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261 10 Teaching outside liberal-Imperial discourse A Critical Dialogue about Antiracist Feminisms Sylvanna Falcón, Sharmila Lodhia, Molly Talcott, and Dana Collins This chapter reflects the multiple conversations we have had since 2007 about academia and is written in a manner that retains the spirit of our feminist collaboration. Our group embodies diverse social positions as women of color and as white women, as immigrants and as children of immigrants, as queer and as heterosexual, as mothers, and as middle class. Our diverse locations, coupled with our shared commitment to antiracist/transnational feminism, produce a strength that resonates with Audre Lorde’s argument about women redefining and celebrating differences.1 Accordingly, we reproduce here our ongoing conversations, which synthesize our collective commitments with the strength of our experiential differences. The four of us came together to form a writing group in fall 2007 when all of us were in different stages of our academic careers, from completing a dissertation , to conducting postdoctoral research, to transitioning to junior faculty positions. Though our research and fields of study vary, we each embrace the idea of teacher-scholar activism. We came together initially to share our writing with one another in a space that was safe, humane, and supportive of our political goals. Though the formation of such a group may not seem exceptional, we came to experience our exchanges as deeply transformative; in fact, we had all borne witness to the competitive individualism, territoriality , and institutional pressures that so often drive academics to isolation. Our dedication to working together to counter the hyperindividualistic and masculine culture of the academy has made our collective into a distinctive space that is both holistic and compassionate. We initially referred to ourselves as the Feminist Writing Group or FWG, though more recently, we adopted the name CASA—Collective of Antiracist-Feminist Scholar Activists. We were searching for a new name because we had moved beyond just offering one another writing support 262 · Sylvanna FalCón, SharMIla lOdhIa, MOlly TalCOTT, and dana COllInS and had entered into broader discussions about critical pedagogies, the challenges of navigating academic life while remaining engaged in diverse social justice movements, and finding sustainable ways to remain present with our loved ones while pursuing our work. We had formed, in our view, an ideal collective for us that merged our feminist politics with our activist scholarship and acknowledged the joys and hardships of our everyday lives. In Spanish, casa means “home,” and we had indeed found an academic home with one another that countered the individualist demands of the university. This new home transformed our vision of the work we aspire to do in our teaching, research, writing, activism, and collaborations beyond the academy ; it also revealed a desire to work on joint writing projects even though we had received subtle and not-so-subtle messages that doing so would not help advance our tenure cases. Our first collaborative writing endeavor took place in 2010. We successfully coedited a special issue of the International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFjP) and coauthored the introduction.2 Our topic, New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights, sought to explore the contradictions that emanate from, on the one hand, the institutionalization of human rights among imperial nation-states and global governmental bodies and, on the other, the growing embrace of human rights logics and languages by activists. The special issue drew on questions at the intersections of our research and filled a critical gap in the existing human rights literature. The common practice of most peer-reviewed academic journals is to have two coeditors, yet we wanted to approach the project as a collective, meaning that all four of us would serve as coeditors. Fortunately, the managing editors of IFjP, a journal that emerged out of a similarly counterhegemonic academic trajectory, supported our vision to work collaboratively and in the process practiced a feminist mentoring model, which we have sought to replicate with one another and with other junior faculty. We followed the release of the IFjP special issue by organizing a conference at the University of California , Santa Cruz, in April 2011, during which we discussed the evolution of CASA and the collective process by which we completed the journal—a discussion that inspired others, both contributors and attendees, to fashion similar collective projects at the intersections of their own work. By the end of 2011, Routledge had published our work as a coedited book.3 The conversational chapter that follows contains questions we...

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