Have you ever stepped into a kitchen with a handful of aunties preparing for a feast? They giggle and gossip all while passing plates and stirring pots at the same time. In such a cramped space, with so many bodies, it feels like a dance, always needing to make space, yet there always seems to be enough room for oneself. It’s as if hidden spaces are within the space, waiting to be squeezed out by us. Sometimes, the space requires raising our voices over chopping or splashing oil sounds. Our bodies know it’s safe, feeling both relaxed and alert. This way of cooking isn’t an assembly line; there’s no strict division of labor. We have to find our own tasks. There’s no need to worry about not being good enough, as the auntie next door shares tips. It’s a jumble of movements to seated people, but what comes out is a colorful array of dishes assembled with love and labor. There’s never a worry; food will be served, and everyone will have a meal.
Kitchen-table talk (Smith, 1989), once considered a pastime with family and friends, is now also a metaphor for our scholarly journey as a community of four women of color developing scholars – or intellectual chefs. We began as a small collective through the Community of Scholars Program (COSP) Small Writing Group, where we met once a week to provide accountability as a writing team. Yet, our relationship as accountability partners transformed into genuine friendships as we began to chat and ask questions beyond our papers. We grew in solidarity and fulfillment by supporting one another as “whole people” through struggles faced within and outside academia. It began with bringing our individual completed seminar papers to the table, taste-testing them, and departing until our next meeting. But, there is something richer about workshopping our own papers together with an assemblage of talented writers. Over time, we consciously nurtured relational ties and a culture of care that transformed our collective writing workshop process. Our metaphorical kitchen of collaborative editing attends not just to the intellectual development of the papers themselves, but also to the emotional and expressive needs of the emerging scholars behind them. In this communal kitchen, we chop ideas, stir the imagination, season with critique, and plate presentations, all while feeding one another’s growth as thinkers and writers.
In this article, we serve our story and critical reflections on our collaborative’s academic labor. For our writing group, we each bring a unique offering that is delicious on its own, but even better when shared. To write this piece, we employed this labor. We recorded several conversations about our writing group. While we traced our group’s journey, reminiscing about how we began, identifying the changes we have made, and aligning our actions to theory, we laughed and shared meals (actual meals). Here, we present a menu of four collective dishes, or practices, that emerged through collective care in our writing.
Meet the Chefs
Ahlam Hassan
I am a doctoral student in the Department of German Studies. I currently focus my work on the cultural imaginaries and narratives of Vietnamese and South Korean migrant laborers in postwar divided Germany leading up to the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. My research centers on the (re)emergence and (re)negotiation of the imaginary belonging of spaces and the individuals shaping them. I unravel the intricate politics of belonging and isolation found in the archives.
Nou-Chee Chang
I am a Hmong-American, first-generation doctoral student in the Department of Communication Studies. I’m interested in seeing how audiences in the United States conceptualize and reinforce their ways of knowing a culture (or identity) based on popular media. I currently focus my work on transnational audience reception around Eastern Asian popular culture. My scholarship is centered on postcolonial theory and Black feminist media studies scholarship. I love cooking…
Angelina Momanyi
I am a second-year doctoral student in the Multilingual Education program in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. I am a Black woman, Northsider, organizer, and former ESL teacher. My work has largely been about finding connections in liminal spaces. I have always engaged in that work through words, shared writing, and shared meals. Currently, my research focuses on the resignation experiences of teachers of color and on teachers of color racial affinity groups.
Peng Liu Nelson 刘爣
I’m a first-generation Chinese American, bilingual writer, visual art storyteller, non-binary woman, first-generation doctoral student in the Culture and Teaching program in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, and a previous Waldorf and Mandarin immersion teacher. Witnessing how teaching shapes and is shaped by social movements, I critically examine curriculum shaped by historical contexts and wonder how adding body, land, and play-based inquiry, shapes curriculum and teaching.
On the Menu
Labor of Love: Delight of Crafting Solidarity
Upon our very first in-person meeting, Peng shared a bagful of treats. There were milk-hard candies and tiny cookies. And instead of jumping into, “So what’s the agenda today?” Ahlam asked, “How are you ladies doing this morning?” These small interactions were the beginning of a supportive community.
Fermentation: Sitting at the Table with Friction and Radical Honesty
The most esteemed flavors in cuisine, like fiery curries or intense garlic sauces, often derive their aromatic impact from skillfully combining ingredients that seem incompatible out of context.
And Then We Eat: Nourishing Wholeness
We honor and utilize the entirety of the body in our culinary practices, ensuring that no part goes to waste. However, our approach is not centered around excessive consumption or indulgence. Instead, we seek to nourish the mind, body, and spirit in harmony.
