Three Essays toward Care in and beyond Academia

Abstract

Radical practices of care rooted in feminist praxis and the lessons we have learned from Professor Lorgia García-Peña are fundamental to our pedagogy and our imagination of a more just future. We insist on a need for care practices across the university—in the abolitionist visions of the future of higher education, in student-led ethnic studies movements on college campuses, and in feminist pedagogical and reading practices. Grounded in transnational feminist thought and praxis that centralizes collectivity, community, and interdependence, our essays incorporate the lessons we have learned from García-Peña and our organizing efforts for ethnic studies as graduate students at Harvard to challenge the exploitative, capitalist, and violent practices of neoliberal universities. Through personal narrative, testimony, cultural and historical analysis, and poetry, this interdisciplinary piece insists that the humanities are indefensible without a focus on ethnic studies methodologies.