Joy, Care, and Resistance: Healing Justice Through the Labor of Immigrant Women Educators

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 9:45 am - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Care, Belonging, and Restoration in Academia and Education

Abstract

This study examines how women educators at BridgeHope (pseudonym), a community-based after-school program serving immigrant and multilingual families, enact healing justice praxis through care, relationships, and cultural labor. Guided by the Healing Justice framework (Doetsch-Kidder & Harris, 2023; Page & Woodland, 2023), healing is framed as a collective, intersectional feminist strategy for personal and systemic transformation. Using ethnographic methods, including participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 14 women staff members, the study explores how care, joy, and cultural pride function as acts of emotional restoration and political resistance in contexts marked by trauma, migration, and gendered labor. Findings reveal that relational care, intergenerational healing, and cultural reclamation position educators as both caregivers and agents of social change.

Authors

• Jue Wang, University of North Carolina - Charlotte

• Lan Quach Kolano, University of North Carolina - Charlotte