Critical Race Theory collective Resistant Knowledges Special Issue

The Critical Race Theory collective’s introduction to the special issue

It has been just short of 4 years (April 2021) since the first conversations began that subsequently resulted in what is now known as the Critical Race Theory collective (CRTc). Over this span of time we have been fortunate to develop a wonderfully collaborative relationship with Education For Information’s (EFI) managing editor, Fidelia Ibekwe as well as the IOS press editorial community.

This relationship now offers the second CRTc produced special issue within the EFI series on the global state of race and race-related dispositions. Just as importantly, this is also our second free access effort with EFI and IOS press. Thus, allowing the collective to live in and demonstrate our value of access as a means to emancipatory literacy.

Keywords: coloniality, communities, Critical Race Theory, decoloniality, re-search, resistant knowledges, storymaking

The Critical Race Theory collective’s Process, Promise, and Presentation of the Resistant Knowledges Discussion Part I

Marilyn Clarke (UK)

Author

A personally reflective review of Avtar Brah’s Decolonial Imaginings: Intersectional Conversations and Contestations

Growing up in Britain, one can easily go from primary school to university and beyond without
encountering many Black tutors. I use ‘Black’ here in its ‘political colour’ sense, which encompasses all Black and Brown people. Before embarking on an MSc in ‘Race’ and Ethnic Relations at Birkbeck College, University of London, I had been taught by two Black teachers – one Indian and the other Moroccan. One of my professors at Birkbeck was Avtar Brah, an East-African Asian. The Masters was a first of its kind in the UK, and she was one of its developers. The Masters programme is now called Culture, Diaspora, and Ethnicity, and Professor Emerita Avtar Brah has retired, having joined Birkbeck in 1985.

Edith Mendez (US)

Author

Cultural Heritage Re-search: Reimagining the Collective Memory of Copándaro de Galeana, Michoacán

The author reconnects with the ongoing struggles of her parents’ hometown, Cop´andaro de Galeana, located in Michoac´an, Mexico, in this ethnographic critical research. Employing critical
survey methods and analyzing the community’s identity reclamation through two festivals, El Carnaval and El Festival de las Almas y las Flores, the author collaborates with family members and friends to create a collective memory of Cop´andaro de Galeana’s intangible cultural heritage, underscoring the community’s self-expressed Resistant Knowledges. As a critical cultural heritage study, this article addresses the dichotomy of exploitation vs empowerment present in archival aspects of cultural heritage preservation methods. It also examines how the author’s position as a Chicana/Mestiza, attempting to reconnect with her indigenous roots and the duality of Indigenismo, aids or counters the empowerment of Cop´andaro de Galeana. Situated within the broader theme of “Resistant Knowledges: Unmasking Coloniality through the re-search of local to global communities,” the study addresses specific subtopics, emphasizing autonomous movements, identity and representation, and community resilience. Recognizing the important role that oral history has played in recording Cop´andaro de Galeana’s memory, the author similarly includes community members’ recollections and personal experiences to form a decolonized re-search article.

Ramona Naicker (Australia)

Author

Archival Practices and Indigenous Perspectives: Yarning with Dr. Rose Barrowcliffe

Based on a yarn with Dr. Rose Barrowcliffe, a Butchulla Aboriginal woman and Postdoctoral
Research Fellow at Macquarie University, this article explores her work around integrating Indigenous
perspectives within archival practices. Dr. Barrowcliffe champions better discoverability
and access to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander records for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
communities, offering insights for archives both in Australia and globally. Her recent work examines
how these communities use social media to bypass traditional archival barriers and share their
historical narratives. Highlighting the importance of collaboration between Indigenous communities
and archival institutions, this discussion aims to put First Nations voices front and centre in historical
and cultural narratives, pushing for Indigenous data sovereignty and transforming archival practices.

Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz (US)

Authors

Ancestral Calls: What if Learning is Bearing Witness? and other Derivativities of June Beer

This paper aims to engage readers with artist-activist-scholar-librarian June Beer of Nicaragua via a close reading of her poetry while tracing connections of field-specific library pedagogical practices that may be drawn from the ancestral calls evident within her work. Her geographic location informs her embedded community role as artist and librarian as well as her socio-cultural connection to her ancestral lineages. Using a close reading of Beer’s poetry, this article gives power to the language of poetry, and aims to draw conclusions of poetic form which identifies ancestral calls, and may be applied to library and pedagogical practice. Informed by Beer’s subversive work of poetics, activisms, and artmaking, sentipensante pedagogy, storytelling, place, and time, this article aims to reveal that within her writings are embedded useful tools for library and pedagogical practice, as informed not via traditional and normative librarianship, but via ancestral teachings, revelatory within the poetic articulations.

Mondrea (Mondo) Vaden

Author

Information and Intersectionality in the Digital Millennium

This paper details the importance of virtual and non-traditional information sharing mediums to
create better information access outcomes for people experiencing multiple forms of oppression
simultaneously. Non-mainstream media platforms and formats like Tumblr and zines, are a valuable
potential contribution to the discourse on coloniality, decoloniality, and how resistant knowledges
manifest according to the needs of the people who create them. The information sciences are
limited as a result of the majority white, abled nature of the field, and Tumblr and zines create a
forum for out of the box thinking and re-search that creatively and thoughtfully sidesteps
censorship. The paper is via a personal lens of lived experience and aims to uplift the recognition and
validation of non-standard methods of information sharing used by BIPOC, Queer, and disabled
communities. It underscores how these methods serve as vital avenues for community building,
education, and the preservation and dissemination of marginalized voices and experiences. The
paper emphasizes the necessity of acknowledging and integrating these unconventional sources into
the broader landscape of information sciences, arguing for their value and legitimacy alongside
traditional information repositories.

Isabella Zou (US/China)

Author

Learning settler colonialism in my K-12 education: a re-search counterstory

In this essay, I examine how settler colonialism operates in the dominant U.S. K-12 education system
through an analysis of my own educational experiences in the Eanes School District in Austin, Texas.
Grounded in the analytical frameworks of critical race theory and TribalCrit, the methodology of
counterstory (telling marginalized stories in critique of dominant narratives), and my positionality as a
second-generation Chinese-American settler, the paper examines how my K-12 education taught me
the ideologies that underpin Indigenous dispossession and further settler colonialism’s “logic of
elimination.” I re-search my experiences, from a kindergarten lesson on “Indian drums” to high school
textbook readings, to trace how educational practices and curricula reinforce settler colonial
ideologies and conscript students into settler society. In conclusion, I discuss decolonial teaching and
how it gives students tools to recognize and challenge settler colonial ideologies.

ACKNOWLEDGING THE RESISTANT KNOWLEDGES EXTERNAL REVIEWERS

One of our goals as a collective when we initially organized to engage in collaborative scholarly editorial work was to provide honorariums to external reviews.  Honoring our external reviewers along with making our EFI editorial work freely accessible remains quite important to the CRTc.  In the 38:4 (2022) CRT Special Issue through the support of the EFI managing editor, Fidelia Ibekwe, we are able to provide free access.  Yet, we were not able to modestly compensate our external reviewers for our initial effort. For this 2024 (40:4) Resistant Knowledges Special Issue we were able to achieve both our goals: honorariums for reviewers and free access to the special issue content.

SUMAYYA AHMED, PhD

Sumayya is the Executive Director of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC) at the University of Chicago. Prior to this appointment, she taught as an Assistant Professor at the Simmons University School of Library and Information Science and at University College London’s global campus in Doha, Qatar.  Her published research has focused on documentary heritage, societal provenance, archival history, oral history, and the politics of cultural heritage preservation in North Africa and the region called the Middle East. Dr. Ahmed has also published on racism in the university and responses to calls for social justice in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museum(GLAM) workplaces. 

