02/19/2020
Keynote Address--"Root Care" by Kevin Bott
1:00 - 2:30pm
Friday, February 28
"Root Care" is a concept Kevin Bott has been thinking about as a framework to use as a white male. Root cause seeks to peel the onion on social issues and identify primary causes with the idea that if we can somehow get to the heart of what's causing harm, we can heal and solve them...Kevin is questioning that construct. Root care is the core of what unites us in hope/concern/care in the world. And how can a white man move forward from a place of "care" (grounded in heart and emotion) as opposed to "cause" (grounded in logical/critical investigation)? And then, how does that root care guide actions? How does it change how we interact, do "the work?"
KEVIN BOTT is a community-based theater artist and scholar whose interests lie at the intersection of healing, freedom, justice, and movement-building, as well as in the mutually supportive relationship between individual excellence and collective creation. Bott is the founder and artistic director of Ritual4Return, Inc. which he began developing in 2008. His 2010 doctoral dissertation is entitled “A Ritual for Return: Investigating the Process of Creating an Original Rite of Passage with Formerly Incarcerated Men.” He is the 2019 A Blade of Grass-David Rockefeller Fund Joint Fellow in Criminal Justice.
From 2010 to 2016, Bott was the associate director & director of cultural organizing at the national higher education consortium, Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life headquartered at Syracuse University. In that role, in addition to consulting with dozens of colleges and universities on their arts- and humanities-based community engagement efforts, he founded The D.R.E.A.(M.)3 Freedom Revival (2011-2015), an original “musical tent revival for freedom and democracy” that drew on the history of Syracuse and Central New York to inspire residents of the city to engage in community change efforts.
In 2013, Bott developed and facilitated the community-based performance, Every Time You See Me…in partnership with Wagner College in Staten Island. Built from the stories of Staten Islanders, and featuring them in performance, Every Time You See Me…explored the dynamics of race, class, power, and privilege, and was performed in the Staten Island Ferry Terminal on the one-year anniversary of Eric Garner’s murder by police chokehold.
Bott was the first director of education for Rehabilitation Through the Arts, a New York State prison-arts nonprofit, through which he facilitated arts workshops and original theater productions in various New York State prisons from 2006 to 2008.
Outside of his identity as a community-based artist, Bott served as the dean for civic engagement at Wagner College from 2016-2018, and then, briefly, as director of community-engaged learning at The College of New Jersey before taking a hiatus from higher education to focus full time on Ritual4Return. Kevin has a BA in Italian from Rutgers University and L’Università di Firenze, and earned both his master’s and doctoral degrees in Educational Theater from New York University. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and three children.
Register today: www.canton.edu/conference
