Search Results (15)

In the face of escalating sociopolitical hostility toward diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts, trans and queer (TQ) center(ed) diversity workers in higher education are navigating increasingly precarious professional landscapes. This study explores the lived experiences of TQ-center(ed) diversity workers through a general qualitative design informed by participatory action research (PAR). Drawing on the concept of “burn through,” critiquing the role of institutions in the exhaustion of practitioners, and the theory of tempered radicalism, describing the fine line diversity workers must navigate to advocate for change within oppressive systems, we examine how these practitioners persist amid institutional neglect, emotional labor, and political antagonism. Findings from interviews with eight participants reveal three central themes: the systemic nature of burn through, the protective power of community, and the multifaceted role of liberation in TQ-center(ed) diversity work. Participants described both the toll and the transformative potential of their roles, highlighting community as a critical site of resistance and renewal. This study contributes to the growing literature on TQ advocacy in higher education and underscores the need for institutional accountability and collective care in sustaining liberatory futures. Full article

Proclaiming Our Roots (POR) began as an academic community-based research initiative documenting Afro-Indigenous identities and lived experiences through digital oral storytelling. Since its inception, Proclaiming Our Roots has grown into a grassroots social movement focused on self-determination, cultural reclamation, and resistance to colonial erasure. This paper explores Proclaiming Our Root’s evolution, from a research project to a grassroots social movement, analyzing how storytelling, relational accountability, and Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Indigenous governance have shaped its development. Drawing on Indigenous methodologies and grounded in Afro-Indigenous worldviews, we examine how POR mobilizes digital storytelling, community gatherings, and intergenerational dialog to give voice to Afro-Indigenous identity, build collective consciousness, and challenge dominant narratives that erase or marginalize Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous presence. Through a sharing circle involving Proclaiming Our Roots community members, advisory council members, and the research team, in this paper we identify key themes that reflect the movement’s transformative impact: Identity and Belonging, Storytelling as Decolonial Praxis, Healing, Spirituality and Collective Consciousness, and Resistance and Social Movement Building. We discuss how these themes illustrate Proclaiming Our Roots’ dual role as a site of knowledge production and political action, navigating tensions between institutional affiliation and community autonomy. By prioritizing Afro-Indigenous epistemologies and centering lived experience, POR demonstrates how academic research can be a foundation for long-term, relational, and community-led movement-building. In this paper, we want to contribute to broader discussions around the sustainability of grassroots movements, the role of storytelling in social change for Indigenous and Black Peoples, and the possibilities of decolonial knowledge production as epistemic justice. We offer a model for how academic research-initiated projects can remain accountable to the communities with whom we work, while actively participating in liberatory re-imaginings. Full article

Māori wisdom revolutionized the child welfare system through the now manualized Family Group Conferencing method. The global trend of adopting and adapting this culturally grounded child welfare practice has been well documented. However, as this service model is adapted and imported to other countries, so is its legacy of settler colonialism. This qualitative case study applies Settler Colonialism Theory to unpack the settler colonialism embedded in the process of adopting an adapted Indigenist family engagement program in Taiwan. Research findings indicate that cultural adaptation reproduces settler colonialism. To implement family engagement within a paternalistic CPS system, program implementers struggled between authoritative decision making and building meaningful state–family partnerships. Although adhering to a model that ostensibly involves family decision making may ease settler anxiety among program implementers, settler colonialism remains the elephant in the room. It frequently undergirds the cultural adaptation process. Liberatory social work practice calls for unpacking settler anxiety, systems of power, and cultural imperialism embedded in program implementation. Full article

