From Being a Problem to Homies Theorizing Back

• In Event: Petals of Blood, Fruits of Freedom: Sustaining Educational Lifeways for Abolition

Abstract

OBJECTIVES

This paper is a dialogue between a journey to the past and my dissertation study Homies Theorizing Back (HTB), a multi-year critical participatory action research project alongside young people impacted by the carceral state in Los Angeles. Inspired by a conversation that took place amongst fellow abolitionist educators, this paper begins in my Elementary School in Mexico and chronicles a genealogy and reflection of my changing relationship with questions of epistemology, ontology, and justice. This autoethnographic work explores: 1) the moments, ideas, and experiences that informed and continue to shape my political consciousness and my understandings, relationship and commitment to liberation; 2) the ways that these show up and are integral to my current praxis.

FRAMEWORK

This study, drawing primarily from critical and decolonizing traditions, centers reality not as “an object but a process of relationships” (Wilson, 2008, p. 73) and thus reflexively seeks to lean into the questions and contradictions that sit at the heart of a commitment to freedom while working alongside fellow abolitionists in the heart of empire. Centering the belief that my subjectivity is imbued with power and meaning (McCarty, 2018) and an epistemology that assumes knowledge is most powerful when produced collaboratively through action (Fine et al., 2003); this study builds on these traditions to interrogate what it means to do abolitionist educational research alongside system-impacted youth within carceral contexts of stark power asymmetries, ongoing violence, and lively resistance.

METHODS & DATA

Employing an auto-ethnographic lens from a critical perspective, I delve deeply into old journal entries, school essays, and positionality statements written throughout two decades and puts these in dialogue with a subsection of my data corpus for HTB. From this data corpus, I consider my conversations with young co-theorizers around positionality, the fugitive purposes of research, and the ongoing pillage of the people’s right to both, the word and the world. Analysis consisted of iterative dialogue and oscillation between data (Deleuze, 1990) and was not intent on landing “right answers” but to challenge and “third” (Soja, 1996) what often is conceptualized as closed circuits of irreconcilable binaries.

FINDINGS & SIGNIFICANCE

This study found “Theorizing Back,” the methodology collectively imagined and enacted by the youth, to be deeply connected to historical and ongoing struggles to reclaim both the word and the world, creating and re-membering paths for abolitionist and liberatory research. Moreover, it suggests that not only must “who we are” be in dialogue with the work that we do, but that our situated and interrelated subjectivity is an ongoing, reflexive, integral and generative part of our research journey and our praxis. Lastly, tracing the genealogy of my own political consciousness, my movement work, and the questions that animate my work revealed fundamental challenges to dominant axiological, epistemic and ontological stances that have become central to my understandings about abolition and liberation; especially as being in both solidarity and allyship, and as someone who directly benefits from the very injustices that assault the lives of many of my young co-theorizers and friends.

Author

• Miguel Casar Rodriguez, University of Alabama
  Presenting Author