Tiffany Konyen (she/they) is a 1st generation college student learning in the Bay Area for the last 11 years. Guided by a deep interest in the evolution of individual and collective consciousness, Tiffany joined the Bachelor Completion Program (Cohort I 11-12’) at CIIS, where they were first exposed to the pedagogies and praxis of Transformative Education by way of Dr. Bell Hooks.
Entering into the Anthropology and Social Change Department Master’s Program, Tiffany wrote an auto-ethnography reflecting on the values, practices and structures of educational methodologies they experienced, both learning and working within K-12 Public and Private schools. They continued into the Anthropology PhD track to further explore the alienation of intellectual labor and the commodification of knowledge production through the student debt market, especially along the lines of gender, race, and class.
Tiffany is in the proposal phase of the dissertation process with the desire to host a Participatory Action Research(PAR) project, engaging Alums of the School of Consciousness and Transformation. This project will consider the value of Transformative Education, alongside the impacts of indebtedness on Graduate Students of CIIS. For the last year, they have been organizing with the Debt Collective to begin a Bay Area Debtor’s Union and is one of the Biden 100 Debt Strikers, currently striking for full cancellation. They believe that power and knowledge belong to communities!