Waging Peace Like Gritty, Mindful Women

• In Event: Curriculum Scholars, Literature, and the Women Who Have Influenced/Inspired Us: Commemorating Dreams and Necessities

Abstract

As a naturalized U.S. citizen and a woman academic of color with a longstanding commitment to the work of systemic and psychic decolonization (engaging such scholars as Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Thich Nhat Hanh, bell hooks, Chandra Mohanty, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and others), I – like many others – have tales to tell of xenophobic, racist, and heterosexist encounters as well as of support, belonging, and love – within and without the academy. Some early encounters jolted me into a sharp awareness of how even women colleagues (typically from racially and socioeconomically privileged backgrounds) colluded – their public embrace of feminism and diversity notwithstanding – to isolate and disenfranchise fellow women scholars. Adrienne Rich (1979) helped me understand then that “The university is above all a hierarchy…. Each woman in the university is defined by her relationship to the men in power instead of her relationship to other women up and down the scale” (pp. 136-7). Similarly, Audre Lorde’s (1984) insistence on engaging “difference as a crucial strength” (p. 112); Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) brilliance in working through dualisms towards mestiza locations, identities, and cultures; and bell hooks’ (1990) gritty realism in claiming “homeplace” as a “site of resistance” (p. 41) have enabled my survival and contributed to the development of my own critical voice in both my writing and my teaching.

As we continue to struggle in educational and sociopolitical contexts increasingly defined by paradigms shaped by corporate greed (see, for instance, Taubman’s 2009 book Teaching by numbers), we experience combinations of anger, fear, and fatigue. Fittingly, the 2018 AERA conference theme is “the dreams, possibilities, and necessity of public education,” with the CFP noting the need to “realize the seemingly impossible” (p. 1). Given the apparent global sway of twenty-first century capitalism, the key questions I am engaging here are: How can we foster a culture that is not mired in dividing, conquering, quantifying? How can we root ourselves, instead, in the commitment to address the persistent themes of our shared human condition, across differences? In other words, in this paper – framed by the critical writings of feminist, lesbian, postcolonial, and women-of-color scholars – I explore ways of crafting a culture that transforms the current capitalist-patriarchal frame, allowing us to move towards “mindfulness” and “interbeing” so that we become capable of “waging peace” in a sustained manner (Hanh, 1991). Indeed, such theoretical meditations have powerful implications for practice. Witness, for instance, former Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy’s (2017, June 2) analysis that, as a nation, if we are to change the world then we need to teach children to be “moral leaders” from a “young age,” enabling them to make “decisions driven by values of compassion, generosity, kindness, and love” by “modeling and rewarding those values.”

Author

• Nina Asher, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities