Centering Mami-Informed Onto-Epistemologies

• In Event: 25.085 - Sheraton Roundtable One - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 25.085-4 - Mothering and Daughtering as Methodological Framing: Black and Transnational Feminist Interrogations of Curricular Inquiry

Abstract

Purpose
The path toward becoming a critical feminist scholar starts well before a woman’s first engagement with the academy. In this paper, I trace how my critical feminist ontoepistemologies were set by women who had no formal schooling–matriarchs who created space for me long before my birth. I center Mami’s (my mother) narratives, cuentos about the Dominican Republic that highlight cosmologies unspoken in the westernized academy, to make sense of my entrance, exits, and reroutings across US educational institutions. Black women in the US have furthered the concept of curriculum theory as an interdisciplinary study of experiences involving “the everyday practices of schools and classrooms” (Baszile, 2006, p 89). As a daughter of someone who desired but could not access schools, my “everyday practices of schools and classrooms” were enactments of de/colonizing processes. Thus, I contend with the paradox that the US academy houses critical theorists who name intersectionality while simultaneously exasperating the epistemicide I mitigate as a Black woman with immediate, familial ties to the Global South.

Perspectives
Moving away from a dualistic analytical approach, I represent the tensions and movements between colonizing oppression and decolonizing longings as de/colonizing; the slash indicates the interchange between these contested positions (Bhattacharya, 2009). In privileging the memories and counter-stories of multiply marginalized people at the intersections of anti-Blackness, ableism, colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy and other forms of oppression (Collins, 2005; hooks, 1994), I (re)center “old wives’ tales” and epistemologies that are explicitly devalued or erased in the westernized university’s curriculum. Through my understandings of Mami’s stories, my complex situatedness, and the education I accessed through US-based schooling, I have (co)constructed a Black feminist, Mami-influenced, de/colonial onto-epistemic orientation.

Methods
Rooted in de/colonial, Black feminist, and Mami-influenced onto-epistemological orientations, I engage in autoethnographic tracing to interrogate how transnational and intergenerational understandings framed my urban public school experiences as empowering, despite the often-fetishized challenges in discourses about urban communities. I then outline key movements made during my undergraduate studies at (a) an Ivy League college and a special education teacher education program in South Florida, and my graduate studies at (b) another Ivy League institution and a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). These narratives are chronologically non-linear, interrupted, disrupted. In their telling, I ascribe as much (sometimes more) credence to the experienced-based understandings of people who are traditionally unacknowledged in academic discursive spaces as I do to the expertise found in academic sources.

Significance
In response to the 2019 AERA thematic focus on (post)truth, I argue that theorization and empiricism exist outside of academia’s bounds. Curricular practices in westernized universities are demonstrably designed to keep multiply-minoritized women at the margins (Grosfoguel, 2013). In referencing de/coloniality while writing in English and working at a US university to amplify my voice, it is difficult to fully separate my participation in university-based endeavors from my desire to disrupt complicity in the epistemicide of culturally-situated understandings. Using an autoethnographic mapping of intergenerationally embodied marginality and epistemic frictions, I highlight the complicated terrain of survivance, intersected with intentional acts of (un)learning westernized curriculum.

Author

• Mildred Boveda, Arizona State University