Co-constructing decolonial futures in academia

Becoming and (un)learning between hopeless and hopeful experiences

Nicole Dillard, Lyla June Johnston, Julia Storberg-Walker

Keywords: collaborative auto-ethnography (CAE), decolonizing knowledges, collaborative research, academia, higher education

Our Work Together

We are three cis female scholars with radically different lived experiences yet find ourselves intellectually and emotionally interconnected through accident and intention—sharing deep passion for education, equity, and justice. We seek to create change within our academic, personal, and cultural communities through our activism and inquiries. To do this we adopt strategies that enliven our work—making it more accessible, impactful, and liberatory for ourselves and we hope for our readers. bell hooks (1984) argued for this type of transgressive writing, and this chapter is aligned with Carolyn Ellis’ (2018) multivocal ethnography. We foreground our different subjectivities with the intent to support the re-humanizing/re-enchanting of the academy, and this chapter represents a moment in time on how we make sense of higher education, the doctoral journey, and decolonizing knowledge. Of most importance to us is to amplify our interconnectedness, our becoming together as women scholars from different generations, and our co-generating of possible futures. It is also important to us that our personal stories can be used to improve the academy as well as inspire, inform, and facilitate diverse people within it.

To accomplish our intent, our writing is at times poetic and too general for typical academic publications. We believe specificity, definitions, and classifications are tools used in research that the academy has reified as the tools one must use for knowledge generation. Not all knowledge, in the academy, is equal: double blind, controlled trials are ‘better’ than first person or subjective research. We resist this hierarchy in our writing. In fact, with this chapter we bring in personal story, subjective opinion, poetics, and future-shaping meaning-making to help envision a new academy. While the writing is meant to provoke and perhaps inspire; it is not for everyone. Please note that when opinions are given, we name the opinionator to provide context and attribution—this is the same strategy used by scholars across the globe when they cite a source in (Year, Date) format.

To the matter at hand: as we see it, the problem in higher education is multifaceted and runs deep beneath Euro-western culture of control, conquest, rationality, and patriarchy, and we believe marginalized voices and subjectivities have been repressed and suppressed at the cost of millions of lives, millions of lost futures, and millions of creative and vital beings—human and more-than-human. While Western science has brought us breakthroughs, the breakthroughs have come at costs Western science is only beginning to understand (Julia). There is a wealth of knowledge, but a dearth of wisdom, and knowledge wielded without the wisdom can cause significant personal, social, and ecological damage (Lyla June). Western science, and a functionalist/materialist ontology has impacted our connection to each other, to the planet, and to ourselves—producing an ideology of separation, treating humanity as somehow outside the web of life itself. Educational institutions, like the neo-liberal university, are designed with a primary goal to train workers to help grow the capitalist economy without consideration of equity, interdependence, and planetary flourishing.

Aligned with Battiste and Henderson’s (2021) concept of trans-systemic thinking, our work bridges European knowledge, Black feminist epistemology, and Indigenous knowledge. This synthesis serves as a path toward a rehumanized academy, specifically by dismantling the 'matrix of domination' (Hill-Collins, p. 328) and enacting epistemic justice (Fricker, 2007) for those historically marginalized as knowers (p. 1). In fact, these three positions mirror our individual identities and experiences, and guide and inform the purpose and aims of this chapter. To help accomplish this goal, we decided to foster imaginative reflexivity in a desire-based research framework (Tuck, 2009). Reflexivity within the social sciences is loosely defined as self-study, the ability to not only reflect on the subject at hand but also oneself as the observer of that subject. We envision educators guided by the belief that students are ‘souls in development’ rather than workers to be trained. We ask, what if educators in higher education believed in pluralism of knowledges and sought to foster and nurture the unique knowledges represented by each learner? What if educators were comfortable in the space of not knowing, and were able to embody deep curiosity and openness to difference – rather than immediately intellectualizing and naming what they experience? What if university education was enacted through co-creative, interdependent, and emergent learning spaces? We offer a road map for these questions within an emergent process of collaborative exploration. We share what has been generated by a months-long co-learning journey organized through a reflexive collaborative auto-ethnography (CAE) process. According to Ngunjiri, Hernandez, and Chang (2010), CAE generates the conditions for studying the self within a collective. In this collective, individuals have the potential to share their deeper truths as experienced and to witness the truth of the other (Kemmis & McKaggart, 2005). Private worlds and lived experiences are opened to the other, generating possibilities for learning about diverse social and cultural perspectives (Longman, Chang, & Lloyd-Page, 2015).

Based on this tradition, we share what we have learned from, with, and through each other as we resist the assumptions, values, and expectations that guide our educational, economic, social, and environmental systems. This reflexive, dialogical approach, built upon relationships (Wilson 2008) is a form of getting closer as affective beings united with (rather than divorced from) our human selves. We recognize that this form of knowledge generation is discounted in higher education. Indeed, the values of the neo-liberal university—competition, scientific reduction, rationality, and hierarchy—are at odds with scholars seeking to get closer. Nevertheless, we seek to center this approach to knowledge production not only as a model of the value of the CAE process, but also in advocacy of its importance within doctoral education. According to Cuomo (2020), the originator of the idea of getting closer,

“…knowledge producers who aim to get closer abandon the dream of scientific progress which seeks absolute knowledge in the service of enlightened mastery and wealth, working instead for knowledge that acquaints us with the particulars of the world we affect. Arrogant inquiries accept a comfortable distance between knowledge and life and hide their limits and inadequacies behind an epistemic (knowledge-making) posture that proclaims a unified route to knowing, a route that necessarily follows traditions of privilege and exclusion” (Cuomo, 2020, pp. 66-67).

Of centrality to our collaborative project is the understanding that getting closer emerges from a “relational ontology” (Thayer-Bacon, 2017) that positions the researcher within the field of inquiry itself; researchers/authors are infused by and nested within — rather than separate from — the human communities that are studied. Getting closer points to or orients the researcher/inquirer towards research that is transformative, educative, and emancipatory; it also generates a moral obligation and sacred reciprocity akin to Indigenous research methods (Wall-Kimmerer, 2013; Wilson, 2008) because of the fundamental belief in interdependence and connectedness.

For me (Julia), getting closer happens with intention and happen-stance. When I was searching for examples of autoethnography dissertations and theses, I came upon Lyla June’s master’s work at the University of New Mexico. I googled her and learned of her creative, activism, and scholarly pursuits. In an instant I just knew that I wanted to meet her and ask her to be a guest lecturer for my doctoral class. Her mix of creative and scholarly talents, combined with bold activism, resonated with my inner yearning for casting off the tightness found in doctoral education. At the time, the only way I could figure out how to contact her was through her FaceBook page, and I privately messaged her with the invitation. The rest is history. I feel so privileged to be gifted of her presence; she is inspirational, generous, kind, and committed. Getting closer to Nicole was a different sort of dance; she is one of my greatest teachers and I cherish our relationship. Nicole will tell you she ‘cyber stalked’ me during the hiring process I undertook to get a job at George Washington University. While she was in coursework, we started the ‘dance’ between student and teacher; learner and learner; woman and woman. When she started on her dissertation, I was her chair, and we had dozens of conversations drawing us closer and closer. She co-created major elements of a doctoral leadership class and facilitated class activities, as well as delivered presentations. I was diving into understanding my white privilege, racist assumptions and mindset, and how I benefit from structures of oppression. Through my relationship with Nicole, I was able to access a deep part of myself that yearned for justice, equity, and flourishing for all human (and non-human) beings.

