Ep 14, IA StoryShare 2025: Chaz Barracks and Sylvia Gale

For this season of IA Storyshare, we brought together participants from the most recent national gathering at Las Cruces, NM - Providing Passage: Practicing the Worlds We Want, and asked them the following questions: How did you find your way to the IA community, What people, ideas, places, actions brought you here? And what has kept you coming back? Who, what, where in this network is a source of sustenance for you?

In this second episode of the season, longtime collaborators Chaz Barracks and Sylvia Gale talk about black joy and play, creative administration, and surviving the academy.

Chaz A. Barracks, PhD (he/they) is a mixed-media interdisciplinary scholar, filmmaker, podcast host, and educator. He teaches courses on Black popular culture and the politics of Black joy through critical media practice. Dr. Barracks writes on the politics of deviance in everyday Black life and wrote and directed Everyday Black Matter, a 2020 film project based in Richmond, Virginia. His research and creative practice are invested in interdisciplinary approaches that center epistemologies of Black joy and refusal, employing storytelling as a method to bridge knowledge gaps relevant to the study of Black queer life in America. Learn more>>>

Dr. Sylvia Gale is the executive director of the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) at the University of Richmond. She joined the CCE in August 2009. She serves on the National Advisory Board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, was the founding director of Imagining America’s Publicly Active Graduate Education Initiative (PAGE), and a founding co-chair of Imagining America’s initiative on “Assessing the Practices of Public Scholarship,” which explores and advances assessment practices aligned with the values that drive community-engaged work.  Learn more >>>