Fostering Beloved Community and Friendships as Decolonial Action: A Collaborative Autoethnography

• In Event: Case studies in holistic and post-foundation education

Proposal

RELEVANCE & RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Western norms shape how we socialize and become scholars in academia in ways that can exclude transnational and othered bodies (Badenhorst et al., 2022; Mohanty, 2003). We, as emerging scholars in the field of higher education, created a digital space to sustain ourselves through our doctoral studies as we navigated academia in North America. We supported each other through our studies in critiquing higher education as Othered bodies, and as we struggled to grow as scholars in an academic world that continues to operate on colonial logics (Quijano, 2007; Grosfuguel, 2006). A few years and a joint publication later, we want to share what conditions we created in our online community space that allowed us to feel safe and whole. We highlight the importance of creating a digital Third Space for south to south connections in North American institutions and how it can function to support scholar development among emerging scholars who have transnational connections.

Our research questions are: 1) What conditions are needed to feel safe in academia in relation to our scholarly/personal identities and transnational connections? 2) How does our positionality/relationships/entanglement/complicity to colonization influence how we negotiate academic spaces? 3) How do we support each other in being/becoming scholars when we feel excluded or underqualified?

THEORY & CONTEXT

Doctoral programs and academia are sites of socialization in higher education that include learning the norms of an institution and learning acceptable epistemologies and methodologies that define a discipline (Gildersleeve, et al., 2011; Giampampa, 2011; Mertkan & Bayrakli, 2018). Therefore, having a space where one can authentically grow becomes essential to the development of the scholar identity, especially for identities and ways of knowing that are marginalized or invalidated in academia. Metcalfe and Blanco (2021) and the Puawi Collective (2018), present friendship and spaces of care as a type of intervention that disrupts harmful institutional norms in academia as well as nurture and sustain the self in community.
We focus on theoretical offerings of the Third Space (Bhabha, 1994) that allow for liminality, hybridity, and the epistemological possibilities of Anzaldua’s border thinking (Anzaldúa, 2012; Bhattacharya 2021). The Third Space, is not a defined or contained space, it is an in-between place where new meaning can be produced beyond the binaries of the self and the other (Bhabha, 1994, Martin & Dandekar, 2022). We also rely on Anzaldua’s Borderlands theory that allows for embodied epistemologies to be centered in our analysis and understanding of ourselves, our relationships, our spaces, and our scholarship (Bornstein-Gomes, 2010).

METHODOLOGY

We used a collaborative autoethnography to share our personal stories and weave them together analytically to provide sociocultural critique (Chang et al., 2016). Gingrich-Philbrook (2013) notes that, in autoethnography, the process is the product of research. Similarly, we use this product to interrogate our process of being together in what we have called a ‘decolonial check-in space’ while the collaborative autoethnographic product further gives shape to our processes of decolonial checking-in.
For data generation, we collaborated asynchronously to write in response to a set of collectively decided questions to guide our research process. We then met and discussed our responses in dialogue, recording the meeting and generating data in our dialogue, continuing this process of asynchronous writing and synchronous dialogue.
Our analysis involves iterative rounds of coding our conversations and writings, using an inductive approach. We used a codebook in NVivo based on an initial open coding to look for themes and connections.We present findings from our process in this proposal, capturing the nuances of our decolonial check-in process.

FINDINGS

We present three themes from our analysis that include; a) interrogating safety and the negotiation of various hegemonic gazes, b) being whole, c) power of friendships help us grow as scholars.

A) Interrogating Safety
One major theme in our conversation concerned safety, as we uncovered ways that our process allowed for epistemic trust, healing, and developing awareness of our entanglements with the colonial system:

“In my ‘safe academic space’ I do not need to negotiate with the white gaze to find a little corner for myself. Safety for me is being able to sit and listen, without feeling the push to prove myself as worthy… where I am not required to camouflage… where I don't need to hide my bruises and can feel the breezes of acceptance.”


B) Being Whole
A second theme from our dialogue was about wholeness and authenticity, as we shifted to joy and thriving, releasing tensions, and listening deeply and with care:

“there is no end goal to being in this space. In this space - I come to find the strength that I need to carry on the task that I must do to survive in the academy. Sometimes - we end up writing together - and we don't do it for our survival but rather to cultivate joy and energize each other.”

C) Friendships and Beloved Community
Finally, we identified friendship and beloved community as a theme in contrast to professionalism with its heteropatriarchal undertone, and explored what it means to be a scholar in a community that also holds us accountable:

“You know, I just expected that you would treat me as a friend. Not the strange unemotional ‘professional, collegial’ way, but the ‘back home’ way where we are community and being in community means care supersedes individual gain... And the emptiness of collegiality leaves me feeling alone. This friendship itself is a resistance to colonial norms of being and professional behaviour.”


CONTRIBUTIONS

We share how our space allowed us to be our complex authentic selves, help each other grow as individuals and scholars, and heal from the colonial impacts of the academic spaces we inhabit. We offer this work to other scholars whose ways of being in academia are rooted in a beloved community that centers wholeness and healing (Bhattacharya, 2015, hooks, 1996). We offer implications of this work for individuals with transnational roots who live on Indigenous lands and study/work in settler-colonial universities but also work toward unsettling (Stein, 2022) themselves and these institutions.

Authors

• Punita Lumb, O.I.S.E. University of Toronto

• Milad Mohebali, University of Nebraska Lincoln