Substantive Citizenship Research Articles

Citizen labor

AbstractIn the last two decades, India's system of agricultural land management has been transitioning from paper to digital records. In effecting this shift, engineers and bureaucrats in the city of Bangalore, India's “Silicon Valley,” have tacitly and invisibly shifted the responsibility for maintaining data from the state to individuals. Moreover, the new digital databases of land records have fragmented offices and dispersed data across new sites and actors. Under these transformed conditions, people can access services only through what I call citizen labor. That is, when digitization is applied to land and property—which are quintessential sites for the making and unmaking of citizenship—people are interpellated into laboring on their own data. This shows that the digitization of government extracts a form of labor, one whose benefits accrue to groups and organizations beyond the laboring individual. As a result, people have an increasingly degraded experience of substantive citizenship.

Policy differentiation and the politics of belonging in India’s emigrant and emigration policies

ABSTRACT India is the largest emigrant origin country in the world. The majority of Indian emigrants work in low-wage employment in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. This paper contrasts India’s policy responses directed at migrants living in the Gulf countries with policies targeted at those in the Global North. India has extended substantive rights and symbolic inclusion to Indian citizens and (descendants of) former citizens residing in the Global North. However, while it established a social protection framework for low-wage emigrants in the Gulf, these emigrants are often unable to access other substantive citizenship rights and are mostly ignored at the symbolic level. Through critical approaches to the study of diasporas and the lens of boundary work, this article analyzes how emigrant origin states (re-)define belonging through differentiated emigration and emigrant policies. It shows that the Indian state links inclusive/exclusive boundaries of (symbolic) national membership, inherent in emigration and emigrant policies, to classifications regarding emigrants’ social identities, in this case class and religion.

States of faḍl or stating faḍl: On the value of indebtedness for Iraqi exiles in Jordan

ABSTRACTA condition of excess characterizes Iraqi exiles' everyday life in Jordan: excesses of waiting and anticipation, bureaucratic work, and aspirations for future benevolent governance. To grapple with this excess, they have had to develop strategies that render their lives in exile more manageable. Despite being hosted as “guests” of the Hashemite monarchy—an ambitious status evoking notions of pan‐Arab solidarity and Arab traditions of hospitality—this status does not guarantee or grant them access to substantive citizenship rights. In light of this, Iraqi exiles who arrived in Jordan following the US‐led invasion of Iraq in 2003 have often found themselves dependent on potentially injurious ways to navigate their presence. One of these strategies are relations and practices of faḍl, a form of exchange governed by a foreclosure of reciprocity and necessity of public recognition. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among what I refer to as the Iraqi exilic milieu in Jordan, this article examines how, in the absence and denial of expected forms of exchange, the circulation of stately faḍl and its cooptation by ordinary people articulate new notions and practices of valuable yet nevertheless wounding citizenship.

Producing dispossessed and humanitarian subjects: Land acquisition and compensation policies in Lahore, Pakistan

AbstractThis article examines land acquisition for the construction of a metro train line in Lahore, Pakistan, to argue that the role and temporality of bureaucratic documentary practices are key to enabling urban informality and associated regimes of substantive citizenship. I examine the changing role of bureaucratic documents along the axes of (a) state and citizens, as documents are transferred between various actors who attribute different meanings to them; and (b) time, as documents assume varying meanings across their life cycles. First, I argue that documents constitute the disaggregated state and facilitate inconsistent practices that produce urban informality by exempting such settlements from some regulations while subjecting them to others. Second, a study of the time effects of these contingent practices and associated documentation shows that while original settlers may manipulate the disparate institutions of the state to secure resources, tolerance of such settlements across generations prompts a reformulation of local conceptions of landownership. Contemporary residents, then, position themselves as propertied citizens in possession of ownership documents. In this case of land acquisition, such efforts secured limited recognition from the state: residents were cast as illegal encroachers but were eventually offered some compensation as humanitarian aid, thereby reproducing socioeconomic inequalities. [bureaucratic documents, urban informality, state, temporality, citizenship]

Principle of progressive autonomy, participation, and recognition of agency. Substantive citizenship in the transition from childhood to adolescence

