“You won’t colonize my values”: Collective memory-work as communal healing praxis

• In Event: Collective Memory-Work for Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: A Feminist, Collective Approach to Inquiry

Abstract

Purpose: In this session, we consider how the critical feminist methodology of collective memory-work (CMW) (Haug, et. al., 1987) can allow us to work across disciplinary and epistemological orientations to explore the possibilities of communal healing and emancipatory politics that can speak to the challenges we face in our imperfect multiracial democracy in the U.S. We contend that resistance to colonizing narratives and discourses in education is vital for personal and collective healing.

Perspectives: Any movement towards authentic justice in education requires an acknowledgement of the histories of colonization as being at the root of the educational project in the U.S. While this is undeniably a systemic issue that requires a systemic solution, we as educators can and must strive to resist these colonizing narratives and discourses in our own praxis and pedagogies.

Methodology: As a feminist research methodology, CMW gives us important tools for unearthing the colonizing dominant narratives, both historical and contemporary, that shape the way we experience the world, and by extension, our teaching practices. Dominant narratives reproduce power dynamics and constrain new systems from arising thereby maintaining the status quo of marginalization and oppression.

Material: We draw on Frigga Haug’s (1987; 1999) work in CMW, to explicate the potential of this methodology for its uses in revealing power dynamics, and its ability to help us hone our resistance to colonizing narratives and discourses in education. We also ask in what ways Black feminisms can lay bare the potential for a critical analysis of the colonizing narratives and discourses in education (Davis, 1983; Hill-Collins, 2009, 2016; Labaton & Martin, 2004; Smith, 2000; Taylor, 2017).

Scholarly significance: We contend that the ability to intentionally reflect on and hone our recognition, and assume our refusal, of colonizing narratives and discourses, is the necessary first step to both resistance and healing in our pedagogies in our current systems of marginalization and oppression. The challenges of the twenty-first century are often framed as “new,” but many of them are rooted in the systemic oppression of the past. Therefore, we need to develop radically transformative practices for imagining a more just future with the potential to create healing-centered practices and systems that uphold the humanity of all students and that abolish violent and oppressive systems.

Authors

• Bisola A. Wald, University of Minnesota

• Keitha-Gail Martin-Kerr, University of Minnesota

• Colleen Clements, University of Minnesota