brings us to what’s beneath these obstacles to connection: trauma. Camille Leak is a DEI practitioner who believes that folks’ inability to be with other people’s differences is their fundamental lack of capacity...
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S2 EP7: with Dr. Crystal Menzies: Finding Inspiration from Maroon Communities to Guide Us Forward
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
One of the barriers for well meaning white folks and BIPOC who want to see a better world is this belief in the inevitability of positive outcomes. Dr. Crystal Menzies When Dr. Menzies drops this pearl of insight into the latest Inclusive Life Podcast conversation with Nicole, Nicole names the “inevitability of positive outcomes” as “a uniquely U.S. American specific ‘cultural hiccup.’” The belief that it’ll all work out in the end suggests a reality that doesn’t comport with the history of revolutions. There’s no one “out there” who is going to save us. Dr....
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S2 EP6: A Roadmap for Black Women to Thrive in the Workplace with Ericka Hines
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
There is something about the research project that feels a lot like love. It began with a personal need and grew into a much larger question: What would it take for Black women to thrive - not just survive - in the workplace? From this question, a massive project took shape. In this project, Founder of Every Level Leads, Ericka Hines and her team set out to understand Black cis and transgender women and Black gender expansive professionals and their experiences. Their goal was to understand them in all of their complexity. Ericka and Dr. Mako Fitts Ward wrote the report based on findings from...
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S2 EP5: Processing the Post-Roe Reality with the Inclusive Life Team
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
This episode of the Inclusive Life Podcast is an intimate conversation between Nicole and two members of her Inclusive Life team, Christina Hernandez and Laura Halpin. We convened to talk about our personal responses to the overturn of Roe v. Wade. We began with our own reactions, exploring our immediate sense of how each of our lives and our loved ones will be impacted. The Dobbs v. Jackson decision impacts all of us, and yet it is vital that we place this decision in a historical, social, and political context: the overturning of Roe v Wade is a massive step in a long history of reproductive...
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S2EP4 Part 2: Fat Phobia is a Social Justice Issue with Dana Sturtevant, HIilary Kinavey, and Sirius Bonner
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“The white gaze is upon us at all times, and the ways in which Black bodies have been destroyed by whiteness are many. But this is just one of them.” - Sirius Bonner One thing to get straight: divorcing yourself from diet culture isn’t just about being fat, loud, and proud. Sirius Bonner, who joins Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant for Part 2 of this two-part Inclusive Life podcast, drives home the importance of rooting our own relationship with our bodies in the broader political context. The context? Fat bodies are subjected to systemic oppression. Sirius deepens the...
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S2EP4 Part 1: Fat Phobia is a Social Justice Issue with Dana Sturtevant and HIilary Kinavey
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“We all eat for emotional reasons. That’s normal. Food is flavored with complex meanings. It connects us with our culture and our ancestry and heritage. We eat to celebrate. We eat to grieve. Food is an emotional thing for human beings. When we dumb it down to its nutritional components and see it only as a vehicle to give us nutrients, we are missing so much.” - Dana Sturtevant If you haven’t yet considered weight stigma as a social justice issue, today is the day you begin. Diet culture is an insidious arm of white supremacy culture that has removed us from our bodies,...
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S2EP3: Joy & Revolution Now with Jennifer Davis
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
"Creativity and engaging in creativity can offer insight into how we move forward." - Jennifer Davis There’s a sturdy and subversive thread woven through Jennifer Davis’s life and work: Where there’s an expectation to do things a certain way, of conformity or straight lines, because that’s how it’s always been done, Jennifer’s life is all about saying, “Nope. I’m doing it differently.” It feels like the “yes” and the path for Jennifer is in the joy, in the curvy unpatterned strokes of her paintbrush, in the “let’s try this and see what...
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S2EP2: Disrupting Business as Usual with Pamela Slim
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“If you’re designing a space for the most marginalized folks, by definition, the entire experience is going to be more inclusive for everybody.” It is a gift to have Pamela Slim as our guest for the official start of Inclusive Life Podcast Season 2. The conversation illuminates Pam’s skills at disrupting business as usual. She points out over and over again the choices business owner’s can make to cultivate one’s business as an ecosystem versus approaching business building as an empire, amassing market power through competition, extraction, and hierarchy....