LORENA CAMARGO GONZALEZ, PhD

Lorena [she/her/ella] is an Assistant Professor of Undergraduate Studies in Education and Gender Equity at Sacramento StateUniversity. Dr. Camargo Gonzalez earned her Ph.D. from UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies with a specialization in Race and Ethnic Studies. Her educational experiences as an immigrant and first-generation college student inform her interdisciplinary approach in drawing from Critical Race theories, Chicana/LatinaFeminist theories, and historical methods such as oral histories and archival research to address the following areas: 1) the activism of Latina/o/x librarians; 2) racial justice within library services, and 3) the history of Latina/o/x children’s literature.

SUJIN HUGGINS, PhD

Sujin is a Professor in the School of Information Studies at Dominican University, River Forest, IL. Dr. Huggins teaches in the areas of youth services, reference, and community informatics. Among many professional associations, she is a member of the American Library Association (ALA), the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL) and the United States Board of Books for Young People (USBBY). Her research interests include children’s literature of the African Diaspora, with a specialization in Caribbean children’s literature, critical pedagogy, and community-based participatory projects.

VANESSA IRVIN, EdD

Vanessa is an associate professor with the Master of Library Science Program at East Carolina University (USA). Dr. Irvin has authored three books, over 60 peer-reviewed publications and presentations, and has been an invited speaker to over 30 panels and events. She has also led grant-funded research projects exploring how heritage-based knowledge systems impact information-seeking behaviors and literacy practices in daily life. Irvin’s work investigates libraries as collaborative communities for literacy justice for diverse and local/Indigenous populations. DrV is equally interested in the social informatics of informal learning and the evolution of librarian professional practices with reference services and emerging technologies. Irvin serves as Co-Editor of the open-access peer-reviewed journal, The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion (IJIDI), where she manages an editorial team of 20 librarians and an editorial board of 35 LIS scholars worldwide. ​For  2024-2025, Dr. Irvin will be President of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE). 

CECILIA SALVATORE, PhD

Cecila is a Professor in the School of Information Studies (SOIS) at Dominican University (DU), River Forest, IL. Dr. Salvatore is SOIS’ Archives/Cultural Heritage Certificate Program Coordinator. She has an international reputation for critical compassion and consciousness related to cultural heritage. Cecilia is a member of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) and active in its Institutions Local History and Genealogy Collections Section. She is also a founding board member of the Indigenous Pacific Islands Knowledge United as well as an editorial board member for the journal Libraries: Culture, History, and Society, which is the official peer-reviewed journal of the Library History Round Table of the American Library Association. Dr. Salvatore is one of the Co Principal Investigators for DU SOIS’ portion ($750,000) of a multi institutional collaborative faculty Mellon Foundation Public Knowledge Program grant ($5,967,700): Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support (FOCAS). 

KENJUS WATSON, PhD

Kenjus (he/him) is a father, partner, brother, uncle and son who is passionate about reaching back to grounded wisdom, seeding into present challenges, and bridging towards more loving and sustainable futures. Kenjus is also an Assistant Professor of Urban Education at American University where he teaches courses in the EdD Educational Policy and Leadership Program within the School of Education. Additionally, Kenjus works as research lead, educator, and co-founder of the Institute for Regenerative Futures in the College of Education at San Jose State University. His research has focused on the biopsychosocial impact of every day anti-blackness and colonization (i.e.,racial microaggressions) on Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color, as well as the promise of school abolition and apocalyptic education to bring about healing and  wellness for people and the planet. Kenjus earned his PhD in Education with an emphasis in Race and Ethnic Studies at UCLA.

2023-2024 Critical Race Theory collective Community

Stephanie Birch

Jon E. Cawthorne, PhD

Vanessa (Chacha) Centeno

Marilyn Clarke

Alice R. Corble, PhD

Rebekah Cumpsty, PhD

Amanda DeSimone-Shabrack

Anthony W. Dunbar (Tony), PhD

Elizabeth (Liz) Grauel

Alison Hicks, PhD

Natasha Howard

Aisha Johnson, PhD

Edith Mendez

Ramona Naicker

Ana Ndumu, PhD

Fezile (Fez) Sibanda

Mikaela Slade

Angela D. R. Smith, PhD

Evangeline (Vann) Stanford