“We Have to Be Everything at a Time America Tells Us that We are Nothing”: enacting justice as praxis as women of color in education

Abstract

Our stories matter. Stories teach, heal, and affirm our presence, struggles, and perseverance. While the academy socializes scholars to privilege individual advancement, Women of Color consistently testify to the power of collective spaces as spaces of resistance, strength, and critical consciousness. As Asian/Asian American and Black women in academia, we present our stories using a methodological approach we call, “Third World Feminist Collaborative Autoethnography.” Epistemologically, third-world feminism honors the feminist transnational identities that situate us within a global majority. Methodologically, collaborative autoethnography focuses on our joint-individual and interactional critical reflexivity as we grapple with our role, expectations, and commitments toward justice as a praxis. Through narrative and poetic reflections, we analyze relationships between public justice work and private support. while simultaneously discussing our (un)learning processes across four themes: (1) navigating academic labor expectations in dehumanizing circumstances, (2) cultivating community, (3) storying temporality, and (4) signifying spatiality.