Sex and the (Tent) City

As I reflect on the impact of the "Teaching for Change" conference on my own pedagogy, I'm filled with a profound sense of gratitude. During what I think is fair to call a "historic" gathering of feminists and womanists from around the world, I found myself stimulated by the acuity of thought, plenitude of models, bristling interchange that spurred further creativity, and sheer power and hope that came from being amid a diverse community of women teaching in heterogeneous ways for human liberation.

I came to the conference as a feminist who teaches at the intersections of academy, congregation, and community. The University of the Poor is the educational arm of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, a network of over one hundred organizations in the United States committed to uniting the poor across color lines as the leadership base for a broad movement to abolish poverty by demanding human rights for all.¹ The University of the Poor is a "school without walls" made up of different departments or schools that teach at academic institutions, within member organizations of the campaign, within local congregations, at direct action sites, and at conferences across the nation and around the world. The School of Theology, for which I serve as Catalyst, provides opportunities for action, reflection, and partnership development among poor people's groups, religious communities of all faiths, and academic institutions for the purpose of abolishing poverty. As Catalyst, I have the exciting role of bringing poor leaders and the theologies emerging from within the campaign together with academics and their scholarship, and religious leaders and their current ministries. These encounters help to build the kinds of relationships and novel, critical thinking that are needed to bring about broad social change.

The School of Theology has explicit commitments that shape its educational content and practice. One is to cultivate experience rather than expertise. We are all students. We are all teachers. Because the experiences and analyses of poor people, however, are rarely heard within dominant institutions, a special role of the school is to create spaces where these stories and understandings may be shared and heard by people from all walks of life.

An important and immediate impact of the "Teaching for Change" conference was to affirm the pedagogy we're developing within the University of the Poor. Sometimes the university's work is featured in academic settings in an uncritical, deferential way that makes me feel as if we're some radical cause célèbre—yet another chic experience "from the streets" to be celebrated, consumed, and, ultimately, discarded. Instead, what I found at this conference was profound respect for our work, which was demonstrated by a willingness not only to learn from our experiences and models but also to challenge them. In this brief essay, I focus on a particular aspect of the conference that both delighted me and disrupted my thinking.

In the University of the Poor, poor people teach as well as learn. When teaching in universities, congregations, and nonprofit institutions, poor leaders are frequently teaching people who are themselves "not-yet poor," about poverty, its causes, and our growing social movement.² This shift from the commonly viewed "poverty expert" teachers (typically social scientists, lawyers, think-tank researchers, social workers, political leaders, funding managers at nonprofit foundations, and so on) to a woman or man who is poor and organizing with other poor people for economic human rights as a teacher intrigues even as it rattles.

But who better to discuss poverty and strategies for ending it than poor people themselves, who have no stake in perpetuating systems that produce poverty in the first place? Take, for example, Tara Colon of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU). Tara has been a homeless mom herself with her children, experienced the violence and gross inadequacy of the Philadelphia shelter system, and waited years on the government's eligibility list for public housing. She has also taken over abandoned HUD houses with other KWRU leaders, installed homeless families in them, and rigged up electricity and hot water, and she has gone...