The Promises, Tensions, and Struggles of Witnessing Toward Racial Justice

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Researchers can shift their role from authority to witness to expand mutual learning opportunities and alternate relationalities with research partners and in solidarity with marginalized groups. The presenters in this symposium examine how witnessing practices and tools were reflexively supplemented, modified, and/or transformed to repair in-the-moment theoretical and ethical concerns, (un)anticipated situational constraints, and evolving study designs. Witnessing as pedagogy offers conceptual and methodological tools for learning in and for collective action towards racially just possibilities, including attunement to broader issues of race, racialization, and power that permeate social positionings and interactions, and responses to inevitable and un/anticipated racialized issues as they occur and unfold through fleeting moments in situated contexts.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 5: Inquiry, Transformation, and Communities

Chair

• Mila Re, University of California - Santa Cruz

Papers

• Healing-Centered Witnessing: Re-presenting the Collective Testimonies of Teacher Activists of Color - Josephine Pham, University of California - Santa Cruz; Farima P. Pour-Khorshid, University of San Francisco

• Seeds, Spirits, and Sacrifice: Emotion Management as Misogynoir in Equity-Oriented Professional Development - Aireale J. Rodgers, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Witnessing & Withnessing as Transformative Justice Praxis - Joe Curnow, University of Manitoba

• The Racial Politics of Witnessing for Racial Justice in Education - Talia S. Leibovitz, University of California - Berkeley

Discussant

• Angela N. Booker, University of California - San Diego