On the Im/possibilities of Anti-racist and Decolonial Publishing as Pedagogical Praxis

Anti-racist pedagogy is grounded in honing the critical exploration of racial inequality and white privilege so as to take direct action against injustice, including the ways it manifests in educational contexts. Beyond being “nonracist,” an anti-racist approach seeks to actively identify and dismantle racism in its multiple and insidious forms toward transformative social change (Dei, “Denial”; Dei, “Anti-Racist”). Decolonial approaches to pedagogy foreground Indigenous knowledges in order to challenge the ongoing presence of settler colonialism, seeking to reframe educational practices so that they spring forth from and in the service of Indigenous people and interests (St. Denis). Although anti-racism and decolonization have been under development by feminists of color and Indigenous feminists for decades, they have acquired the status of “mainstreamed” and “metaphorical” concepts in recent years, often being mobilized in inauthentic or paper-thin ways (Tuck and Yang). We write this piece to explore the pedagogical possibilities and impossibilities for anti-racist and decolonial praxis in the realm of feminist publishing.

Online and open access feminist journals have mushroomed in recent years. Constituting a public space, online feminist journals provide unprecedented opportunities for community involvement, for the making of knowledge in various mediums, and for the making of public space itself. As part of this paradigm in feminist publishing, Feral Feminisms (FF) (www.feralfeminisms.com) is an independent, online, peer-reviewed, intermedia, open access feminist journal started in 2012 by Ela Przybylo, Sara Rodrigues, and Danielle Cooper. Each issue of Feral Feminisms builds around a particular thematic and includes academic articles, creative pieces, cultural commentaries, poems, photo-essays, short films, and visual and sound art. It utilizes the advantages of online publication, such as a flexibility of mediums, in seeking to subvert structures of knowledge production, to create alternative or “feral” publishing strategies, and to foreground topics elided by other feminist publications. Yet there are limitations on the disruptive potential of online feminist publishing. For example, “open access” can itself rely on Western colonial understandings of knowledge-sharing that thief Indigenous and Traditional Knowledge (Christen); the everyday operation of feminist publications overly relies on unpaid feminized labor (McLaughlin); and online publishing replicates and advances the power imbalances of traditional publishing models (with the ownership of the majority of journals in the hands of five commercial publishers, for example) (Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon). Feral Feminisms, along with other feminist online publications, thus must ask: what are the pedagogical purposes, as well as the decolonial and anti-racist possibilities, of publishing online? As three managing editors of Feral Feminisms, we are interested and invested in exploring the possibilities and impossibilities of undertaking online journal work as a form of anti-racist and decolonial pedagogical practice. In this piece, as well as in our editing praxis, we reflect on the following questions:

• • In what ways are feminist journals active in creating pedagogies of anti-racism, decolonization, and a commitment to free, open, and accessible readership?

• • What work can journals undertake to not only theoretically, but also practically, dismantle settler colonialism and racist structures?

• • How are publishing models invested in settler ways of knowing and creating knowledge?

• • How are publishing models invested in precarious and free labor that mines and undercuts feminist subjects?

• • In what ways do feminist publishing models suffer when they are bound to academia and its systems of worth and value allocation?

• • How do models of feminist publishing need to change in order to be truly transformative, empowering, and capable of remaking the worlds we live and work in?

Feminist Publishing as Pedagogical Praxis

Feminist publishing is an important platform through which to challenge knowledge formations, structures, and publishing communities that have historically been insistent on canonizing the work of white male authors—be they theorists, creative writers, or artists—while making it difficult for women, gender nonconforming people, Indigenous people, and people of color to have their work published. Feminist journals, instead, have created alternative practices around publishing, honing distinct forms of knowledge and building communities of resistance (Gilley; Murray, Mixed Media). Yet feminist publishing, as our piece...