Theorizing From the Intersections: Understanding Education Policies and Practices Through Critical Feminist Theories

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium presents a series of papers that approach the study of educational policies and practices through the lens of intersectionality. Drawing on critical feminist analytics emerging from Black, U.S. Third World, transnational, postcolonial, Indigenous, and decolonial feminisms over the last four decades, these papers consider how intersecting powers of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation are constitutive of educational policies and practices, albeit in varying and contingent ways under different historical and geographic conditions. These papers examine ethnographic cases in the US, Brazil, and Guatemala in order to highlight the empirical complexity and political necessity of theorizing educational policies and practices through a truly intersectional lens.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 2: Differences and Intersectionalities

Chair

• Kathryn Moeller, University of Cambridge

Papers

• "We Were Never Allowed to Be Children": Understanding Black Nongirlhoods in Predominately White Schools - Ashley L Smith-Purviance, Providence College

• Mothers Can Be Black: Parental Involvement and the Expectations of Mothering - Sam Prough, University of Delaware

• "No Company Can Take This Away From Us": Chuj Youth and Educators' Intersectional Decolonial Resistance - Alexandra Allweiss, Michigan State University

• Politics of Curricular Erasure: Debates on Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Brazilian "Common Core" - Kathryn Moeller, University of Cambridge

• "Spaces of Radical Openness": Counter-Spaces for Afro-Brazilian Women in Higher Education in Brazil - Tarsha I Herelle, Johns Hopkins University

Discussant

• Erika C. Bullock