Portraits of Decolonizing Praxis: How the Lives of Critically Engaged Pinay Scholars Inform Their Work
There is a dearth of knowledge about educationally disadvantaged groups particularly within the Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) population, as research does not adequately provide disaggregated data. As such, this study particularly focuses on the intersecting sociocultural processes and educational experiences of Filipina American (Pinay) students turned professors to understand the transformative nature of their epistemologies and its manifestations in their work as scholar activists.Moving beyond questions of race/ethnicity, this study acknowledges the American classroom as both a fragile and powerful place of becoming; where "emerging identities are being invented within a contestation of dominant discourses of [not just] race, [but also] class, gender, and sexuality." It extends from the understanding that the exclusion of particular histories, cultures, texts, and ways of knowing in the traditional university has forced the construction of new alternative spaces, wherein the production of knowledge requires creative, critical, and collective thinking towards radical transformation. Thus, through the lens of women of color theory, this work employs an intersectional framework, which sees these social categories created by colonialism as mutually constitutive across contexts.Written in the tradition of Moraga and Anzaldua's This Bridge Called My Back, this study holds conversations with six Pinay scholar activists. It pulls from memory, breaking long held silences as it boldly sutures together glimpses of personal confrontations with coloniality (Lugones, 2007; Maldonado Torres, 2007) across their lifetimes from childhood to womanhood, from within the American classroom and beyond. This critical looking inward of one's private (and often painful) formations of race, class, and gender reveals the unstable growth of a Pinay scholar activist's personal/political identity. By drawing from an assembled, unorthodox framework of decolonized feminist thought and Buddhist philosophy, this study operationalizes the methodology of embodied portraiture to capture, interpret, and illustrate the ways in which transformative moments in these scholars lives shape their work. What surfaces is a shared story of how these women of color come to inhabit their paradoxical position within empire through the experiences and practices of silence, anger, and reconciliation; as well as the creation and participation of resistant socialities; helping to extend the work of Pinayist pedagogical praxis.