Looking back, my (Nicole) relationship with academia was defined by a persistent sense of tension Even now, as a scholar at an ‘elite, public institution,’ I still view my experience in the academy through the tensions of isolation/connectedness, uncertainty/clarity, mother/ worker, and Black body/white space. These tensions are deeply connected to many of my most salient identities: Black, mother, woman, queer, survivor and first-generation student, and inform my subjectivity as a scholar. Perhaps, most importantly in the context of getting closer, is the reality that these tensions also reflect my lived experience of higher education being a site of trauma. The manifestation of my experiences with trauma often resulted in embodied contractions vacillating between an overwhelming need to find solidarity and a sense of belonging and seeing the world around me (and the people in it) as unsafe and untrustworthy - thus complicating my efforts at getting closer. However, what CAE has provided me is a frame to meaningfully hold my own subjectivity as a scholar in relation to both Julia’s and Lyla June’s experiences in the academy. The discursive practices of our interactions helped me make connections between both our shared and unique experiences, ways of being and knowing. What emerged was an exploration of intersubjectivity that released some of the hopelessness that I associate with the academy as a result of those tensions and allowed me/we to get closer to imaginings of hope.

Our Process

In this section, we offer a description of CAE as a research/learning method, followed by a description of the specific steps we took in our own journey as collaborators. The goal of this process is to help others access the possibility of experiences that we have collectively accessed while utilizing CAE. After describing the details of our process in CAE, each of us shares personal reflections on both hopelessness and hope, which shed light on and deepen the understanding of the various facets of our individual and collective experiences. These two themes arose through the CAE process as we each shared our profoundly negative experiences in the academy, and how they motivated us to dream possibilities for future generations.

The CAE Method

The design of the process for co-writing this chapter was emergent, birthed from a relational onto-ethico-epistemological frame, and guided by a theoretical sensitivity to a diverse selection of scholarly conversations ranging from Indigenous, transpersonal, action research, and learning perspectives (see Anderson & Braud, 2011; El-lis, 2007; Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2021914; Kemmis, 2010; Kemmis & McTaggaart, 2005; Longman, Chang & Lloyd-Page, 2015; Ngungiri, Hernandez & Chang, 2010; Wall Kimmerer, 2013; Wilson, 2008). When we say “relational,” we mean focusing on the importance, beauty, and quality of our human relationships and our relationship to the world around us. Key characteristics of this form of coauthoring include emergence, reciprocity, action orientation, learning and development, storying, and interdependence.

In our work, being guided by theoretical sensitivity is crucial to co-creating a communal container (e.g., deeply personal, and inter-dependent space) capable of catalyzing and fostering the qualities of vulnerability, courage, and compassion required for deep sharing and witnessing what is, rather than what we make up through our assumptions, biases, and frames. Of course, witnessing is fleeting because humans are meaning-making machines. But with intention we can be inspired to be clear mirrors of each other and communicate that information with love and compassion. We hold human experience as a legitimate site for learning, especially if our goal is to generate findings useful to human beings. Our goal in creating our communal container was to unearth this human-experience-as-learning to explore the real hopelessness felt by many in the academy, including ourselves, as was illustrated in our personal stories, as well as a vision for real hope as inspired by the relationality of our interactions during this experience of getting closer. It is important to note that steps we took to get closer evolved over time, and trust and openness expanded the more and more we interacted. However, some practical steps we took towards this goal included:

• Scheduling regular conversations to ensure that everyone had space and opportunity to contribute and share.
• Seeking consent for recording and transcribing our interactions to revisit and remember in support of practices of introspection and reflexivity.
• Sharing memos, meeting notes, transcriptions, and individual writings/reflections to help in sensemaking.
• Creating prompts to guide conversations and maximize inclu-sivity.
• Accepting/honoring our human experiences during our collec-tive journey.
• Dividing up work/tasks
• Data analysis (primarily in-vivo, emergent, thematic)
• Write up/reporting.

