Re-Contouring Academic Infrastructures Through Care(full) Design: A Case Study With Women of Color Graduate Students (Poster 7)

• In Event: Advancing Understanding of Infrastructuring in the Learning Sciences

Abstract

Introduction
Higher education institutions play important roles in legitimizing what counts as knowledge. They organize themselves around discrete disciplines and areas of expertise that define the intellectual terrain (Gumport & Snydman, 2002). Within this infrastructure it is difficult to ascertain what is “truth”, that is, how individuals maintain a sense of self apart from their “academic work” and find validation in the “other” knowledges learned outside the academy. Non-dominant people within higher education must contend with the ubiquity of racialized harm that stems from historically-embedded intentional structures of dehumanization through colonization (Nakano Glenn, 2015). Women of color (WoC) in graduate programs often experience fragmentation of self as a result of how higher education infrastructure privileges false dichotomies (e.g., productive/not productive) (Shahjahan, 2014), individuality over community (Cajete, 2016), and the artificial separation of mind, body, and spirit (Facio & Lara, 2009). This fragmentation is a type of trauma incurred from the embodiment of oppressive structures; healing from this requires engaging in a process of learning and unlearning (Anzaldúa, 2015; Rendón, 2009)—in essence, a re-contouring of infrastructure.

Methods
The Healing, Empowerment, and Love (HEAL) program aims to re-mediate higher education infrastructure by designing a space to 1) raise awareness of institutional infrastructures that normalize trauma (McGee & Stoval, 2015), 2) reposition intuition and inner strength as legitimate and valuable knowledge, and 3) increase interconnectedness with each other and mother earth (Mendoza, 2021). The primary data sources that inform our design narrative (Jurow & Freeman, 2020) of re-contouring infrastructure include reflective memos and recorded design planning sessions documenting our programming at two university sites. The narrative makes explicit how our design decisions attended to the ethical and power-ed dimensions of infrastructural change and serve as a reminder to embrace slow(er), intentional, and reflective design.

Findings
We present a design narrative that documents how we designed to expand higher education infrastructure to include spirituality, emotion, intuition and reciprocity. The narrative illuminates the design considerations that shaped our implementation. We found that designing an alternative space within higher education supported new ways to define success, who can learn, and what counts as legitimate forms of knowledge. It cultivated “wiggle room” (Erickson, 2004) within the oppressive structures of higher education that positively shifted how students felt about and imagined their future scholarship. Our narrative names promising practices to shift infrastructures and deeply entrenched obstacles to transformation.

Significance
We call the approach we developed through this work Care(full) Design to emphasize holistic nourishment by designing for intangibles such as care and healing. The approach builds on Cortes (2020), which weaves together concepts from Afrocentric Research Design (Hlela, 2018) that foreground spirituality, holism, and intuition as integral knowledges and from Participatory Design (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) that privileges the co-generation of knowledge production. As such, HEAL is an infrastructural intervention that addresses power and equity by 1) reorienting design theory and methodology toward care and healing and 2) supporting “unlearning” by identifying the strengths and limitations of the institutional base to create new, equitable structures.

Authors

• Krista L. Cortes, University of Pennsylvania

• Elizabeth Mendoza, HEAL Collective

• Aachey Susan Jurow, University of Colorado - Boulder