Love on the Front Lines: Asian American MotherScholars Resisting Dehumanizing Contexts Through Humanizing Collectivity

• In Event: The Intersections of Motherscholar Identities in the Time of COVID-19

Abstract

Objectives
As Asian American MotherScholars committed to enacting care work (Dariotis & Yoo, 2020) in our pedagogies (Tintiangco-Cubales, 2020) and lives while navigating xenophobic racism, we ask, what are our educational responsibilities to one another? Our inseparable identities of being Asian American, mothers and scholars amplify our acute awareness of suffering around us and its impact on our children, students, and communities, necessitating created spaces of love and healing as a collaborative endeavor. This paper explores the importance of humanizing, critical love in sustaining MotherScholars during times of crisis.

Theoretical Framework
Love is the epistemological force informing our sense-making of the multiple, often contradictory spaces we traverse as Asian American MotherScholars (Matias & Nishi, 2018). While institutions seek to reproduce settler colonialism that “trains people to see each other, the land, and knowledge as property,” (Patel, 2016, p. 72) we resist this reproduction through Freirean notions of “armed love,” love as an act of freedom that becomes the pretext for emancipation (Freire, 1998). We enact love in our pedagogical, professional and scholarly choices, and seek to embody this love in our interactions with one another, our children, students, and communities. In centering love and our own humanity, we challenge the notion of faculty as emotionally detached machines of capitalist production within systems reproducing social inequities that dehumanize minoritized communities (Macedo, in press). To challenge colonial structures, we embrace humanization through engaging in collective and individual reflective practices.

Methods/ Data
This study uses collaborative autoethnography (Chang et al., 2016), a qualitative methodology focused on joint-individual and interactional self-study analysis within sociocultural contexts, using autobiographical data and self-reflexivity to interpret actions and interactions within particular environments. Through an iterative, ongoing process, we examined Zoom recorded collaborative sessions, individual reflective writing, and communications sent between authors from March 13 (beginning of COVID social distancing) to May 15 (end of our spring teaching semesters). Aligned with collaborative autoethnographic methods, we chunked the data into 2-week fragments, reviewing each chunk individually and writing theoretical memos, then coming together to collectively discuss and build from themes related to Asian Crit (Museus & Iftikar, 2013), Asian American Motherscholarship (Matias & Nishi, 2018), theories of radical love and pedagogies of care (Freire, 1998; Tintiangco-Cubales, 2020).

Findings/ Significance
Our data reveal multiple layers of collective care: for one another, our children and families, students, and communities. They reveal strains related to our multiple identities during a time when we often felt stretched beyond ourselves. Often, we held this strain until we could come together in our regular meetings which served as places to be seen, affirmed, and supported through words, resources, and related experiences. Zoom calls and messages served as refuge in moments of crisis and spaces of humanity in resistance to constant demands for production and externalized care. In this historical moment, we found that we could only survive alongside one another, and being responsible for others allowed us to care for ourselves. These sacred spaces demonstrate the critical importance of humanizing collectivity for Motherscholars in academic spaces during times of crisis.

Authors

• Betina Hsieh, California State University - Long Beach

• Cathery Yeh, Chapman University

• Ruchi Agarwal-Rangnath, University of San Francisco

• Judy W. Yu, Queens College