These discursive practices helped us get closer not only in relationship with each other, but also served as artifacts within the process of CAE that helped us articulate the themes of hope and hopelessness that embodied our experiences within the academy. Specifically, the steps we took to honor each other’s contributions and experiences provided an acknowledgement of our ways of being and knowing that is often marginalized within the academy. As we sought to make sense of our shared experiences of hopelessness within the academy, we created a collective way of doing that generated a new sense of hope.

Our Reflections on Hopefulness & Hopefulness Within the Academy

The next section offers some context of our relationships with the academy. Our writing conveys the meanings that we have individually and collectively made of our journeys navigating experiences within higher education that we attribute to notions of hope and hopefulness. Engaging in the CAE process reconfirmed that through our stories, we can simultaneously honor our lived experiences within the academy by bringing visibility to experiences of hopelessness, while also honoring the power within our various ways of knowing that can offer visions of hope. It is through this hope for ourselves, our communities, and institutions that we can envision a future of the academy. It is our hope that our engagement with and learning from each other’s different epistemologies and lived experiences, can serve as a model of how embracing difference can serve as a catalyst for creating change, finding connectedness, and fostering belonging towards a rehumanized academy. To actualize the potentiality of this hope, we generated three prompts for individual reflection/writing that we agreed to share in this writing: (1) What is the experience of feeling hope within academia? (2) What is your wildest dream for what academia could look like for your people? (3) What have you experienced in your lifetime that embodies, inspires, or points to that wildest dream?

Lyla June (recent PhD graduate, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Diné [Navajo] Nation)

To me the experience of feeling hope is the desert sun on my skin, with red ch’ii paint on my face, as I work with my muscles to build a hoghan (a traditional ceremonial house made of local materials) with my fellow Diné (Navajo) People. It is the feeling of my body walking closer and closer to my people, my roots, my homelands, my ancestral epistemology. It is the sound of my ears bending to try and understand the sound of my language being spoken by elders while they eat lunch in the hot noon sun. It is the feeling I get seeing an Indigenous Studies PhD program at Trent University in Canada that requires students to work with an Indigenous elder to receive their degree. In this world, our traditional knowledge is deemed as essential by an academy we have co-created. It is no longer considered “extracurricular”, or superfluous, but a part of the core curriculum, as it should be. Indigenous knowledge has been trivialized and denigrated for far too long. The glorification of Western epistemology has stolen us from our people. What if love for our ancestral epistemologies could give us that back?

My wildest dream for academia is a grand network of universities that teach Indigenous students to speak their language, teach their language, tend their land, eat their foods, sing their songs, heal our broken spirits, and learn to interface effectively with this new world our ancestors never knew. This same network has specialized departments designed to teach non-native people our knowledge and knowledge systems to help them relearn and reclaim their own indigeneity, be in proper solidarity with Indigenous communities, be a respectful guest on Indigenous homelands, and relate to their local ecosystems productively and respectfully. Both types of departments could teach peace, diplomacy, reparations, and truth, so that intercultural healing could occur. These university systems would mobilize Indigenous students to document, analyze and embody our fading knowledge and knowledge systems.

Pointing to this wildest dream, I have experienced online classes where non-natives pay to learn a variety of Indigenous topics and theories. One hundred percent of the proceeds of these classes went to Indigenous projects, for instance an in person training for Diné women on our traditional midwifery practices. For the online classes, non-native students gave more than the minimum suggested donation because they knew their money was fueling something important. Through this system, we educated non-natives on Indigenous cultural knowledge in an appropriate and constructive way and simultaneously helped to reconnect Indigenous students to knowledge that was taken away from their ancestors. Another thing that points to this is my experience in the Indigenous Studies PhD program at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. They offer classes, for example, in Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Seminar in Language Revitalization, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Indigenous Organization Management, Documenting Indigenous Knowledge, and Culture, Cognition and Knowledge Acquisition. I loved staying up all night reading and writing papers that support the research agenda of my ancestors.