Join Us at the Table, There’s Always Room for One More: Tending the Future Harvest
The meals from our scholarly kitchen nourish more than the four of us. We cook not just for our own nourishment but to spread the feast across communities.
Labor of Love: Delight of Crafting Solidarity
Upon our very first in-person meeting, Peng shared a bagful of treats. There were milk-hard candies and tiny cookies. And instead of jumping into, “So what’s the agenda today?”Ahlam asked, “How are you ladies doing this morning?” These small interactions were the beginning of a supportive community. Angelina was always there to crack a witty or dramatically-real comment while Nou-Chee made loud comical gasps and cackles to anyone’s shared audacious microaggression stories.
With so much laughter in our knowledge production kitchen, we found ourselves writing seminar papers, submitting abstracts for conferences, and so forth. To be honest, though, our collective was always working. Ahlam was always sharing information about monumental international conferences, while Angelina was pointing out various readings that could apply to our seminar papers. It could be 8:00 pm, and someone would text the group chat, such as Nou-Chee, to request feedback for a deadline due at 11:59 pm, and everyone would jump on board to make edits, add frameworks, or even proofread. When Peng took a day off, she was still sending us resources in an organized, itemized list. We all shared, whether it was on papers or journals or preparing our readings for seminar discussions that ended in late evenings. Then we found ourselves again, at 9:00 am on Wednesdays, talking and working together once more. There were moving parts, but everyone was moving—just like aunties in a hectic kitchen.
Developing abilities to communicate complex ideas effectively and interdisciplinarily strengthened us all. However, we emphasized our collective over competitive advancement. Each group member contributed specialized knowledge, whether theoretical insight from cultural studies or concrete suggestions drawing from years as an educator. Even in the midst of the intensive labor of writing, researching, and editing, laughter and joy were present. Our bond as a group expanded our individual and collective capacities, not through stressful tension to compete or compare ourselves against one another, but through a mutually supportive connection where we lifted each other up. We shared resources, insights, and encouragement freely. The work often felt fun rather than draining because it was communal rather than solitary. Our growth was intertwined—when one of us learned something new or had a breakthrough, it benefitted us all. We continue to celebrate each other’s successes and mourn each other’s losses together.
This is not a competitive cooking show, nor do we face verbal scrutiny like in Hell’s Kitchen. The intimacy we’ve nurtured enables us to share vulnerability about life’s difficulties, not just perfect academic personas. We make space for tears, doubts, and personal challenges affecting research productivity. Integrating heart and mind fosters more holistic well-being to weather academia’s storms. Laughing over snacks, inside jokes, rambling tangents on radical theorists—these moments of joy revive weary spirits. They remind us of shared humanity beneath the abstractions of complex theoretical frameworks and academic jargon. For example, while discussing a particularly complex postmodern feminist theory, one of us made a silly pun about “performative gusto” in the author’s writing style. Though a seemingly trivial moment, it enabled us to connect with the author’s passion as a fellow scholar rather than viewing her solely through the detached lens of philosophical abstractions. Our laughter dissolved that barrier momentarily, yet powerfully.
On a summer day, the four of us gathered and realized it was really hard to teach at the college level, alone, without preparation guidance. Angelina offered us a seminar about planning, student feedback, grading, and managing self-expectations. She included practice exercises, guidelines, and a cute PowerPoint presentation. We pool such expertise to scaffold one another’s growth, believing academic resources can multiply rather than deplete if shared openly. This collaborative process requires consistent emotional and intellectual labor. Our meetings demand regular preparation and engaged dialogue. We grapple with complex feedback on developing arguments. Such intense effort may sound depleting amidst graduate school’s relentless pressures on individual productivity. However, within a supportive community, labor transforms into delight.
Our solidarity emerges through openness about mutual struggles, despite different social locations. This grounds us in collective care that renders the labor lighter. Laughter permeates every step of our journey together. Our regular eruptions into giggles, cackles, guffaws, and dramatic gasps punctuate meetings, writing sessions, and conference calls – no space stays solemn for long in this rambunctious scholarly sisterhood. But the laughter serves deeper purposes than mere enjoyment. It dissolves hierarchical barriers of expertise that stifle free thinking. It grounds us in shared humanity when tensions arise over disagreements. Most importantly, it keeps us rooted in an ethics of care essential to our work. Rather than harshly critiquing ideas in hostile attack modes, we cushion constructive feedback with compassion and lighthearted nonsense. We know the labor of writing and researching challenges souls as much as minds; laughter renews spirits battered by the academy’s toxicity. It replenishes mental fuel depleted by debates over language and theory.
