For-You-Page Watermelon: An Autoethnographic Reflection on Transnational Solidarity

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 3:35 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Resistance and Solidarity (Table 2)

Abstract

In this autoethnography, I reflect on my experience as a doctoral student at a college of education in a Midwestern university. As a first generation woman of color with an F-1 visa from the Global South, I unfold my journey via transnational solidarity framework to break down the walls of the academic ivory tower. Against the backdrop of the persistent genocides in Palestine and elsewhere in the Global South, I narrate the ways I continuously un/re-learn from and with the “TikTok University” community about the United States, the global capital of capitalism. This study, then, holds potential to democratize graduate classrooms in search of education renewal by re/connecting academic trajectory with the postcolonial realities of the global majority.

Author

• Astri Napitupulu, University of Missouri - St. Louis