FACULTY PROFILES
Social Justice and Community Organizing
Cirien Saadeh, PhD, Faculty & Department Coordinator
Dr. Cirien Saadeh is an Arab-American journalist and educator who works at the intersections of journalism, social movements, experiential education, and sustainability. She was trained as a community organizer by the former Organizing Apprenticeship Project (now Voices for Racial Justice). She has written for local, national, and international publications and is committed to using journalism as a tool in the pursuit of justice for all historically disenfranchised communities. She produces and hosts the Radical News Radio Hour and is the co-founder and Project Manager of the Journalism of Color Training Center, sponsored by XITO - the Xicanx Institute for Teaching and Organizing. Saadeh also is the Executive Director for The UpTake - a community news organization and Associate Faculty at Prescott College where she received her PhD in Sustainability Education in 2019. As part of her doctoral program, she developed a theory “Journalism of Color,” which asks, in short: how do we develop sustainable journalism platforms and spaces in historically-marginalized communities and how do we create journalism methodologies which build community power and resilience? Saadeh is currently conducting research at the intersections of journalism, social movements, and cooperative sustainability, as well as the applications of racial equity impact analyses to the practice of Journalism of Color.
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April Ruth, PhD, Faculty
aprilruth.hoffmann@prescott.edu
Faculty, Prescott College - MA in Social Justice and Community Organizing
- Subject matter interests/courses: cultural geography, decolonizing methodologies, community-centered fundraising, abolition discourse, antiracist social and political organizing, Capstone projects, geographies of violence and injustice in 20th century US history. I prioritize volunteering for grassroots organizations founded and led by currently and formerly incarcerated colleagues. My research illuminates the impacts of ethically driven scholar-activism across multiple geographic scales.
- Pedagogy: student-centered, antiracist liberation aligned affirming practices; qualitative methodologies, critical ethnography, community-aligned advocacy research; praxis-based experiential learning
- Professional Development: 200-Hour Training- SEL & Wellness Facilitation for Educators and Community Leaders, Ethic of Care, Universal Instructional Design praxis-based course design, affirming pedagogies that emphasize research and writing skill building alongside small-scale, high-impact, project-based fieldwork. My decade in the classroom is coupled with over 30 years of community organizing mainly focused on hunger relief, anti-prison activism, resource-sharing libraries, mutual aid solidarity efforts and education policy reform. My scholarly work as a biomedical inequality ethnographer uses a critical geography framework to analyze narratives of health geographies. Namely, I examine the impacts of powerful stories that people tell about the healing work they do and the worlds that are created and dismantled through those stories. I've also made over 2,500 homemade dishes for community meetings and enthusiastically stuffed tens of thousands of envelopes in solidarity with causes large and small. I love teaching, and my goal is to educate and create opportunities for the next generation of social and political movement leaders.
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Courney Wooten, Adjunct Instructor
Hello! I'm glad to be a part of your learning journey here at Prescott.
I have a long history in community education as a part of my organizing praxis, and I began teaching at Prescott College in Fall 2022. I'm originally from Berkeley/Oakland, CA, and I’ve called the ancestral homelands of the Coast Salish in western WA my home for nearly 20 years now. I live in a multigenerational household with my parents, my partner, our two homeschooled daughters, and a handful of animals. I make a living as an equity consultant and community educator, often in education, non-profits, executive leadership, and faith communities. My academic focus has always been on collective liberation, and I use abolitionist, queer, disability justice-centered, and womanist frameworks to support communities of care and belonging.
I hold a BA in Sociology from Stanford University, an MA from Prescott's SJCO program, and I'm also finishing up my PhD in Sustainability Education. My primary focus in research is on belonging and bridging as a foundational part of healthy communities--how do we do our liberatory work together?
In my free time, I love to make art--mixed media and painting is my jam!--and I almost always have music playing in the background.
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Craig Willse, PhD, Adjunct Instructor
Craig Willse is a teacher and freelance editor living in Los Angeles, where he is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace. He is the author of The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States (University of Minnesota Press) and has a PhD in Sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center. His first novel, Providence, is forthcoming in April 2024 from Union Square.