Imagining Educational Otherwise: HMoob-Informed Carework for a Replenishing Intellectual Ecosystem

• In Event: Providing for Ourselves: Mutual Aid and Gift Economy Politics as Practice for Liberatory Education

Abstract

This paper draws from ongoing work examining education as a site of struggle with a focus on stateless (or state-free) youth, political education, and belonging. Through this work, the author has witnessed and co-constructed educational perspectives and practices centered in carework, mutual aide, and liberatory education. This paper utilizes a feminist HMoob epistemological framework to articulate that liberatory education must stem from the most marginalized groups of people. Often this means utilizing nontraditional ways that bypass gatekeepers to provide the needs for students and/or individuals in need. HMoob feminist stance views more as more opportunities for growing what we are cultivating, not more as challenge and competition. In these ways, HMoob-informed carework and mutual aide imagines an sociopolitical, economic, and intellectual ecosystem that replenishes itself. Thus, this paper focuses on the ways HMoob feminists offer strategies and educational practices (formal and informal) that critique scarcity models.

Author

• Choua P. Xiong, University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh