Welcome to Volume VI ofSPARK: Legacies, Inheritances & Futures.
Over the past six years, SPARK has celebrated scholars from a diverse range of disciplines who have shared impactful stories about the ways their histories, lived experiences and communities contribute to their research and shape their lives in meaningful ways. This year is no different.
Volume VI of SPARK broadly engages with the theme of legacies, inheritances and futures, while also considering the complex emotions and possibilities these processes generate. Our present-day institutions, knowledge systems and traditions are strongly tethered to the past. When our predecessors depart this world, we are left with their struggles, gifts and legacies of survival. Yet, as we learn from the contributors whose stories are shared in this issue, building a legacy is also about disruption and the refusal to pass down ways of thinking that have often sought to disenfranchise and delegitimize knowledge systems and cultural traditions of entire peoples.
As many of the pieces in SPARK illuminate, legacy building is not only a critical interrogation of the past, but also a way to honor diverse ways of knowing and being that have sustained communities for generations while also cultivating the possibilities of dreaming and imagining a better future.
Enjoy!
In This Issue
Black Healing Through Spiritual Storytelling, and the Limits of Academic Practice
I looked forward to the dissertation writing process as a doctoral student. I envisioned spending time in cafes, with the freedom to sit with the questions driving my research process: in the afterlives of slavery and colonization, Black trauma is “climate”; amidst a context of ongoing, layered, and intergenerational trauma, how can we heal from wounds that never close? Unfortunately,…
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Rekindling the Original Flames: The Anishinaabe Origin Story of Fire and a Reflective Conversation Between Mother and Son
Bapakwanagemagoons saplings (Pinus resinosa commonly known as red pine), are dependent upon fire for regeneration and only commonly found in areas where fire occurs on a regular basis. Where there is absence of fire for long periods of time, saplings are rare. (Photo by Nisogaabokwe Melonee Montano) Boozhoo indinawemaaganag. Minogiizhigaabo indizhinikaaz, Gaa-Miskwaabikaang indoonjibaa, Migizi indoodem. The name that I was…
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Lessons Learned and Taught: Stories and Memories of Refusal and Resistance From My Parents About the Hidden Black Curriculum
“Remembering and getting a good education,” as my mom and my dad believed and always insisted, was the only way to imagine and dream for a better future for Black people in the United States—a country, at its “founding” core, steeped in a history of theft of land and Black bodies, brutality and violence against them and death and desecration of those lands…
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The Revolution Will Not Be Ageist: My Semester Teaching Environmental Justice
In early 2025 I taught an introductory course on environmental justice. As students make their way to class, normally, I set up my Powerpoint slides or prepare and divvy up materials for in class activities. On this day, I wanted to try something new. Kendrick Lamar had just performed the Superbowl Halftime Show, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity…
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What I Inherited as a Mother: Language, Schooling, and the Early Years of Korean Immigrant Parenting
Concerning I didn’t learn about institutional expectations from theory. I learned them in quiet, uneasy moments as an immigrant parent trying to understand my child’s school in the United States. In these moments, I realized there were rules no one had explained to me. In the late 2010s, my husband was suddenly transferred by his workplace in Korea and we…
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We Came Here to Live a Good Life: An Ode to Indaanisag
I was still new to this world when I first saw the dragonflies dance to the flute. A Dakota elder, who is now with the spirit world, once took out his instrument in the place where his people lived, loved and left so many years ago. It was the season when the strawberries started to grow along the paths we…
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Theories From the Diaspora: A Kānaka Maoli–Filipino Relational Praxis Toward Embodied Knowledges
As graduate students at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, we are witnessing, living through, and actively resisting against the unlawful military occupation of Minnesota by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents deployed by the Trump administration, all the while we are expected to continue navigating our programs, research and teaching obligations. In navigating this contraction as members of the…
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A Conversation With Kamana’okekai and pim
C. Kamana’okekai Lattig (KL) and pim gonzales (PG) are diasporic scholars who grapple with their respective ancestries through values they carry in their bodies. By reflecting on their autoethnographies together, they explore how embodied research can pave new horizons for their (inter)disciplines. Arriving to the body as theory and method KL: To introduce the conversation, I wanted to ask what…
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Inheriting the Lab: An Auto-ethnography of U.S. Scientific Violence in Puerto Rico
I was born in the late ’1990s on the beautiful island of Puerto Rico, more than a century after the United States began its occupation of Puerto Rico in 1898. Officially designated as an “Estado Libre Asociado,” Puerto Rico exists in a political gray area – neither fully integrated into the United States nor independent.1 This colonial reality shaped not…
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Before Us, After Us: A Pakistani Diaspora Visual-Poetic Archive
To The Next Generation
You won’t be fully connected to yourself until you learn all of it.
Even the ugly parts.
They’ll haunt you if you don’t.
Understanding how we got here
is how we decide who we want
to become.
That’s your responsibility.
And your gift.
Continue Reading Before Us, After Us: A Pakistani Diaspora Visual-Poetic Archive
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