This article proposes a conversation on the limits and possibilities of collectivizing the way in which we generate and inscribe knowledge within the terms of a political economy of knowledge production and circulation regulated by hierarchies of academic and non-academic classifications, as well as those that demarcate centres and peripheries domestically and internationally through racial–gendered distributions of authority. To this end, it explores a series of collective projects elaborated within the GlobalGRACE network in Brazil (Global Gender and Cultures of Equality), which experiment with residency methodologies designed to create the necessary infrastructure for a redistribution of power, knowledge, and authority in investigations on racial–gendered violence in the peripheries of Rio de Janeiro. As collaborators in this research–action project initiated in 2018 with the Observatory of Favelas of Rio de Janeiro, here, we mobilize two of these collective projects as case studies—the dance residency of Cia Passinho Carioca and the Free School of Arts ELÃ residency—so as to reflect on our ways of knowing and experiencing racial–gendered inequalities in context. In this way, it becomes possible to propose not only questions around the production, erasure, and appropriation of knowledge but also possibilities for the broad-based circulation of dissident knowledge practices and the subsequent displacement of established authorities in the field, notably by means of a disobjectification of subjects of knowledge and exercises in authoring in the first-person plural. This entry point into the conversation on who has the power to know and control the meanings of intersectional inequalities enables a focus on practice, pedagogy, and methods to unpack the ethical and epistemological questions at hand. By centring the problem of authorship, we argue that feminist and decolonial approaches to knowing, teaching, and learning need to effectuate redistributions of power and the construction of politico-epistemic infrastructure if we have any chance of cultivating the conditions needed for liberatory knowledge practices. Full article

The carceral apparatus in the U.S. can be understood as mechanisms of policing, criminalizing, and incarcerating through the criminal justice system in its traditional sense but also encompassing mechanisms of social control, surveillance, and violence exerted through other systems such as family policing organizations, social service agencies, and helping professions. As we are witnessing the impacts of the toxic drug supply crisis and continued reliance on the “war on drugs” policies, these carceral functions are deeply felt among people who use drugs and have substance use disorders. This qualitative study uses the Foucauldian lens of biopolitics and biopower to examine how power operates in carceral systems and impacts women who use substances. By conducting and analyzing in-depth interviews with four women who identify as systems-involved in the U.S., this study highlights that power operates in a multitude of ways. The findings highlight the gendered experience these individuals face navigating these systems of circularity, including the minimization of bodily autonomy, the destruction of social reproduction, and coercive performances to the patriarchal gaze. The findings also amplify the women’s perspective on systemic change and offer alternatives to current carceral approaches. This research provides insights for social service professionals in all fields for more liberatory approaches to working with women in carceral settings and proposes a radical departure from current trajectories of social control and criminalization. Full article

Performance methodologies take many forms—performative writing, poetic transcription, and co-performative witnessing, to name only a few—and can be both process and product, differentiating and unifying a group between and across differences. As a social work researcher committed to decolonial, liberatory methodologies that make and bring meaning to the communities I work with, performance methodologies fill a gap that other qualitative research methods can only begin to approach. This project is an exploration in performance methodologies and Critical Suicidology through the lens of social work research, with a case study derived from a performance documenting suicide prevention research with Native Hawaiians. This study sought to understand connections between suicide risk and experiences of colonization among Native Hawaiians and among LGBTQ Native Hawaiians. The findings point to the importance of relationships, cultural understandings of identity and identification, and healing through cultural practices. Sections from the performative text, including voices from the participants, as well as feedback gathered from performances of the research, are woven together with academic narrative to form a creative and critical report of the research. Full article

The Women’s March on 21 January 2017, opened a new social and political landscape for Muslim women to engage in Islamic liberatory activism. I locate Muslim women’s participation in the marches following the 2017 ‘Muslim travel ban policy’ as a site for discovering the link between the politics of resistance and the utility of Islam as a source for liberation. I argue that Muslim women living in minority and post-secular contexts resort to faith as a source of agentival liberation to address the political rhetoric of anti-Islamic sentiments and policies. The outcome of this research demonstrates (1) how Muslim women activists challenge the Western narratives of being oppressed and explore the ways they want to represent themselves; (2) how Islam serves as a catalyst for theological resistance and how this enhances the role of Muslim women as moral and spiritual agents in transforming their political and social conditions; (3) how the Islamic liberation in the US context historically intersects with Black churches’ resistance toward White racism; and (4) how Muslim women’s agency as spiritual beings is linked to the promotion of justice in the Western liberatory movements. Overall, the article shows how Muslim women resort to their spiritual journey and use such narratives to confront unjust political rhetoric and policies. Full article

