“Reflections On Graduation”

We have recently passed the season of graduation, where students meet a so-called ‘end of the road’ for high school and/or college; the dead end is always met with the question, what is next? What happens after it’s all said and done? For many of us in life, we never see another graduation or degree(s), and we find ourself asking yet again what’s next?  Join Jé Exodus Hooper as we discuss life’s graduation and a path that leads into a site of memory.

Jé Exodus Hooper (they/them) teaches Theatre History, holds a Ph.D. from the School of Interdisciplinary Arts, and is Ethical Humanist clergy. Both as a performer and clergy within the Ethical Culture Movement and First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, their ritual-based performance is grounded in the act of homiletics, decolonial Humanism and Black Intellectual Thought. Jé’s love for orality involves the aesthetic of Black folk-talk – one of imagination as meaning-making. Their word-working emphasizes human freedom and interconnectedness through embodiment, intuition, creativity, and improvisation. These kinds of transdisciplinary approaches console and agitate communities in re-imagining and re-claiming narratives that honor the inherited worth and dignity within all people – a love-work that Jé is committed to!