Women Of Color In Education Research Articles

“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

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.

Lived Experiences of Women of Color in Education

By building upon previous research of women of color in academia, this article focuses on the lived experiences and narratives of two faculty members. Their stories are presented as case studies which explicate the distinct difference between reading and researching poverty and having experiential knowledge of this circumstance. The first narrative presents a scholar from a farmworker background who understands and has lived in poverty. Because of this background, she is able to apply her own community cultural wealth to her work in education. The second narrative depicts a scholar with a rich academic background that did not have the opportunity to engage fully with her research agenda. Her life in academia was very rich and she was able to help many students, schools and communities. However, she was forced to set aside her dreams of conducting in depth research of the issues confronted by her underserved community.