It is necessary to talk about children's and adolescents' education for citizenship beyond the vindication of spaces for citizen action. It is necessary to incorporate the principle of progressive autonomy highlighted by the Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989 in terms of 'evolving capacities', from the knowledge of their rights and their exercise. This article aims to analyse the concept of substantive citizenship of children and adolescents based on their right to participation and from the recognition of their agency, as well as the promotion of and respect for the principle of progressive autonomy. Based on a participatory narrative research with a socio-critical perspective, 23 discussion groups were carried out with 210 young people between 15 and 19 years old in five Iberoamerican cities: Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Madrid and Sao Paolo. From the content analysis of their contributions, three dimensions emerge: to know oneself as a subject of rights from the knowledge of these rights, the importance of intergenerational relations in recognising progressive autonomy, and the incidence of age in the development of their autonomy. As conclusions, it should be noted that young people in the five cities know their rights and recognise that family, school and social networks favour their recognition as subjects of rights and responsibilities. It also reveals that age is a limiting element and a fundamental factor for the development of substantive citizenship.

“We are not the people they think we are”: First-generation undocumented immigrant belonging and legal consciousness in the wake of deferred action for parents of Americans

On 20 November 2014, President Barack Obama introduced Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) as a temporary relief for undocumented immigrant parents raising citizen children in the United States. DAPA’s implementation stalled indefinitely following a court-issued injunction in 2015, subsequent legal contestation, and a Supreme Court decision in 2016 upholding the original injunction. I purport that both DAPA and its failure to implement constitute sites from within which to critically examine the legal consciousness and sense of belonging of undocumented participants. By bridging scholarship on legal consciousness and belonging, this article examines how Latino first-generation undocumented immigrants from Los Angeles, who considered DAPA, understand their unlawful presence and assert belonging in the United States (US). This article draws on participant observation in Los Angeles, California, including four DAPA legal information forums and 24 in-depth interviews following DAPA’s court injunction with undocumented parents who intended to apply to DAPA. Data reveal a legal consciousness imbued with normative and value-based notions of substantive citizenship including parenthood, law-abidingness, and contribution. In light of DAPA’s failure, participants draw on these narratives to counter-assert their belonging and deservingness of DAPA. Ultimately, this case draws attention to how undocumented, first-generation immigrant legal consciousness is more complex than previously ascertained, and how DAPA shapes immigrants’ claims to a lawful presence.

Chouftouhonna Festival: Feminist and Queer Artivism as Transformative Agency for a New Politics of Recognition in Post-revolutionary Tunisia

Abstract In Tunisia, like in other MENA countries, feminism has opened the door to activism advocating for individual liberties and sexual rights. After the 2010-2011 revolution, a new wave of political activism has relied on new forms of cultural and creative practice to reconfigure the public space. This paper utilises ethnographic fieldwork to investigate the experience of the Chouftouhonna Feminist International Art Festival in Tunis as an example of ‘artivism’ – i.e. artistic activism – grounded in secular feminism and advancing LGBTQ+ claims. The first section of this paper explores the multiple ‘dimensions of subversion’ of the Festival. The second section aims to demonstrate why Chouftouhonna’s experience can be analysed as part of a political strategy contributing to a new imagination for a substantive egalitarian citizenship, through both ‘affirmative and transformative remedies to social injustice’. Because the Festival is meant as an expression of ‘transformative agency’, its founders and organizers strive for a new politics of recognition for women and sexual diversity in post-revolutionary Tunisia.

Ensuring Citizenship Rights: Cooperation and Tensions in the Governance of Urban Community Gardens

The manifold social, cultural and health benefits of urban community gardens have received much attention in the literature on urban ecosystem services and nature-based solutions off late. Despite recognition of these benefits by many city governments, critical scholarship in urban political ecology has, however, also shown that urban community gardens can stand in tension with other municipal agendas, in which economic growth is prioritized over social justice. While highlighting some of these tensions, in this paper we pay particular attention to possibilities for cooperation with municipalities and to the possibilities of promoting more inclusive urban citizenship. In the past, community gardens were frequently set up by municipalities for urban residents to respond to food scarcity and public health issues. Today, they are often still founded in periods of socio-economic crisis either by municipalities or by community actors themselves. We discuss whether and if so, how, such a cooperation may promote substantive citizenship rights, while highlighting some of the tensions that counteract this aim. The paper draws on case studies conducted as part of the EU-Horizon2020-funded project NATURVATION (Grant Agreement 730243) and suggests methods for citizen engagement that municipalities can adopt in order to enhance participation in the cooperative development of urban community gardens.