Our laughter declares that, through existence alone, knowledge production need not happen through isolation and torture of the soul. When we laugh, we resist. And in this resistance, we find renewed strength and purpose that fuel our scholarship. Our laughter asserts through a joyous embodiment that another academy is possible.
Donuts from Bogarts, bánh mì from Mi-Sant, pastries from Aki’s Bakery, and mooncakes with salted duck yolks. Our shared academic labor feels less like a burdensome toil, but a voluntary act of cultivation yielding collective fruit. Rather than reproduce the extractive processes that exploit the solitary efforts of Ph.D. students for hollow accolades, we are working to infuse care into collaborative inquiry for its inherent rewards. The generosity between us transmutes duty into pleasure–be it laughter over snacks or flashes of insight that invigorate weary spirits. In this sanctum away from self-serving demands, where giving becomes receiving, we rediscover the true value of scholarly exploration.
Though we come from different backgrounds, community can emerge through academic work when our diverse ideas build upon one another through genuine inspiration rather than mandated requirements. The harmony in our group stems not from identical viewpoints, but from the rich interplay of our distinct scholarly perspectives. Unlike capitalist notions of competition to get ahead, we embrace cooperation to uplift one another. Of course, we have not eliminated self-interest completely. Yet, open sharing and mutual support around our scholarly passions—from conference papers to dissertation writing—fills us with greater enthusiasm than solitary toil would. Discussing and developing our academic writing together often feels fulfilling, not just intellectually, but socially. Through genuine connection around ideas, labor transforms into communal progress. In these glimpses where cooperative work embodies care and joy, we enact ethical resistance to systems promoting isolated gain over collective advancement. Utopian visions aside, we have cultivated a tiny scholarly kitchen where mutual growth sustains us through the storms of academic precarity and isolation.
Fermentation: Sitting at the Table with Friction and Radical Honesty
The most esteemed flavors in cuisine, like fiery curries or intense garlic sauces, often derive their aromatic impact from skillfully combining ingredients that seem incompatible out of context. Similarly, in our writing collective, clashing viewpoints and seemingly disjointed arguments often provide the catalytic sparks for extraordinary new syntheses. Our preliminary ideas or writing drafts frequently contain raw criticisms, underdeveloped stances, and gaps in understanding. Yet our disparate contributions meld into coherent analyses by collectively tending to these imperfect ingredients over time–patiently providing missing nuance here, probing implicit assumptions there. What first appears as roadblocks, whether theoretical disconnects or conceptual conflicts, become productive friction from which more nuanced arguments emerge. By leaning into the generative tension spawned through discussion and debate, our collective writing practice curates fresh combinations of perspectives. The friction of viewpoints rubbing against each other pushes our thinking to more complex planes.
Gloria Anzaldúa famously urged racial/ethnic minorities to “put your shit on the paper” (1981/2021) in cross-cultural coalitions–to air internal tensions openly as pathways for growth and collective empowerment. Our writing group echoes such advice; we embrace putting half-formed ideas and internal debates on the page, airing conflicts as fodder for reflection, rather than fracture. Just as certain food preparations depend on controlled preservation amid delicious smells, our preliminary writings and disparate perspectives require patience to ferment into richer analyses. Unpacking knee-jerk assumptions, probing implicit biases, sitting with discomfort—this generative conflict reminds us that revelation emerges gradually through collective questioning and listening.
Our writing group cultivated the radical honesty to openly admit uncertainty, confusion, and doubts around our knowledge.
By bravely uttering, “I don’t know,” we disrupt norms of intellectual posturing and the hubris academia often breeds.
Spaces honoring humility rather than narrow demonstrations of expertise allow more authentic, vulnerable growth. Underneath the pressure for perpetual confidence in the academy lurks internalized inferiority and superiority complexes tied to imposter syndrome. Yet when we front humility and our inner questioning, our collective flourishing unfolds. Removing pretenses of knowing reveals our common struggles to make meaning amidst complex paradigms. This reflexivity liberates our mutual exploration.
When we speak together we keep it real, often too real for department meetings or discussions with colleagues. Here, we can question if there is a meaningful difference between “rhetoric” and “discourse” without an argument about crossing elastic disciplinary boundaries. We all come with our own disciplinary tools, but don’t let trivial differences stop us from collaborating. We do not always agree. Upon reflection, moments of dissent or emotional flare-ups resemble that simmering kimchi. With care and attention, they elicit new flavors and wisdom.