This study aims to illustrate the complex relationships between reading motivation and reading comprehension for Black girl readers. There is an urgent need for research that explicitly centers on the reading motivations of Black girls through a humanizing, asset-oriented lens. Through a Situative Black Girlhood Reading Motivations lens, which integrates a situative perspective on motivation and the tenets of Black Girlhood Studies, this multi-year study focuses on a group of Black girl readers participating in a summer reading program. Qualitative data, including video observations, student work artifacts, and small-group artifact-elicited interviews, were analyzed through a generic inductive approach to answer the research question, “How are relationships between Black girls’ reading motivations and their reading comprehension evident in their reading engagement and enactments?” The findings demonstrate that the participants’ most salient reading motivations in this instructional context (meaning-oriented, collaborative, and liberatory reading motivations) (1) were a precursor to their comprehension, (2) worked in tandem with their comprehension, and (3) stemmed from their comprehension. These findings contribute to models of reading by illustrating the need for additional complexity when describing the relationship between reading motivation and comprehension. Full article

This paper introduces justice-centered reflective practice, an approach that emerged out of our practitioner research in the Independent School Teaching Residency program. This ongoing and imperfect praxis is simultaneously a stance, a lens, a pedagogy, an orientation, and a way of understanding and mobilizing our individual and collective identities as teacher educators. Mediated by joy, imagination, vulnerability, and uncertainty, six foundational principles guide our work: justice-centered reflective practice is (1) purposeful and systematic, (2) iterative and cyclical, (3), critically reflective, (4) agentive, (5) done in community, and (6) loving and hopeful. Here we detail these principles and illustrate how they manifest in our work as teacher educators in how we structure the program and enact our pedagogy. We seek to continue a scholarly conversation among critical teacher educators about how we enact liberatory values and aspirations in the context of institutions and policy environments that often constrain our collective work. Full article

Because research alone cannot dismantle racial inequity, this article focuses on lessons for critical community-engaged scholarship (CCES) based on the Relationship-Centered Schools campaign of Californians for Justice (CFJ), an educational and racial justice youth organizing group. The campaign embraced transformative organizing—an approach to social change that encompasses reshaping oppressive institutions and healing trauma wounds wrought by injustice. I discuss findings and methodological implications for CCES, considering challenges in translating research to policy change for racial equity. This article situates the power and limitations of research within CFJ’s broad array of transformative organizing strategies to create more caring and equitable schools. Strategies include youth-led action research, voter engagement, lobbying, youth sharing power with adults, and healing practices of slowing down and relationship building to rehumanize youth of color. I then discuss implications for CCES. First, research supported CFJ youth leaders’ efforts to press institutions to value their full, emotionally complex humanity and legitimize their emotional knowledge. Yet because research is only one of many strategies for transformative change, fully participatory research is not always within organizing groups’ capacity. Thus, researchers can act more expansively by lending our time, energy, and labor to power building. Second, care and healing practices embodied by CFJ can inspire researchers to center relationship building and care as praxis and translate these lessons to transform the academy into a more equitable place. Ultimately, transformative organizing shows how CCES can extend beyond equitable research practices to include more liberatory ways of being, feeling, and acting towards justice. Full article

Engaging in liberatory praxis at times means operating outside of set or limiting boundaries. As such, this article is written in the first person to highlight both a praxis of freedom (outside of the status quo) and to show impact. It pays homage to elder educators in the process of (re)membering those who have paved the way for liberatory praxis and influence my personal educational philosophy presented here for guidance. Student voices are amplified in the process of highlighting ways that (re)searching, (re)visioning, (re)cognizing, (re)presenting, and (re)claiming are actualized to engender educational freedom across curricular content in a higher educational setting. Full article