Homeless women self-advocates: The quest from liminal to full citizenship

ABSTRACT This essay explores how homeless women produce advocacy to gain full and substantive citizenship. Homeless women's attempts to gain recognition as full members of the society require them to transform lived experiences of trauma, exclusion, and loss into public arguments. Facing the intersection of civic exclusion by class and gender, homeless women are commonly viewed as welfare-dependent, irrational, and present-oriented, and are, therefore, considered the opposite of “good citizens.” Despite their legal citizenship, homeless women are essentially liminal citizens—their citizenship is lacking substantial political power and is thus barren. This essay explores how liminal citizens attempt to secure full citizenship by looking behind-the-scenes at their self-advocacy production process. Employing rhetorical field methods, the essay offers an interpretive reading of in-depth interviews with homeless women self-advocates and illuminates three aspects of the advocacy production process: recognizing the worth of the story; deciding to tell traumatic stories; and crafting the story. By unpacking the self-advocacy production process this essay animates the discussion about the mechanisms required to foster a deep and inclusive democracy from a rhetorical perspective.

Integration reasoning at the ECtHR: Challenging the boundaries of minorities’ citizenship

This contribution zooms in on a particularly disconcerting development in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, that is visible in several recent cases brought by religious minorities with a migrant background, in which the Court accepts – in the name of (requirements for) integration – far-reaching restrictions on the rights of these religious minorities with a migrant background to be respected in their own religiously inspired way of life. The Court furthermore glosses over a context of Islamophobia and related stereotypes, thus failing to identify and counter instances of discrimination on grounds of religion. The article argues that the ECtHR in these cases not only drifts away from the counter-majoritarian core of human rights protection, turning several of its steady lines of jurisprudence favourable to (the effective protection of) minorities’ fundamental rights on their head, but also allows States to basically push religious minorities with a migrant background out of the public space/public schools, in the name of social integration – an integrated society. Ultimately, States are contesting the substantive citizenship of religious minorities with a migrant background and the Court, unfortunately, enables them to exclude and marginalise these religious minorities with a migrant background. The Court thus disregards the foundational value of the right to equal treatment for the human rights paradigm, and moves away from an equal and inclusive citizenship. Put differently, the Court enables governments to dress up Islamophobic, exclusionary agenda’s with a human face, thus challenging the boundaries of citizenship in the name of ‘integration’.

Uncertain Citizenship: Everyday Practices of Bolivian Migrants in Chile by Megan Ryburn

Reviewed by: Uncertain Citizenship: Everyday Practices of Bolivian Migrants in Chile by Megan Ryburn Chris Strunk Megan Ryburn Uncertain Citizenship: Everyday Practices of Bolivian Migrants in Chile. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. xiii + 206 pp. Maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $35.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-520-29877-4); $85.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-520-29876-7); $34.95 electronic (ISBN 978-0-520-97079-3) In october 2019, millions of chileans took to the streets to demand that Sebastián Piñera’s government end a proposed metro fare hike. Behind the concerns over increasing transit costs, the dramatic protests were fueled by widespread anger at the failures of neoliberalism in the country, including inadequate and expensive social services, high levels of debt, and the exclusionary nature of Chilean society. While formal politics and social movements are often seen as the primary avenues for individuals and groups to make claims on the nation-state, in recent years scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the everyday as a site of belonging and citizenship. In Uncertain Citizenship, Megan Ryburn makes an important contribution to the field of migration and citizenship studies in a richly detailed ethnography about the lives of Bolivian migrants in Chile. [End Page 291] Uncertain Citizenship is based on a multi-sited ethnography with Bolivian migrants in the Chilean cities of Santiago and Arica, and in migrant communities of origin in Bolivia. The strength of the book lies in its rich descriptions of the lived experiences of Bolivian migrants and their struggles to exercise substantive rights in a society that routinely discriminates against and marginalizes them. Accessing spaces inhabited by low-wage migrants, many of whom have irregular legal status, presents obvious logistical and ethical challenges for researchers, and Ryburn’s introduction offers a thoughtful discussion of the strengths and challenges of her research design. Long-term volunteer work with a migrant rights association in Chile gives Ryburn a sense of the shifting and interconnected exclusions (and inclusions) of migrants from substantive citizenship rights, as well as knowledge of specific policy changes proposed by advocates. Fieldwork in multiple places in Chile and Bolivia further contributes to the development of a theory of South-South migration shaped by conditions in transnational spaces. Ryburn’s research is an important corrective to the dominant focus in migration research on the global North as a destination for international migrants. Bolivians in particular have a long history of migration to northern Argentina and Buenos Aires, explored in great depth by Bolivian and Argentine scholars such as Alfonso Hinojosa Gordonava, Alejandro Grimson, and Susana Sassone. In recent years, Bolivian migration patterns have shifted away from the European Union and United States – largely a result of economic recessions and restrictive immigration policies – to neighboring Brazil and Chile. Ryburn describes recent migration to Chile as part of a livelihood and economic citizenship strategy in post-neo-liberal Bolivia, which has challenged some of the major tenets of neoliberalism while maintaining a system that has failed to meaningfully address marginalization and vulnerability. But while mobility is part of a search for a more certain citizenship that guarantees economic and social rights (el sueño chileno), Bolivian migrants often encounter more uncertainty in Chile, where citizenship has been shaped by the country’s long history of neoliberal social and economic policies. Ryburn illustrates the ambiguous position of migrants through six brief but poignant descriptions of different places of uncertain citizenship, taking the reader from overcrowded and dangerous migrant cités (dwellings) in Santiago to domestic workers isolated in the homes of wealthy Chileans on the edges of the capital city. Her analysis of Bolivian truck drivers at a remote border crossing in Lago Chungará exemplifies the importance of a spatial perspective on citizenship that she develops throughout the book. Here, she describes how a long history of geopolitical tensions between Chile and Bolivia, as well as an intentional policy of Chileanization that violently displaced and discriminated against Indigenous people in the region, shape the arbitrary applications of the law against poor and Indigenous Bolivians crossing international boundaries in the twenty-first century. While Uncertain Citizenship has a strong empirical focus, it also develops important...

