Critical Relational Epistemologies: Challenging Inequitable Knowledge Relationships in Educational Organizing

• In Event: 25.067 - Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: 25.067-19 - Challenging Power and Transforming Relationships Through Grassroots Organizing

Abstract

This paper describes how working class Mexicana leaders centered the knowledge of working class Mexicanas within educational organizing efforts to receive more equitable educational services for their children. Drawing from a participant ethnographic case study, I describe how a leader resignified ‘amor’, or motherly love, to privilege Mexicana’s knowledge of their children and their rights to an equitable education. I use a combination of critical pedagogical and relational epistemological theory to argue that critical relational theory can provide an important lens through which to reimagine more equitable knowledge relationships within educational organizing.

Author

• Christopher Milk Bonilla, Texas State University - San Marcos