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S2EP1: The Russian-Ukrainian Conflict from an Antiracist, Progressive Perspective: a Conversation with Dr. Clarence Lusane
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
For many people alarmed at the very visible anti-Black racism at the outset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine two weeks ago, it’s important to understand more about the history of Afro Ukrainians and Africans in Ukraine. This conversation between Dr. Clarence Lusane and Nicole Lee sheds some light. We’ll learn that it is not a new history. Dr. Lusane, who has traveled and taught in Ukraine and all over the world, shared that after Ghana became independent from British colonial rule in 1957, and in 1960 when 17 other African countries gained their independence from colonial rule,...
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EP9: Rest: a Practice to Meet Urgent Times with Jen Lemen
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“There’s a way that we can meet urgent moments without the spirit of urgency. That requires a competency and capacity that comes from deep grounding and regulation. Being able to show up consistently in ritual, rhythm and routine.” This conversation with Jen Lemen feels like strong medicine. With so many of us understandably depleted and exhausted, this topic of rest and sensitively responding to the needs of our bodies is so important and resonant. Jen has learned, through her own relationships forged in times of urgency and danger, to “interrupt” urgency. The interruption can...
info_outline"Creativity and engaging in creativity can offer insight into how we move forward." - Jennifer Davis
There’s a sturdy and subversive thread woven through Jennifer Davis’s life and work:
Where there’s an expectation to do things a certain way, of conformity or straight lines, because that’s how it’s always been done, Jennifer’s life is all about saying, “Nope. I’m doing it differently.”
It feels like the “yes” and the path for Jennifer is in the joy, in the curvy unpatterned strokes of her paintbrush, in the “let’s try this and see what happens.”
In her work and life, Jennifer is exploring where creativity and liberation intersect, asking how creativity as a practice can inform the work of liberation.
She shares, “Creativity, in so many ways, is almost the exact opposite of oppression and oppressive systems, which demand perfection and accuracy and get-it-right-everytime.” In her work alone and with other folks, she explores how creativity can provide a way forward, with its space for play, questions, and mistakes that turn out to be openings for something new to emerge.
And although social justice is a serious endeavor, the “work of liberation” has to be infused with play and joy. Nicole identifies this in Jennifer’s art, this pairing of the whimsical and innocent with powerful political statements.
The conversation lands on a “press pause” moment when they identify that their ability as Black women to find joy, innovation, and art is inherent in the struggle-- a truth that’s easy to miss if you’re not living it. Jennifer makes it harder to miss. In this conversation, in Jennifer’s work, in her love of texture and color, in her completely joyful lip synch/dance thing on Instagram, there’s an irresistible invitation into joy and play.
Joy and revolution now. Joy is the revolution now.
Please listen in, and after you do, let us know how the conversation surfaces for you. We’d love to hear from you.
We also invite you to check out Jennifer’s Play and Healing at the Intersections: Conversations on Creativity and Liberation, monthly gatherings where folks convene to talk and “make marks” together.
In this episode, Nicole and Jennifer touch on:
• Jennifer’s intention in pairing the whimsical and the political in her art
• How getting stuck in outgrown ideologies can steal the joy
• Art and healing
• The importance of “marrying joy and challenges”
• Jennifer’s insistence on centering her existence on joy and community, not oppression
• Exploring the intersection of creativity and liberation
• Their refusal to engage in “trauma wasting”
• “Get in bitches. We’re being inclusive.”
Bio:
Jennifer Price Davis is a Cleveland-based painter, illustrator, and writer. As a primarily self-taught artist, as a practice, Jennifer paints what pops into her soul and demands to come to life. Jennifer has a BA in psychology and an MA in art therapy counseling. Until very recently, she was a teacher of 1st through 3rd graders. Prior to her work as a teacher, she was a career counselor.
Jennifer’s work focuses primarily on black culture and what it means to exist in black bodies, with emphasis on black women and girls. She is particularly interested in illuminating the ordinary. In the ordinary, Jennnifer sees something both achingly beautiful, immensely political, and even revolutionary, about the ability to exist and move about the world safely and confidently in ordinary ways.
Her goal is to participate in the progress of liberation through every bit of her work.
You can find Jennifer at jenniferpricedavis.com
On Instagram: @jenpdavis
You can purchase her products at Redbubble: JenPriceDavis
Learn more about Play and Healing at the Intersections: Conversations on Creativity and Liberation
You can support her work at Patreon