Academic Supervivencia and Sesi Irekani: Refusing, Reimagining, and Rearticulating Decolonization in the Social Foundations of Education

Abstract

The American Educational Studies Association (AESA) was established in 1968 in a context of both local and global social justice movements. The AESA’s mission and ongoing commitment to the analysis of education and society with underlying liberal activist aims has been ongoing since. Although AESA and its membership have been critiqued and questioned for their larger impact in the field, especially in its disconnect between university academics and pk-12 teachers, the original charge and purpose has largely remained. This address seeks to put a spotlight on the foundations of the social foundations of education and by extension AESA by using settler colonial and structural racism frames to examine the enduring problematics of how academia and academic enterprises are, as Quechua scholar Sandy Grande would say, “an arm of the settler state” (p. 47). Namely, I ask, how does AESA and the field of social foundations of education advance settler futurity? However, most importantly, I will also engage, how can AESA, the field and its membership engage in anti-colonial and anti-racist self-reflection and work toward decolonizing the organization and the work that we do as faculty members in this field? To engage in this process of reflexive praxis, I will use Grande’s concept of academic survivance, which includes operating beyond the boundaries set up for us by the institution and toward “an active presence in society and the academy” (p. 12). I slightly modify survivance with Chicana feminist scholar, Ruth Trinidad-Galvan’s concept of supervivencia, which also emphasizes beyond mere survival but from the perspective of Mexican campesinas “left behind” in a context of neoliberal extractivist dislocation. Finally, I draw from my P’urhépecha community ancestry a concept also common throughout many Indigenous communities, Sesi Irekani, el buen vivir, or “the good life.” I will argue that by centering a reflexive praxis based on these saberes-haceres we can refuse, reimagine, and rearticulate a relational comunalidad that unsettles the settler within and recon/figures an alter/Native charge and decolonial practice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor (1999, p. vii) theorized the concept of survivance as not merely a reaction or survival to colonialism, but an active Native sense of presence, continuity, storytelling, renunciation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry.

2 I purposefully emphasize only “César Chávez and his struggle” because that is the male-centered, individual hero narrative I was presented with. I am now well aware that the farmworker struggles were fought by people of multiple communities, including Filipinos/as/x, women like Dolores Huerta, and gender expansive peoples.

3 According to Cherokee/Thai scholar activist Maylei Blackwell (2023, p. 107), Abya Yala in the Guna language means “land in its full maturity” and is the name given to the continent, instead of the Americas or Latin America. Aymara leader Takir Mamani called on Indigenous people and Indigenous organizations and movements to use the concept to reject the imposition of foreign names and the colonial compulsion to name or rename Indigenous Lands, waters, more-than-human relatives, towns, and cities.

4 Smith (2009) and Roithmayer (2008) discuss structural racism as a socio-legal theory that combines critical race theory (CRT) and systems science. Critical race theory focuses on the “historical centrality and complicity of law in upholding White supremacy” (Crenshaw et al., 1995). The theory recognizes the racial bias embedded in the U.S. legal system, challenges the idea of a “colorblind” constitution, and the idea that any legal doctrine is fair, objective, or neutral. CRT has been utilized by education scholars to analyze the effects of racial injustice on students of color in schools (e.g., Ladson-Billings, 1999; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Solórzano et al., 2000; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002; Tate, 1997; Urrieta, 2006).

5 See Aguilar Gil (2018) for the case of Mexico, for example.