Nicole (Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)

Most often in the academy, I have experienced feelings of illegitimacy. Whether it comes in the form of being questioned about my belonging or fit in my doctoral program or through my students challenging me in ways that my male or white peers are not challenged, at all points of my journey there is a constant struggle with feeling the need to legitimate my presence. I struggle with this experience, and not just in the obvious ways of being exhausted from what feels like a constant barrage of doubt, mistrust, misogyny, and racism that weighs down my love for the academy; but also, in my own sense of self questioning as to whether I need to legitimize myself in the first place. I went through and came out on top of every form of scrutiny by the academy, so why is my legitimacy still being questioned once I have essentially ‘made it?’ And while this question haunts me at the individual level, I know that many of my Black female peers are having a shared experience. Countless times I sit in sister circles and hear stories that could be mine. The student who continuously addresses you by your first name, while addressing your peers as professor or doctor, the questioning of the relevance of your identity-based research and subtle suggestion that “you don’t want to be known as the scholar who always harps on race,” or the lack of representation in your doctoral program that leads to a further sense of isolation. This isolation can be loud and paralyzing, especially when you are new to the journey in the academy. For me, it was an experience I shared during my doctoral program as well as when I became a new faculty member. The context changed slightly, but the experience of not being seen remained and remains.

These experiences produced a sort of balancing act of both hopelessness and hopefulness that operated at odds. I had feelings of hopelessness because going from one space of my journey to the next, and still experiencing the same marginalization can lead one to wonder whether the academy as a whole is so broken that no matter your title or position, you will be treated as illegitimate. In contrast, I have also experienced feelings of hopefulness. Being in community with other Black, female scholars who in their own cultivated, safe space have found community and support in ways that almost feels foreign to my experience in the academy. Showing up and simply being me, with my defenses down, allowed me to be curious without being seen as unknowing; creative without being treated as unorthodox; spiritual and emotion without being treated as unhinged; and most importantly, unapologetic, and bold without all of the negative narratives associated with the “aggressiveness” and “anger” of Black women. It is quite rewarding, healing, and nearly an out of body phenomena – to be moved by strangers and to share a sense of identity and similar lived experiences that provide the empowerment and comfort needed to move forward towards another day navigating the insidious nature of the academy. Similarly, I have found hopefulness in the solidarity of allies who have sought to understand the experiences of underrepresented and marginalized voices in the academy. These folx have intentionally shared power, fostered a sense of deeper appreciation for a diversity of ways of knowing, including that of BIPOC folx. They have created and generated space for me to be and while it has been invaluable, I know that it is few, far and in between for many other scholars who look like me. As such, when I think about my wildest dream for the academy and for my people, it is a community like I’ve experienced in my state of hopefulness that is ever-present and encourages a deeper, more inclusive set of knowing where all experiences can be shared, nurtured, protected, and lifted up as being valuable and legitimate. My wildest dream is for this to be the norm, and not an anomaly.

Julia (Associate Professor, The George Washington University)

I experience hope as deep feelings of joy, possibility, potential, creativity, fulfillment, and contribution. This feeling is most often generated in community—to me, hope almost requires community. The fact that there is so little hope in the world in this historical moment might be because we have so few communities where people can show up fully, defenses down, vulnerable, curious, and open-hearted. I have felt hope in the classroom (virtual or in-person), when students deeply connect with each other, excitedly share new ideas with spaciousness and curiosity, and when they open and hold space for each other to show up fully. I have felt hope when students bravely engage in difficult conversations with grace and mutuality. To me, hope is an energy of transformation, of sensing into a future of equity and reciprocity, of co-creation, and of love. It is generated through relations between people. The experiences of hope as an educator in higher education is both deeply personal and communal—it is reciprocal and it can be initiated in a group setting (classroom, small group breakout, study session, etc.) by any individual member. Hope is a force for connection, curiosity, openness, and courage. Personally, hope emerges to the degree that I am able to connect to the larger field of all that is (variously called Source, Dao, Quantum Field, etc.), and through nature, deep communion and witnessing with others, aesthetic experiences, medi-tation, and surrender.