Contending with neo-classical patriarchal bargain: Filipina marriage migrants’ negotiations for naturalization in South Korea

ABSTRACTThis study examines naturalization choices and processes among Filipina marriage migrants in South Korea. Drawing on interviews with 89 Filipina marriage migrants and nine of their spouses, we show how naturalization can become a site of bargaining where female marriage migrants strategize to maximize security and optimize their life options within a patriarchal host society. Citizenship is, for most marriage migrants, informally tied to their fulfillment of gendered expectations as wives, mothers and daughters-in-laws. As such, Filipina marriage migrants’ political incorporation cannot be separated from their gendered performance in the family. We also examine how personal resources such as education and employment prospects influence migrants’ bargaining potential. By focusing on the different social positions of and resources available to female marriage migrants, we show the complex ways in which both gender and human capital influences marriage migrants’ legal and substantive citizenship.

Relational Legal Consciousness of U.S. Citizenship: Privilege, Responsibility, Guilt, and Love in Latino Mixed-Status Families

Based on interviews with 100 members of mixed-status families in Los Angeles, California, this article analyzes how U.S. citizen children practice and understand citizenship in the context of punitive laws targeting their loved ones. Participants' narratives of citizenship as privilege, responsibility, and guilt reveal that despite normative conceptions of citizenship as a universally equal status, citizenship intersects with key social markers to determine the contours and inequalities of substantive citizenship. Specifically, U.S. citizens in mixed-status families make sense of their juridical category when they navigate unrealistic aspirations from relatives, maintain silence about undocumented family members' legal status, manage their fear of family separation through deportation, and take on financial and logistical responsibilities prematurely to help relatives. In each of these ways, family proves to be a key site for the social and relational production of citizenship.

Urban planning, exclusion and negotiation in an informal subdivision: the case of Bombay Hotel, Ahmedabad

Urban planning as conceptualised and practiced in the global South has enacted inequitable distribution of resources, produced social and spatial exclusions and denied substantive citizenship to low-income groups. This article examines urban planning as one of the key drivers of exclusion and conflict by unpacking the ways in which it has produced layers of informalities over the years in Bombay Hotel, a low-income Muslim locality in Ahmedabad. A key planning instrument implicated in these processes in recent years is the Town Planning Scheme (TPS), a land pooling and readjustment mechanism portrayed nationally and internationally by the government as an example of best practice. The article also interrogates political processes, their interface with the TPS implementation in the locality, and the outcomes of these interactions. The article ends by reflecting on the possibilities and limits of these processes for addressing the exclusions and everyday conflicts faced by residents of low-income informal localities.

