From Spirit Lynching to Radical Well-Being: Kinship as Resistance to Violence in Higher Education

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium introduces spirit lynching as an analytic for understanding racialized and gendered spiritual violence in academia. We extend the concept of spirit murder—or spiritual death that occurs through racially motivated assaults on dignity, worth, and belonging—to account for the spectacle, public participation, and digital virality that characterize many contemporary instances of academic harm. The session explores how higher education institutions become death-making environments, while highlighting how minoritized scholars, particularly Black women, resist through practices rooted in sisterhood, kinship, and Afrofuturist dreaming. Through three interwoven papers we examine: how spirit lynching functions within academic cultures; how kinship becomes a site of survival and scholarly inquiry; and how we might reimagine institutions as life-affirming spaces where well-being is a collective imperative.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Stress, Coping, and Resilience

Chair

• Jamar Green, University of Kentucky

Papers

• Naming the Unseen Wounds: Introducing Spirit Lynching as Public Spiritual Violence in Higher Education - Candice Peters, Appalachian State University

• Kinship as Foundation: Reclaiming Self and Spirit through Sisterhood in the Aftermath of Institutional Violence - Rosalie Zdzienicka Fanshel, University of California - Berkeley

• Radical Rebuild: Envisioning Structures of Accountability and Well-Being in the Academy - Raquel Wright-Mair, Rowan University

Session Organizer

• Rosalie Zdzienicka Fanshel, University of California - Berkeley

Discussant

• Erin Doran, University of Texas - El Paso