Storying Intersectionality for Collective Thriving: Dignity and Wisdom Across Cultures, Generations, Space and Time

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium session calls us to witness and explore how intersectional identities are storied and taken back across generations, cultures, and geographies to foster a collective thriving. Through four qualitative inquiries centering immigrant, diasporic, queer, and racially marginalized communities, we collectively examine how youth, families, and educational leaders engage reflective and creative practice to honor ancestral wisdom, navigate systemic inequities, and reimagine liberatory futures. Grounded in theories of cultural wealth, imagination, and critical race, each presentation reveals how dignity and knowledge reside within our lived experiences. Together, we offer powerful frameworks for educational transformation rooted in our tenderness, possibility, and resistance. We invite participants to witness how wisdom emerges when communities are seen, heard, and held across space and time.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 2: Differences and Intersectionalities

Chair

• Jasmin Esparza Gomez, Duval County Public Schools

Papers

• Creating Space for Cultural Knowledge: How Reflective Practice Enables Immigrant Youth to Recognize, Share, and Connect Across Intersectional Identities - Rorujorona Ferrell, University of Pennsylvania

• Now You See Me: Unforgetting Exclusionary Histories While Imagining Equitable Postsecondary Futures - Margot Todman-Mack, University of Pennsylvania

• Queer Filipinx Youth and The Metaphorical Balikbayan Box: Imagining the Possibility of the Return Home to Self - Anthony Andre Zarate, University of Pennsylvania

• Negotiating Double Diaspora & Identity: Journeys of Indo Caribbean, Afro Caribbean, and Multiracial Educational Leaders - Regina Hardatt, University of Pennsylvania

Session Organizer

• Rorujorona Ferrell, University of Pennsylvania

Discussant

• Kesha Bascombe, Malverne High School