Freedom Dreaming: Leveraging Arts-Based Testimonios to Support Early Career Justice-Oriented Women's Research

• In Event: Justice as Praxis: Cultivating Community, Centering Creativity, and Building Viable Pathways for Equitable Educational Systems

Abstract

Academia is traditionally structured along rigid hierarchical lines that include junior and senior faculty, administrators, and graduate students. Typically, the value and humanity of graduate students are reduced to research and teaching assistants who support faculty. Rarely are graduate students seen for their full humanity as adults who often have families of their own and who come to graduate with years of experiences within their respectives industries. As such, graduate students are expected to “pay their dues,” and/or “suffer in silence,” until they become deserving of full humanity and collegial respect. This “deservedness” often comes with academic status symbols like acquiring 4.0’s in graduate courses, passing doctoral defenses, securing prestigious research grants and teaching awards, and winning tenure-track positions. Yet, these rigidly prescribed definitions of success for and among graduate students, dismisses their humanity. It also conflates academic status symbols with possessing the experiential maturity to utilize critical methodologies. In brief, higher educational systems are dehumanizing. We believe graduate students are full humans who carry experiential wisdom and deep forms of knowing. We each participated in the Justice as Praxis in Education Research Conference, a revolutionary academic space intentionally designed to dismantle Eurocentric norms of knowledge hierarchies. Instead of “presenting our research” at traditional conferences, we communed, drew, and wrote with other justice-oriented scholars to freedom dream across theories, pedagogies, and methodologies in education. This paper centers freedom dreaming (Kelley, 2002) as a theoretical framework to acknowledge and illuminate our voices and experiences as early career scholars. Freedom dreaming as a framework, “explore[s] the alternative visions and articulations of hope among Black women abolitionist teachers whose willingness to dream other worlds inspire modern renderings” (Neal & Dunn, 2020, p. 60). To build just and equitable educational systems in the 21st century, this paper elucidates collective and individual narratives of Black, South and East Asian, and white female graduate scholars (n=6) to bear witness to our own and one another’s raced, classed, gendered, and (inter)national experiences within and beyond of academia. These written, spoken, and visual narrative reflections illuminate: (1) our collaborative freedom dreaming experiences; (2) cross-racial solidarities rooted in loving reciprocal relationships; and (3) how inclusive, multimodal, and transgeographic academic experiences might serve as a model for revitalizing higher education in affirming and humanzing ways.

References:

Kelley, R. D. (2002). Freedom dreams: The black radical imagination. Beacon Press.

Neal, A. M., & Dunn, D. C. (2020). Our Ancestors' Wildest Dreams:(Re) membering the
Freedom Dreams of Black Women Abolitionist Teachers. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 35(4).

Authors

• Tamara Moten, University of Georgia

• Tairan Qiu, University of Houston

• Merida Lang, University of Georgia

• Ji Hyun Hong

• Serena D’Agostino Readhead