The fourth and final piece in our special series, “Restorative and Reparative Conversations,” is crucial as we reckon with universities’ collaboration with settler colonialism. Julie Ballangarry and Madeleine Pugin are PhD students who generously share their ideas and lessons for how to create a supportive space for Indigenous scholars who must navigate both colonial and Indigenous epistemological frameworks and consider how their research matters for their communities. Their piece is a beautiful reminder that “restoring and repairing” is what will facilitate the emergence of the kinds of space that Indigenous researchers need to strategically use academia to benefit their communities. What we learn from Ballangarry and Pugin is that settler academics need to simultaneously cultivate communities of care while destabilizing the ways in which settler colonialism (and its intersection with other oppressive structures) has socialized us to learn, think, teach, and interact. Even as we grapple with our own experiences with feminist and other forms of harm, how are we making sure that those most impacted by colonial knowledge production have the greatest support, space, and freedom in academia?
When we first put out the call for our special series, we did not imagine that we would end up with four provocative, heartrending pieces that bring to light the conversations that so many of us have been having privately, only with our most trusted confidantes. Elina Penttinen inaugurated the series by detailing workplace abuse and gaslighting inflicted by feminists. Laura Castrillón-Guerrero, Adriana Rudling, and Maja Davidović shared their painful experiences of intellectual dishonesty and epistemic harm perpetrated by the people who are supposed to support and mentor them. Jenna Harb, Kirsty Anantharajah, Kanika Samuels-Wortley, and Nadia Quereshi shared their “Kitchen Table” approach to cultivating feminist community and care in the face of the toxic dynamics of academia. We are grateful to these authors for bringing such authenticity and vulnerability to us, and for the conversations that the two of us were able to cultivate with them and each other as a result.
All four pieces have in common a desire to “restore and repair” our own ability to trust others and build vibrant, joyful feminist communities in the vexing and traumatizing spaces of academia. This work is crucial so that we can hold (each other) steady as the academy commodifies education, extracts labor, and inflicts psychological violence, but also when the institutions with which we are affiliated try to silence us, sometimes with the use of militarized force, as we are seeing around college campuses in the United States and Canada during protests in solidarity with Palestine. All four pieces remind us that every time we put ourselves and each other back together, trying to heal, soothe, and care, we know that we must also unravel if we are to dismantle the oppressive structures that shattered us in the first place.
The Conversations section is an innovative intervention by IFJP which aims to offer space and opportunity to make strong theoretical and practical contributions to feminist debates that do not necessarily take standard academic forms. It may include interviews with prominent or early-career scholars, practitioners, and activists; narratives and short stories; photo essays, artistic pieces, and poetry; film readings; conference reports; and other “non-traditional” modes of scholarly writing.
Interested authors should submit their articles via ScholarOne: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rfjp. Please also upload a biographical note and five keywords. Make sure to edit it thoroughly for language and clarity, format it to correspond to the Taylor & Francis guidelines, and identify it as a submission for the Conversations section.
For further information, please refer to the journal’s FAQ page at: https://www.ifjpglobal.org/submit-to-us/#anchor_conversations_shortcut.
Inquiries should be directed to both Conversations Editors.