This study highlights a culturally responsive transformative school, family, and community partnership in the Western Region of the United States. The partnership served over 100 students and 300 parents of Black Pan-African immigrant descent responding to persistent school alienation. Using Critical Race Theory, Community Cultural Wealth, and a critical participatory action research design, we explored the structural forces shaping these experiences and the community-based responses that sought to resist them. Data sources included professional development sessions, counter-storytelling, Theater of the Oppressed, asset mapping, and semi-structured interviews. Findings revealed key partnership members centered five dispositions-Prophetic Activism, Asset-Based Ideology, Critical Consciousness, Trust, and Solidarity-collectively theorized as PACTS, in response to multiple forms of alienation intersecting Black Pan-African families experienced in schools. These dispositions represent a spiritually, culturally, and politically grounded praxis that disrupted systemic marginalization and help reimagine school, family and community partnerships as sites of collective care, resistance, and justice. Theoretically, we advance "spiritual wealth" as a justice-contingent extension in Community Cultural Wealth. Methodologically, we recommend Black Indigenous approach's centering African knowledge producers. Practically, we provide an audit tool to assess weather partnerships are transformative.
Student questioning is central to science learning, yet what counts as a "good" question and who is seen as capable of asking one emerges through historical, material, and institutional entanglements rather than individual intent. Drawing on Barad's agential realism and Derrida's hauntology, this study examines how human and more-than-human forces - ghosts, affects, infrastructures - shape conditions of questioning in spaces between family and school. Using diffractive analysis of graphic elicitation interviews with four undergraduates, we map questioning as an agentic, world-making practice entangled with race, gender, and institutional structures. Findings suggest that questions materialize through haunted relations among bodies, spaces, memories, and matter. The STEMM ecosystem differentially produces students through racialized and gendered assemblages that privilege some knowings while constraining others. We call for reconfiguring STEMM education as a haunted, posthuman ecology attuned to matter, memory, and relation in cultivating just and capacious scientific curiosity and belonging.
This article explores the everyday epistemic refusals of Asian American educational leaders. It draws on three qualitative case studies to elucidate the ways in which Asian American leaders disinvest from certain norms and relations that legitimate and maintain power structures. The article significantly contributes to a conception of epistemic refusal in education by attending to the micro-moments where educators reject, reframe, and refocus hegemonic narratives. Ultimately, it suggests that the epistemic refusals of Asian American leaders provide a glimpse into aspirational elsewheres of Asian American education.
This paper explores how Black graduate students in higher education graduate programs experience collective healing spaces (CHS). Utilizing a collaborative autoethnography (CAE) methodology, the authors infuse CHS to examine how graduate students navigate and exist within graduate program environments and spaces in higher education. Our research examined the following research questions: (1) How do Black graduate students experience healing in graduate education? (2) How do Black graduate students cultivate collective healing space in graduate education? This research illuminates how our lived experiences as Black graduate students experienced graduate school pressures, joy as resistance, and cultivated joy and healing in graduate education. This scholarship offers critical recommendations on ways graduate education can center joy and healing for Black graduate students.
This study utilized intersectionality to explore the collegiate experiences of four Black Caribbean women navigating a predominately white institution (PwI). Data collection consisted of three virtual (60-90-minute) sista circles. Findings showcase the culture shock that Black Caribbean women experience as they navigate microaggressions due to their race, ethnicity, gender, or accent. In particular, they found it difficult to know when to voice their concerns, as they wanted to avoid being stereotyped as angry Black women. Findings also showcase the varying strategies (i.e. building community) they utilized to negate microaggressions and discrimination. This study has implications for how PwIs develop and implement intersectional practices to support Black Caribbean women in thriving in these types of institutions.
Since the early 2000s, Latinx populations have rapidly increased in Southern states in the United States. Now called the New Latinx South, some areas in the South serve more Latinx students and families than ever before in U.S. history. Research shows that school systems in the New Latinx South struggle to create and maintain educational opportunity for Latinx students. This article draws on the experiences of former Latinx students to understand how schooling shaped educational opportunity for them in Georgia from 2003 to 2010. Latinx community members who grew up in the New Latinx South possess valuable knowledge and assets that can inform Southern education systems. The research uses a collective testimonio technique to share the perspectives of former students regarding being stereotyped and misunderstood, facing low expectations, and lacking support to navigate their education.
In this article, we describe how we encountered queer joy, failure, and ambivalence in two participatory artmaking sexuality education workshops with teachers from a rural community school in New Brunswick, Canada. Writing together as two queer femme sexuality researchers, we ask: What does it mean to talk and think about sexuality education in a context of queer erasure and antiqueer and anti trans political violence? Looking back on our facilitation practices engaging rural sexuality education teachers in participatory visual methodologies, we use workshop discussions and visual data to facilitate a critical reflection on our fieldwork experiences. Here, we describe the downplaying of queerness and pleasure in our workshops, the conservative community norms framing the edges of our facilitation practices, and note how participants created resistive spaces of inquiry through their artmaking. We argue that sexuality research co-facilitation in resistant settings at times necessitates mutual repair, solidarity, and care. Our findings also reveal something about the complications of doing fieldwork in rural communities as two queer femme researchers, and of the nature of sexuality education in New Brunswick more generally.
Questions of care pervade teacher education discourse. Drawing upon Black feminist theories of care, relational philosophies, and abolitionist approaches to education, this study uses data-grounded duoethnographic reflections to interrogate our personal and institutional capacities for organizing communities of care in our teacher and school counselor education classrooms. By reflecting on the messy real-time unfolding of university teaching, this paper explores the generative tension associated with attempting to put an ethic of care to work amongst the complex intersubjectivities of university teaching. Specifically, we examine the overlapping tension associated with competing temporal demands of care that variously need a speed-up and slow-down approach to class time. We also analyze the concurrent tension between comfort, discomfort, and classroom community commitments to care and learning. We conclude with a recognition that while universities are, in many ways, antagonistic to communities of care, they are nevertheless a necessary site of struggle.
This article explores how material agency shapes ethnographic encounters in educational research through a posthumanist lens. Drawing on Karen Barad's agential realism, we examine how pens, often overlooked as mundane tools, emerge as active participants in fieldwork with children. Through small stories drawn from two independent ethnographic studies in early childhood education and home literacy practices, we trace how pens intra-act with researchers, children, and spaces to co-produce knowledge and reconfigure the concepts of the ethnographic field(s). Rather than treating the field(s) as a fixed site solely navigated by the ethnographer, we conceptualize them as emergent, plural, and more-than-human phenomena. By engaging with pens as agents of intra-action, this study invites a rethinking of both materiality and field in qualitative inquiry, offering methodological reflections for posthumanist ethnography.
