Respecting Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color Resistance at AERA

• In Event: Watering Our Foremothers' Garden: Building a Community for Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color Resistance in Education

Abstract

Even as we acknowledge the ideologies that have created the need to even ask a membership base of education researchers to accept educational responsibility, we would be remiss if we do not talk about the counter-public spaces that marginalized folks in the association have created to resist the research-practice split, and actively advocate for alternate epistemological frameworks to be validated in educational research. We can even argue that SIGs like CESJ, Black & Brown at AERA, Pachanga, IPA developed as alternate spaces for validating BIPOC scholarship and strategizing on collective change-making for the association and education overall.
BIWOC members of AERA have especially been at the forefront of advances in educational research, when we consider the influence that scholars like Carol Lee, Eve Tuck, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Kris Gutiérrez, and Lorraine McDonnell have had on changing the tenor of conversations about educators, students, researchers, and epistemological assumptions. These BIWOC scholars have fought for the legitimation of non-Western ideologies, many of which center relationality and unity, despite AERA resistance in the form of proposal and manuscript rejections. When our research work gets rejected for not being “rigorous” or “scholarly” enough, we have repurposed the AERA conference space to informally guide non-BIWOC scholars towards non-dominant epistemologies, and affirm other BIWOC towards challenging normative research etiquettes. In addition to these informal spaces sustaining BIWOC retention in academia, our non-BIWOC colleagues who engage with the work then repurpose our thoughts and bastardize our epistemologies so that they can signal a false sense of progressivism in their research, without disrupting the status quo. Even when our epistemologies succeed in receiving institutional validation, it is non-BIWOC who reap the material benefits in the form of presentation and journal acceptances that contribute to their professional portfolios. One recent example is how Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “intersectionality” has been misappropriated as a buzzword by various white scholars to secure journal publications and book deals (DuBrow, 2008; Harris & Patton, 2019). Meanwhile, BIWOC because our behind-the-scenes academic labor did not yield deliverables that are used to accord “merit”-based fellowships and academic positions, we incur a professional toll while everyone else profits off our labor.
This is not to problematize the work that we do as BIWOC, as our work is transformational, essential, sustaining, and grounded in care for and solidarity with other marginalized folks. However, it is important to consider the unintended consequences of AERA’s call for accepting educational responsibility, especially for BIWOC scholars who never shirked their obligations to their communities. With this in mind, one section of the workshop will highlight and honor the onto-epistemic successes that our foremothers have managed to achieve within the AERA context, and provide BIWOC participants an opportunity to re-engage and validate the em-bodied ways of knowing that the academy has attempted to delegitimize and erase. With this knowledge at hand, we will transition to strategizing about how to continue the work of our foremothers in AERA in particular and the academy as a whole.

Authors

• Aireale Joi Rodgers, University of Southern California

• Judith Landeros, The University of Texas at Austin