Images: Vassar College
A Publication of the ALANA Center
Spotlight with Candice Lowe, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
By Jason Wu, '07
Professor Candice Lowe is from Chicago, Illinois. She received her B.A. from Fisk University and her Ph.D from Indiana University, Bloomington. Professor Lowe spent a year at the University of Virginia, as a pre-doctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute in 2004. She is also a former Fulbright scholar.
What inspired you to become a teacher? What would you be doing if you weren’t teaching?
During college, between my junior and senior years, I visited the Soviet Union and studied
Russian history, culture and language. My encounters with teachers and with people I met from various parts of the world all inspired me to learn more. When I finished my undergraduate degree, I moved back to St.Petersburg for a couple of years, and then I got a job working with Russian refugees in Chicago. All of these events really transformed me. I knew that I wanted to teach about how to dialogue and learn across racial, cultural and national divides. If I weren’t teaching, I’d probably be working for a non-profit organization in another country; it would be grassroots or part of a social movement. I would probably be working with refugees.
Who are the people who have inspired you and why?
Apart from my nuclear family and husband, lots, lots, lots! Globally…Gandhi, Steven Biko and Hugo Chavez….more locally, Johnetta Cole and Helen Keller. But in almost every person I have come into contact with and with whom I deeply engage, I find something that inspires me.
What brought you to Vassar?
Fate.
What do you think is important to keep in mind as a person of color in the world today?
To think both within and beyond your racialized group, to see the similarities between
ourselves and people who are similarly marginalized and subject to systematic discrimination. I think that it is important for us to keep in mind that thinking is only the first step in social activism.
What do you hope to bring to the lives of the students here at Vassar?
In the classroom, experiences that I have had may be different from other professors. I might raise different questions, and have a different perspective based on my subject position in the world. It’s where I’ve been and my negotiation of how I have been perceived in my encounters locally and all over the world, that help me to be a different person, not necessarily better, but different. I also really enjoy helping students to develop the tools with which they can denaturalize their worlds, to see how cultures are crafted, so that they can better understand the worlds we live in. For activists, I hope that this will help them to tap their creative spirits and collectively re-imagine our world, and reconstruct it in ways that are better for most of us.
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