Jennifer K. Wood

This book was published in 1994, the year I entered graduate school, and has been my guide and inspiration as I have learned to be a scholar and a teacher. "The academy is not paradise," writes Hooks. "But learning is the place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom."