Fugitivity Within the University as First-Generation Womxn Faculty of Color: Cultivating an Undercommons

• In Event: First-Generation Faculty of Color: Reflections on Research, Teaching, and Service

Abstract

As first-generation faculty who identify as Black-Pinay, Indigenous and Chicanx, we have an intimate knowledge of what Moten and Harney (2013) theorize as the undercommons—those fugitive spaces outside the sanctioned spaces of the university where we come together to radically engage in collective study, support and research. We recognize that we are “first” not because of our exceptionality, but because of our respective communities’ positions to power and not being allowed “in.” We reflect the generations of those denied entry into these institutions. Our fight is for liberatory research approaches that counter the problematic narratives inherent in white racial knowledge.

As educational scholars, we heed the call now more than ever the importance of scholar-activism and that our research is a political act in which knowledge creation and dissemination are deemed necessary for human liberation (Young et al., 2010). As Calhoun (2008) writes, “Commitment to social action in pursuit of social change is one of the sources for a commitment to social science” (p. xxi). Thus, our experiences with the majoritarian approach to research has been significant in the trajectory of our own research; such that we center critical social science approaches that aim to abolish the institutional forces of white supremacy and anti-Blackness.

We use the concept of fugitivity (Moten and Harney, 2013) and critical autoethnography to explore and examine the limits and possibilities of liberatory research approaches while centering our experiences of gender, race, ethnicity, etc. within the sociopolitical context of power, liberation, and oppression. Critical autoethnography emphasizes practitioner research, where research and practice are inseparable and interdependent. Because knowledge is socially constructed and situated, it asserts that we understand and give meaning to our lives through storytelling; understanding that the researcher’s story is indelible to the study of phenomena (Boylorn & Orbe, 2014; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990).

Using our experiences, we seek to engage the notion of the undercommons and fugitivity as a site of both resistance and sustenance for first generation BIPOC faculty, acknowledging that the work is not easy nor does this work require us to stay in a place that does not want us.

As first generation BIPOC faculty, the white-supremacist, heterosexist, ableist, settler-colonial, and capitalist enclosure does not want us and therein lies a blessing and way forward. Our narratives highlight ways in which we refuse what the university offers us and how our refusal from the surround helps us to create possibilities of what the academy can be or if it should even exist. bell hooks (1989) reminds us that it is in the margins, in effect, the surround that is a “site of radical possibility, a space of resistance” (p. 20).

Author

• Nini Hayes