We are very pleased to announce the 2021 recipient of the Vivien Hartog Graduate Student Teaching Award: Carlos Vazquez

Congratulations Carlos!

First, we want to introduce this award and Vivien Hartog. Then Carlos’s advisor, Lisa Diedrich, will introduce Carlos.

This award is named in honor of Vivien Hartog, a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies graduate certificate student who died before she could complete her Ph.D. in Sociology. It goes to the graduate student instructor we think most exemplifies Vivien’s lifelong commitments to activism, teaching, and learning. Here’s a description of Vivien written by her family that captures something of the kind of person we are honoring with this award:

“In Vivien Hartog’s 55 years, she went through more identities than most could imagine. An incomplete list would include: rebellious daughter; actress in training; young mother, wife (3 times); scientologist; scourge of scientology; business woman; domestic help in a hotel; undergraduate; radical feminist and lesbian; graduate student in sociology and women’s studies. At every point she both threw herself into her new identity and at the same time, remained herself. And one way that she always remained herself was in her commitment to social justice and to human rights. She remade herself regularly, but she always understood her remaking as struggles on a larger stage. Particularly in her last decade, she saw her life through the lens of an international women’s movement.”

Professor Lisa Diedrich on Carlos Vazquez:

I am delighted to tell you about Carlos Vazquez, a most-deserving recipient of the 2021 Vivien Hartog Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Instructor.

Carlos’s scholarship and pedagogy are deeply intertwined. The work he does in the classroom is linked to his recognition of the need for structural changes in higher education and society more broadly. In his research, he is interested in practices of what he calls “queer of color pedagogies of care,” which he describes as “an ethical mode of care that preoccupies itself centrally with a future-yet-to-come, mobilizing a praxis that enables the transmission of knowledge geared towards nurturing the future and diminishing the vulnerability of trans and queer of color communities to come.” In his classroom, he puts this ethical mode of care into action, centering both race and disability and the experiences of Black and Latinx communities. His impact on students at Stony Brook has been nothing short of profound.

Carlos has been an influential and popular instructor for our department, teaching a range of courses, including Introduction to Queer Studies and the timely and important topics class that he created, Race and Disability in Contemporary Culture. He also stepped up and volunteered to teach in the Writing Program in only his second year at Stony Brook. I mention this not only to show the breadth of Carlos’s teaching experiences at Stony Brook, but also to give a sense of his willingness to stretch and challenge himself pedagogically, as well as his recognition of the centrality of developing his students’ capacity for creative expression in multiple genres and modalities.

Carlos is a Turner Fellow and he takes seriously the Turner fellowship’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion through the teaching and mentorship that Turner Fellows provide to undergraduate students, especially underrepresented minority students. This commitment is apparent in both the form and content of his courses. He is especially good at getting students to analyze a wide range of media—music videos, TV programs, films, advertisements, memes and gifs—using a multiplicity of theoretical and methodological tools from the intersecting interdisciplinary fields of gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies, and critical disability studies. I can’t tell you the number of times he has dropped by my office to show and tell me about something that he and his students had just discussed in class. In one instance, the text he had his students discuss was one of the large Far Beyond brand murals adorning various buildings on Stony Brook’s campus. In another, he excitedly relayed to me how he and his students discussed the swimming lesson scene from Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight as an enactment of a queer of color pedagogy of care.

Comments on Carlos’s evaluations frequently mention his kindness and compassion. One student noted that, “such compassion from the professor motivates me to do better and…try instead of giving up. I want to thank him for being an inspiration on how to be a good professor.” In relation to the difficulty of going online in spring 2020, another student said Carlos “was incredibly understanding of the situation and tried to alleviate our stress as much as possible.” I know as well that he is particularly good at reaching out to students who are struggling, giving them specific ways to get back on course, showing care and concern for their well-being and lives beyond the classroom.

In his letter of application for the Vivien Hartog Award, Carlos wrote that he hopes “these cares, and commitments, and concerns…align [him] with the aims, objectives, and aspirations of the late Vivien Hartog, and the Award bestowed in her name.” I think Vivien and Carlos are indeed kindred spirits.