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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium considers mutual aid as central to imagining educational spaces free of racial injustice and nourishing of liberatory possibilities by remembering our capacities to know and educate ourselves towards freedom. Participating scholars engage organizing, activist, participatory, and Indigenizing methodologies in their transdisciplinary academic work that include critical refugee studies, critical disability studies, critical Muslim studies, critical HMoob studies, intersectional feminisms, ethnic studies, youth studies, and language justice. Papers seek to speak across disciplinary and community contexts to ask and share what existing practices of mutual aid, politics of abundance, and ethics of gifts-exchange nourish educational studies concerned with the futurity of those who are most constructed as damaged and damaging by educational research.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Critical Educators for Social Justice

Chair

• Maneka Deanna Brooks, Portland State University

Papers

• “And the Earth Was Laid Out for All Living Beings”: Muslim Epistemologies, Science, and Non-Western Ways of Knowing - Arshad Imtiaz Ali, The George Washington University; Ebtissam Oraby, The George Washington University; Samuel Burmester, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Beyond the Double-Edge: HMoob Feminist Refusal of Refugee Education - Kaozong Nancy Mouavangsou, University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire

• Beyond “Be Nice, Be Kind”: Moving From Helping-as-Compliance Toward Helping-as-Mutual-Aid in Early Childhood Classrooms - María Cioe-Pena, University of Pennsylvania; Jenna Cushing-Leubner, University of Wisconsin - Whitewater

• Imagining Educational Otherwise: HMoob-Informed Carework for a Replenishing Intellectual Ecosystem - Choua P. Xiong, University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh

Discussant

• Edwin Mayorga, Swarthmore College