EAducation: Letters from Hawai'i to Palestine

Abstract

Abstract: This essay explores ways to strengthen solidarity from Hawai'i to Palestine, in our classrooms and organizing spaces. We are particularly interested in the role that stories have to play in forging relationships of care. We look to the power that stories hold in creating bonds of friendship that are at the core of political community, and to their importance in EAducation, which we contend is central to solidarity. (As it includes the word EA , or sovereignty, breath, rising, the term EAducation bridges liberation and learning inside and beyond the classroom.) Written as a series of letters, to our readers and to one another, we theorize the significance of letters as what the Palestinian scholar and organizer Sarah Ihmoud calls "material expressions of an abolitionist praxis of decolonial love." In their form, our letters also put into practice the principles we embrace. As we explore and enact ways to build solidarity, we look to the work we do in our own classrooms, and to organizing we have done as members of Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at the University of Hawai'i (SFJP@UH). In documenting this history, we hope that the stories we tell will help to inspire more such stories, strengthening what Steven Salaita calls "inter/nationalism," and what Haunani-Kay Trask calls "the rope of resistance."