The politics of cholera, crisis and citizenship in urban Zimbabwe: ‘People were dying like flies’

Abstract Zimbabwe’s catastrophic cholera outbreak of 2008/09 resulted in an unprecedented 100,000 cases and nearly 5,000 deaths. In the aftermath of the epidemic, questions of suffering and death and of rescue, relief, and rehabilitation have persisted in on-going processes of meaning-making through which people come to terms with the epidemic as a ‘man-made’ disaster. Based on extensive fieldwork, I examine the views of residents in Harare’s high-density townships that were epicentres of the disease. I argue that cholera was experienced by township residents as many crises at the same time. It was not only a public health crisis but also a political–economic crisis, a social crisis as well as a crisis of expectations, history and social identity. As such, I argue that the cholera outbreak was intensely generative of political subjectivities that reveal important shifts in the fraught relations between state and society in Zimbabwe’s urban politics. Finally, I argue that the government’s perceived causal role in, and failure to respond to, the cholera outbreak occasioned intense public outrage among township residents, which speaks to a much deeper aspiration for substantive citizenship based on political rights, social recognition, and access to high-quality public services delivered by a robust, responsible state.

Civilizing the political society? Redevelopment regime and Urban Poor’s Rights in Mumbai

Abstract This article is concerned with informality-state relations, subaltern politics and citizenship in the context of the urban redevelopment regime. Based on an empirical study of an NGO (SPARC)-mediated resettlement of Project Affected Persons (PAPs) in Mumbai, it explicates the incomplete ‘civilizing of the political society’ which engenders asymmetrical material and leadership enablement and differential subjectivities at the community levels. The state co-opts SPARC’s institutional framework to mediate resettlement, engender limited traversal from ‘population’ to ‘citizen’, restrict democratic liberation and subject the PAPs to bifold governance against the antagonistic articulations of state-subaltern relations, viz. ‘political society’ and ‘deep democracy’. SPARC’s institutional claims of inclusion and community-centric resettlement, non-confrontational negotiations and politics of patience are materialized through institutional coercion, domesticated confrontations and inadequate compensation, and are augmented by the PAPs’ calculative rationalities, fear of homelessness and anticipation of urban citizenship. Against this backdrop and amid further post-resettlement marginalities that complicate housing-based ‘substantive citizenship’ and ‘political society’-based mediation, this article calls for a re-politicization of the redevelopment discourse to seek alternate possibilities of urban citizenship for the urban subaltern.

Putting “Canadians First”: Problematizing the Crisis of “Foreign” Workers in Canadian Media and Policy Responses

AbstractResearch into media constructions of migrant crises has noted when, where, and how migrants become illegalized, criminalized, and securitized, exposing the relationship between media, migration, and state power. News media, through narratives and lexicon, can portray some migrants as a threat to the fabric of society. This article applies the framework of policing the crisis (Hall et al., ) to discuss the discursive construction of Temporary Migrant Workers (TMWs) in Canadian media and policy. Content and textual analysis of front‐page coverage of newsprint on the Moratorium on TMWs implemented in 2014 demonstrates this process of collective problematization. The Moratorium responded to a concern of replacing Canadians, which was largely unsupported by data. Since then, news coverage has shifted their representation of TMWs from a threat to victims, signalling a critical moment to reimagine TMWs and re‐direct discussions towards granting substantive citizenship rights.

Nuevos enfoques para el fortalecimiento de la ciudadanía sustantiva del MERCOSUR. El caso de la cultura Jesuítica-Guaraní (Paraguay)

El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo central proponer una visión ampliada y multidimensional del concepto de integración y, al mismo tiempo, promover abordajes sociales y culturales del MERCOSUR a partir de criterios territoriales integrales. Más concretamente, se plantea que el uso turístico del patrimonio puede contribuir al desarrollo del proceso “mercosureño” en términos económicos, culturales y, sobre todo, sociales. Dicha construcción pretende ser analizada a partir del estudio de caso correspondiente a las Misiones Jesuíticas Guaraníes de Paraguay, en tanto que no solo representa el primer proyecto-piloto en el marco de los “Itinerarios Culturales” que lleva adelante el MERCOSUR sino que, además, puede constituir una auténtica herramienta de empoderamiento y fortalecimiento de la ciudadanía sustantiva de la región. En este sentido, se trabajará en torno al eje V del Plan Estratégico de Acción Social (PEAS) entendiendo la necesidad de promover la diversidad cultural de los países del MERCOSUR en sintonía con la agenda social del bloque.

