Strategies for Sisterhood in the Language Education Academy

ABSTRACT

Almost 20 years after the publication of our co-authored article in a leading North American academic journal, seven female language education academics revisit our evolving analysis of the complex spaces occupied by women of color in the language education academy. We expand on the particularities of our place-based struggles and ask questions about how conditions in the academy and the world have changed for us as female and racially minoritized scholars over the past dozen years. Over the years, we have sought to cultivate strategic and analytic expertise that might enable us to thrive in the academy without compromising our political stance nor our integrity. We share the stories of our experiences in the form of strategies for solidarity, feminism, and antiracism in the academy, asking how racially minoritized women can carve out productive lives in the academy without taking on dominant ideologies of self-interest, self-promotion, exploitation, competitiveness, individualism, and neoliberalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Academia
• antiracism
• anti-sexism
• collaboration
• feminism
• language
• race
• sisterhood
• solidarity
• women

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. http://www.heforshe.org/

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sister Scholars

The Sister Scholars are a feminist, antiracist collective of critical language educators who have written and laughed together and loved and supported each other for almost 20 years. As individuals, they are Rachel Grant, College of Staten Island, City University of New York; Ryuko Kubota, University of British Columbia; Angel Lin, Simon Fraser University; Suhanthie Motha, University of Washington; Gertrude Tinker Sachs, Georgia State University; Stephanie Vandrick, University of San Francisco; Shelley Wong, George Mason University. More importantly as a collective, they are a strong and powerful alliance exploring creative resistance within educational spaces. Their scholarship is centered around antiracism within academia, feminist ways of knowing and being, and the lives of women of color in the academy.