Embodying Transnational Radical Humanization in Higher Education

• In Event: Humanizing International Higher Education: Decolonial Practices, Indigenous Perspectives, and Collaborative Care

Proposal

In response to the murder of George Floyd and the rise of anti-blackness and racial and ethnic discrimination around the world, two scholars developed a transnational racial equity summit (TRES) to explore considerations for establishing a global framework for advancing equity for racially and ethnically minoritized (REM) communities in post-secondary institutions throughout the world. The TRES was held over three years, starting in the Netherlands in 2022, then the United States in 2023, and finally in the United Kingdom in 2024, bringing together more than 200 scholars, policy makers, administrators, and graduate students from across 15 different countries to analyze, assess, and explore the advancement of a global framework for REM Communities. Overall, the purpose of the TRES is to bring together a group of transnational critical scholar-practitioners to analyze, assess, and design important considerations for establishing a global strategy and framework for advancing equity for REM communities in education research, praxis, and policy. The goal of this paper is to examine how the framework resulting from the summits was applied in a period of potential conflict (impacting communities locally and globally) during the TRES to attempt to humanize all those present in the local space.

Theoretical Framework: The Comparative and Intersectional Anti-Blackness Framework for Decolonizing and Humanizing Education

As a result of collaborative theorizing across the transnational contexts, we collectively developed the Comparative and Intersectional Anti-Blackness Framework for Decolonizing and Humanizing Higher Education (See Appendix A). The framework has four areas: Teaching, Leadership, Policy, and JEDI Research Impact, which also have underlying components guiding these areas for the consideration of scholars and practitioners. Teaching, which also encapsulates curriculum, must include multi-level scaling that involves thinking globally and acting locally. Leadership needs to be guided by shared but contextually defined terms and good troublemaking (a term created by activist and leader John Lewis; Labode, 2020). At the forefront of policy should be radical humanization, and it is imperative JEDI Research Impact center both equity-minded actions and making equity actionable. These elements come together to not only frame the areas of focus for examining racial equity, but how scholar-practitioners need to engage these areas towards advancing racial equity.

Radical Humanization

Humanization has been utilized in multiple spaces in education, such as in pedagogy (del Carmen Salazar, 2013; Freire, 1970). In conceptualizing and reinventing humanizing pedagogy, del Carmen Salazar (2013) invokes the writings of Paulo Freire (1970) who encouraged being in relationship with others towards mutual humanization, focusing on a student’s whole personhood, and overall emphasizing the importance of developing critical consciousness towards critical reflection and action. When we refer to radical humanization, we refer to conceptualization of humanization brought forth by Freire (1970), though add radical to refer to the context of humanizing others and ourselves when all forces and systems of power are actively pushing against acts of humanization.

Methodology: Photovoice

Photovoice is a methodology that falls into the participatory action research family capturing community narratives as a part of moving towards societal change, particularly policy change (Kessi et al. 2019). Photovoice has three goals aligning with the purpose of this paper: “(1) to enable people to record and reflect their community’s strengths and concerns, (2) to promote critical dialogue and knowledge about important issues through large and small group discussion of photographs, and (3) to reach policymakers” (Wang & Burris, 1997, p. 369). Photovoice promotes racial justice by revealing the ways that power operates in day to day circumstances, centering the voice and humanizing the lived experiences of the participants, and demonstrating how “critical consciousness, empowerment, and social capital are put into practice” (Kessi et al., 2019, p. 357-358). Photovoice presents an opportunity for the authors and leaders of the summit to encapsulate their lived experiences individually and collectively and utilize them to push for change. The data collected included approximately 18 photographs, three photo-debrief focus group sessions which were recorded and transcribed for analysis, and reflective writings or notes accompanying the photographs.

Findings: Radical Humanization in Academic Spaces

Academic spaces are often sites of the perpetuation of whiteness, colonialism, and dehumanization (Haynes et al., 2020; Leonardo, 2009; Tuitt & Stewart, 2021; Williams et al., 2021). However, the lived experiences of scholars, practitioners, and students in the TRES space, demonstrate how they can come together in community in academic spaces to engage in dialogue and radical humanization. For example, one participant from the United States shared a photo of them in the same space as student activists engaging in a dialogue, discussing their experience both as a former student activist who became a professor and administrator: “they had something to say, when we educate students to have a voice we have to then expect them to activate their voice. We can’t give them a voice then take it right back, we need to invite them into the room.” Radical humanization in academic spaces involves not only listening to students, staff, and faculty who are working to advance racial equity, but learning from and learning with them. Moreover, learning from, and learning with, ultimately to move towards systemic and policy change by recentering power.

Conclusion and Significance

As there continue to be educational crises across the globe including epistemicide (Mizra, 2024), the drop in humanitarian funding for education in emergencies (Sherif, 2024), and across all of these issues, systemic racism particularly against Black communities (International Service for Human Rights, 2024), there is a sustained call for transnational anti-racism frameworks to intersectionally address systemic racism in education in ways that radically humanize REM students, faculty, and staff. This paper demonstrates how the Comparative and Intersectional Anti-Blackness Framework for Decolonizing and Humanizing Higher Education can be applied to create more humanizing environments in higher education.

Authors

• Frank Tuitt, University of Connecticut

• Saran Stewart, University of Connecticut

• Kelly Schlabach, University of Connecticut