Between a guest and an okupa: Migration and the making of insurgent citizenship in Buenos Aires’ informal settlements

In this paper, we explore initiatives for the construction of substantive citizenship by transnational migrants in Buenos Aires. In looking at migrants’ political participation across the city, we found that the spatiality of citizenship practices is important. At the city level, there are migrant organisations representing specific nationalities. However, in informal settlements, where many migrants reside, we found that migrants engage in political practices across nationality and ethnic lines by coming together with their neighbours in grassroots organisations. These different forms of organising embody critically different views of migrants in their relationship with rights. While the former promote practices linked to ethnic belonging and see migrants as ‘guests’ in a foreign country, unable to make claims to the local or national governments, the latter see them as rights-bearing individuals with power to claim their right to the city. We argue that activism at the scale of the neighbourhood proves to hold more potential for the building of substantive citizenship than actions by organisations active at the city level. This is because migrant organisations active at the city level organise on the basis of nationality, while those at the neighbourhood level bring migrants and non-migrants together on the basis of their class-based interests.

Black Women Teacher Educators, Race Uplift, and the Academic Other-Mother Identity

This paper examines the intersections of teacher educators' identities and the notion of race uplift. It is basedon a larger study that explores the experiences and practices of Black women professors at three differenthigher education institutions. The author maintains that as a result of their outsider-within position and raceuplift stance, Black women teacher educators may produce an academic other-mother identity. Whileconsidering the concepts of womanist theory, this paper attempts to offer a thick description of the kind ofrace uplift practiced by teacher educators of color. The author defines the outsider-within position and thehistorical relationship between the race uplift theme and womanism, reviews current literature about teachereducators of color - highlighting their experiences and how they view their work in the academy, andexamines the outsider-within position in Black women teacher educators. The author concludes with adiscussion of the other-mother identity and Black women teacher educators.Research indicates that the experiences of Black women faculty involve racist and sexist practices bycolleagues and students. Additionally, these women experience feelings of isolation, discrimination, andtokenism. Collins (1998) cautions that being marginalized in intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality,and/or citizenship places a variety of well-meaning intellectuals engaged in higher education in commonborder zones, and these same systems of power reproduce hierarchies in "outsider-within locations." Middleclass African Americans in the United States, for example, are aggressively recruited to join eliteinstitutions of higher education and other sites of institutional power, only to find themselves, upon arrival,confined to a new designated "place", or "outsider-within location" (Collins, 1998). Professor AnnetteHenry, also a teacher educator, describes the outsider-within location clearly from personal experience:Standing like an oak by the photocopier, a White male graduate student utters the only words hehas ever said to me during his years in the college of education: "You're lucky you got this job;"he mutters, assuredly, un-stapling a document. "They don't usually hire, well;" he leans towardme and whispers,"outsiders," as if telling me a deep dark secret. (Henry, 1998, p. 5)That is, they appear to belong, because they possess both the credentials for admittance and the rights offormal citizenship, "but that does not automatically translate into substantive citizenship rights" (Collins,1998, p. 5). Several Black women scholars have termed the race-, sex-, and class-based oppression theyexperienced in institutions of higher learning as "double", "triple", or "multiple oppressions" (Anzaldúa,1998; Guy-Sheftall, 1995; James, 1999; James & Farmer, 1993; King, D., 1993). These terms are meant tosuggest the cumulative effect of experiencing, gender, race, and class exploitation (Knight, 1998).These new spaces that marginalized Black women occupy in the academy, coupled with the possible erosionof activism within teaching due to a growing Black middle class (Collins, 1990), led me to ask questionssuch as: what is the current relationship between agency and teacher preparation?; in what ways are teachingpractices influenced by these new "outsider-within" locations?; and, how do contemporary Black womenteacher educators utilize notions of "race uplift" to shape their work?This paper examines the intersections of teacher educators' outsider within identity and the notion of raceuplift. While considering the concepts of womanist theory, it attempts to offer a thick description of raceuplift as practiced by Black women teacher educators. It is based on a qualitative investigation of threeBlack women teacher educators that sought to answer two questions: In what ways do their experiencesinform their teaching practice, and how does the notion of race uplift inform their work? The sample wasclearly purposive because the goals were to deepen society's understandings of the significant experiencesand practices of Black women who prepare teachers for K-12 classrooms.