This piece uses Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens as a conceptual framework to highlight the unique ways Girls and Femmes of Color (GFOC) create beauty and life amidst a backdrop of devastating oppression. In doing so, we emphasize the brilliance and beauty of GFOC and their multiliterate practices while also challenging the notion…

Three art education researchers conceptualize ethical considerations in conducting research with Indigenous peoples, people of color, and minoritized groups. Three critical dimensions of ethical research emerged: reflexivity, reciprocity, and racialism. We consider how the demands to be successful in academia are at odds with ethical futures. With…

This dissertation explores the well-being of public K-12 teachers in the United States who explicitly identify as anti-racist and/or anti-colonial teachers. Well-being has traditionally been conceptualized as attached to single human individuals in most Western academic scholarship. However, drawing on insights from the posthumanisms, community…

The suffering racism creates is endless. For too long, the burden of speaking out and taking action against racism has fallen on Communities of Color. Higher education needs people inside the system to actively resist its racism by implementing antiracist policies and practices. White people, and white women in particular, comprise a majority of…

Educational leaders face immense challenges each day. Currently, such challenges include, but are not limited to, reckoning with the United States' ongoing legacy of persistent and pervasive racism, supporting students' health and wellness in the aftermath of a global pandemic, and facilitating difficult intercultural dialogs during a time of deep…

Predominantly white pre-service teachers typically lack awareness of white supremacist patriarchal (WSP) ideology as a system of thought and praxis. Yet, the prevalence of white people working as teachers alongside BIPOC students and families in urban contexts persists. These teachers' lack of understanding about the system that plagues the…

Purpose: Discourses of racism have always circulated within US classrooms and, in the current sociopolitical climate, they move with a renewed sense of legitimacy, entitlement and violence. This paper aims to engage the consequences of these shifts for the ways that racism works in university-based classrooms and, more specifically, through the…

The navigation and socialization within academia is rife with toxicity and a hidden curricula reflective of neoliberal competitiveness, drawn from White cis-hetero colonialist patriarchy. To challenge and resist the toxicity within academia, Communities of Color have created counterspaces to share resources, build beyond the purported…