This article brings together critical disability scholarship and personal narrative, sharing the author’s pandemic story of disruption, caregiving, grief, burnout, cancer, and post-operative fatigue. It offers critical reflection on the limits of the neoliberal academy and possibilities for practicing liberatory politics within it, posing two central questions: What does it mean to crip time and centre care as an arts-based researcher? What might a commitment to honouring crip time based on radical care do for the author and their scholarship, and for others aspiring to conduct reworlding research? This analysis suggests that while committing to “slow scholarship” is a form of resistance to ableist capitalist and colonial pressures within the academy, slowness alone does not sufficiently crip research processes. Crip time, by contrast, involves multiply enfolded temporalities imposed upon (and reclaimed by) many researchers, particularly those living with disabilities and/or chronic illness. The article concludes that researchers can commit to recognizing crip time, valuing it, and caring for those living through it, including themselves, not only/necessarily by slowing down. Indeed, they can also carry out this work by actively imagining the crip futures they are striving to make along any/all trajectories and temporalities. This means simultaneously transforming academic institutions, refusing internalized pressures, reclaiming interdependence, and valuing all care work in whatever time it takes. Full article

The visible impacts of COVID-19 and racial injustice have resulted in renewed funding commitments and research within minoritized communities. However, this work is too often anchored in deficit and damage-centered research approaches and practices. In this brief, we call on the qualitative research community to reframe their perspectives and terminate harmful, pain-driven research. We underscore the importance of humanizing and liberatory approaches to research with youth who are racially/ethnically minoritized. Specifically, we contend that the emotional health and overall well-being of youth are impacted by the approaches employed by researchers and the experiences racially/ethnically minoritized youth have with research. Thus, we offer specific anti-oppressive strategies and recommendations for qualitative researchers to consider in their work with racial/ethnically minoritized youth and communities. Full article

Prison theatre practitioners and scholars often describe the sense of imaginative freedom or “escape” that theatre and drama can facilitate for incarcerated actors, in contrast to the strict regimes of the institution. Despite this, the concept of freedom or liberation is rarely interrogated, being presented instead as a given—a natural by-product of creative practice. Drawing from John Dewey’s (1934) pragmatist aesthetics and the liberatory pedagogies of Bell Hooks (2000) and Paulo Freire (1996), I propose an embodied aesthetics of liberation in prison theatre that adds depth and complexity to claims for freedom through creativity. Reflecting on over twenty years of prison theatre practice and research, I propose that the initial “acts of escape” performed through engaging the imagination are merely the first threshold toward more meaningful forms of freedom. I frame these as the following three intersecting domains: “Acts of unbinding”, which represents the personal liberation afforded by experiences with theatre in prison; “acts of love”, which expresses how the theatre ensemble might represent a “beloved community” (hooks); and “acts of liberation”, which articulates how these experiences of self-and-world creation may ripple out to impact audiences and communities. An aesthetics of liberation in prison theatre can, therefore, be conceived as an embodied movement towards personal and social renewal; an approach that deepens our understanding of its oft-cited humanising potential, and its limits. Full article

Feminist pedagogy is a teaching practice, philosophy and process that seeks to confront and deconstruct oppressive power structures both within and outside of the classroom using a gendered lens. As Women’s Studies departments continue to grow in many universities, feminist pedagogy seems to be gaining popularity as an approach to engaging students in liberatory classroom practices. However, feminist language pedagogy (feminist pedagogy in the second language learning context) appears to have stagnated. This paper investigates the implementation of feminist language pedagogy in an EAP writing classroom for first-year students at a public university in the Southwest of the United States. Using action research, the teacher, who is the author of this paper, examined how feminist language pedagogy aids the development of her students’ critical consciousness and serves as a motivational tool for L2 writing development. The author finds that even in a short, sixteen-week semester, it is possible for students to foster critical consciousness without sacrificing linguistic development. Full article