“Here, Everyone’s Voice Matters”: Grassroots Justice, Belonging, and Pluriversal Futures in Café Without Borders

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 1:45 pm - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Mentorship, Antiracism, and Fugitive Literacies in Youth Justice Work

Abstract

Café Without Borders is a grassroots, digital, transnational commons, created by and for global, multilingual graduate students and early-career scholars to challenge exclusion and hierarchy in academia. This autoethnographic study draws on my experience as a founder-participant to critically examine how collective leadership, horizontal decision-making, and mutual aid are enacted and negotiated in our peer-led space. The analysis foregrounds the complexities of building solidarity across languages, borders, and identities, centering “unforgetting” erased histories of collaboration, and imagining new futures for equitable, pluralistic knowledge production. Using reflective fieldnotes, collaborative ideation, and multimodal analysis, this research demonstrates how student-led, pluriversal spaces can disrupt extractive academic models and foster justice, care, and shared agency, essential for sustaining solidarity among students/scholars globally.

Author

• Lamiaa Mohamed Fathy Eid, University of Massachusetts - Amherst