My wildest dream is for all people to experience their profound connection to, and responsibility for, the web of life on this planet. All manner of routes to that experience would be cherished and nurtured because the access to this connection is different for each unique being on the planet. Education would cultivate wild generosity, reciprocity, and love; policy makers would understand the world as sacred and new narratives of politics, economics, and culture would blossom. Science would release its grip on knowledge and assume its rightful place as one source of knowledge among many others. Higher education would create transformative spaces of individual/collective learning and development—replacing critique with curiosity, judgment with openness, hierarchy with reciprocity, and fear with trust and brave surrender into unknowing. My wildest dream for my people is that they develop the capacity to be able to stand and see the violence that has been done in our (White, Euro-Western) interest. And yes, while the system of patriarchy may have been the prime mover in the world’s current condition, as a white woman I have benefitted from this violence. To have the capacity to stand in that reality—with love and compassion for self and the world—is my wildest dream for my white brothers and sisters. It is not about guilt, blame, or shame. It is simply a surrender to what is and what has been, with clear eyes, an open heart, courage, and compassion. From that place of surrender, healing begins, feelings of obligation and action gather force, and a new power arises—a power of humility that provides a great strength. From surrender comes power for enacting justice and equity in this material world; from surrender comes the awareness that one is infused by nature—is part of nature—and is responsible for tending to the wellbeing of all.

Core CAE Finding: Principles and Practices Towards ReHumanizing the Academy

We conclude this chapter with the idea of future-forming orientation/intention as a possible catalyzing force for this most important project of rehumanizing the academy. Our writings, combined with analyzing data (transcriptions, meeting notes), suggest significant implications, and we offer several principles and practices for how doctoral education might support learning and becoming with difference. Learning and becoming require principles and practices that range from deep work on one’s ‘inner landscape’ (one’s inner self ) to practical curricular and programmatic steps for enacting equity, justice, and inclusion in our classrooms. It is important to note, however, that the primary lever for institutional change is how one is being, rather than what one is doing. Intention matters, and we assert that intention can catalyze a community towards transformation. Thus the principles and practices below are offered as specific ways for educators to start/continue to decolonize their ways of knowing, which impact their ways of being with students. We believe that this shift begins with embracing difference, particularly difference in ways of knowing, as was shared by the three embodied, personal, and often political experiences shared in this chapter.

This list emerged from the stories, struggles, and hopes we co-created during our CAE process. Ultimately though, it is the intention of the educator that is most important. Those educators who anchor their work in the intention to decolonize their classroom; who intend to grow and develop as ethico-relational beings; and who intend to create spaces of radical inclusiveness/reciprocity—we believe that these are the intentions that will generate the skills, tactics, and strategies for a more hopeful future.

Concluding Thoughts

As noted previously, the source, root, or key dynamic that emerged from our CAE was the continual dance between hopelessness and hopefulness in our experiences as students, faculty, leaders, change agents, and human beings in this historical moment. We consistently experienced the movement from hopeless to hopeful over the months of our mutual engagement. Within our academic journeys, we have each experienced sexism, racism, materialism, and intellectual judgmentalism. However, through our sharing and learning of one another’s experiences, we found ourselves continually drawn into a practice of imagining spaces of — what we called — ‘non-struggle.’ Our vision of these spaces is deeply rooted in fertile soils of reciprocity, equity, and equality where we can rest and exist as who and what we are—spaces where the full spectrum of knowledge and lived experiences are valued and recognized. Interestingly, when we discussed sorely needed reform, revolution, and restricting of the current academic system,—which are sorely needed— we sensed less hope. Indeed, it was the creative imagining of a liberated academic space that pulled us collectively forward—an imagining of a future that we can see for ourselves and our communities and —a future that is possible with intention, courage, commitment, and will.

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