Transnational youth reading the world

• In Event: Roundtable Session 7
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Teaching in globalization

Proposal

Schools and educators in the United States are currently confronting a complex and often hostile web of challenges. While navigating what ​​Ladson-Billings (2021) identified as the four pandemics of COVID-19, systemic racism, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe, schools are also at the center of national debates around gun control, local budget crises, challenges to the teaching about racism in the US’s past and present, and persistent attacks on queer and trans lives within and beyond the curriculum. Yet, despite strained resources and a teacher shortage, the responsibilities facing today’s educators continue to mount. The National Academy of Education’s 2021 report on “Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse” made clear the call for schools to prepare young people to engage thoughtfully in this moment by equipping them with “the knowledge, skills, and dispositions they need to understand complex social issues, respect multiple points of view, and dialogue across differences"(p.1). These intersecting crises highlight a need for collective thinking, yet increasingly, our schools and society reinforce individualism and divisiveness. There is a critical need for research that explores what it might look like to cultivate empathy, solidarity, and collective responsibility, and for scholars and educators to look towards and listen to those who have been most marginalized in educational spaces yet whose epistemological lenses might offer new possibilities. This presentation explores how educators might activate transnational borderland knowledges towards the kind of intersectional solidarity our world needs.

This research seeks to explore the intersections between nepantla and critical consciousness in order to explore—through and within the words of transnational young people—how those forms of consciousness may coalesce and build upon one another. Building on Anzaldúa’s theories of nepantla (2015) (in-betweenness) and Dyrness and Selpúlveda’s work on border thinking (2020) I argue that nepantla can be a generative space for the kinds of critical consciousness that our classrooms and communities need—one that breaks boundaries, disrupts binaries rooted in colonialism, racism, and patriarchy, challenges dominant notions of citizenship and belonging, and imagines solidarities across social categories that have been constructed and maintained to divide us.

This roundtable presentation will discuss preliminary findings from a qualitative study that explores how Latinx, Caribbean, and South Asian newcomer youth living and learning in New York City draw upon their transnational experiences to read the world and make sense of their racialized, gendered, and classed experiences in the United States and their homelands. My methods include semi-structured interviews as well as co-constructed dialogues that position youth participants as co-creators of knowledge and inquiry, and that engage feminist borderland methodologies that see our qualitative inquiry as autoethnographic, collaborative, and humanizing. Both the methods and the theories that frame my research challenge dominant norms, critically reimagining the researcher-participant relationship and excavating knowledges, citizenship practices, and co-storying across national, linguistic, and methodological boundaries. This research seeks to highlight what new possible futures might emerge from the liminal in-between, and the ways in which educators can meet this moment by recognizing, honoring, and cultivating the transnational wisdom their students bring.

Author

• Rita Kamani-Renedo, Stanford University