Radical honesty in our writing group allows us to to air tensions, disagreements, and vulnerable emotions openly. This radical honesty disrupts norms of perceived “propriety” in academic settings that encourage glossing over “conflicts”. By embracing discomfort and critical feedback genuinely, our group experiences productive conflict that enhances our collective understanding. Our willingness to admit knowledge gaps and uncertainty, question disciplinary assumptions, and debate research approaches in a spirit of humility strengthens our interdisciplinary collaboration. Through modeling radical honesty and transparency about personal struggles as well as academic challenges, we build solidarity and nourish our spirits against the dehumanizing effects of the academy’s competitive individualism. Our writing group demonstrates how communities that center radical honesty with tact and care for human wholeness can plant seeds to reshape academic culture beyond an alienating ethos of individual achievement toward nourishing contexts fostering collective abundance. As women of color building community within academic institutions not created by or for us, we consciously foster solidarity through practicing radical honesty with one another. Of course, radical honesty alone does not necessitate care; blunt criticism without compassion centers the self, not collective growth. Our writing group models radical honesty through a lens of communal uplift—we center mutual nurturing over proving a singular truth. We acknowledge that certain confrontational tactics valued in Western frameworks of debate and argumentation stem from patriarchal and white supremacist norms. Instead, we have cultivated radical honesty wrapped in accountability, patience, and compassion. We opt for asking thoughtful, clarifying questions over reactionary retorts when disagreement emerges. We offer gentleness if something initially comes out wrong rather than rushing to indict. In this way, we embrace radical honesty’s discomfort not to deepen divides between “right” and “wrong” stances, but to expand our shared understanding. As a collective, we expand what radical honesty entails by grounding it in radical care.
And Then We Eat: Nourishing Wholeness
We honor and utilize the entirety of the meal in our culinary practices, ensuring that no part goes to waste. However, our approach is not centered around excessive consumption or indulgence. Instead, we seek to nourish the mind, body, and spirit in harmony. It’s not merely individual parts that we focus on, but rather the holistic integration of the whole.
Academia often splits intellectual development from other aspects of being. Graduate students get advised to segment “personal issues” outside scholarly identity despite their inextricable interconnectedness.
While I navigated through a medical mystery last year, my fellow writers always checked in on me. As I told them incredulous stories about my visits to the doctor’s office they laughed with me when I shared that a doctor told me,“You know, sometimes fingernails just fall off! Could be totally normal.” It was in fact, not normal. They gave me hugs, advice, and presence. They shared my anger and helped me heal.
Our collective’s ethic of care for cultivating our full humanity resonates with “ethics of self-care” in activist collectives. Lorde (1984) declared that for communities sustaining liberation struggles over the long-haul, nurturing collective joy proves equally vital as critiquing oppression. For those striving to advance social justice and dismantle oppression within academia, nurturing a sense of collective joy and overall wellness is equally as crucial as critically examining and confronting the inequitable structures embedded in these institutions. Speaking openly about mental health challenges or imposter syndrome reminds us of interdependent resilience, not isolated precarity in institutions seeking productivity over humanity. Such compassion for all aspects of being – from physical and intellectual to emotional and spiritual – makes our collective writing process sustainable despite the barriers faced.
I find myself troubled because I cannot show my authentic, curious self yet. I find myself bound to the judgment of others and encouraged to display my greatest dish and the roots of every spice and vegetable. Our writing group nurtures human wholeness. We support variable research productivity amidst ebbs/flows in mental health. Processing stressful comprehensive exam preparations or healing from spiritual wounds gets welcomed alongside academic peer mentoring.
We remind each other that integrated self-care sustains scholarly fires. Wholeness fuels excellence.
Join Us at the Table, There’s Always Room for One More: Tending the Future Harvest
The meals from our scholarly kitchen nourish more than the four of us. We cook not just for our own nourishment, but to spread the feast across communities. As we unwrap radical care through writing together, broader imaginings unfold of how these ethics ameliorate academia’s toxic individualism into contexts of collective abundance. We dream of expanding this kitchen – training more scholars, inviting guests, hosting communal spaces where ideas get chopped, stirred, and blended into revolutionary revelation. If we grew the table, who else might find sustenance here? We urge scholars hungry for solidarity to reclaim academia as a space for fostering collaborative scholarship and ethical community. Convert sterile offices into welcoming studios where creativity gets kindled through compassion. Transgress hierarchies that separate professors as all-knowing and students as passive recipients. And in this collaborative spirit, we urge reassessing the presumed scarcity undergirding so much knowledge hoarding and secrecy in the academy. If academics shared ideas openly with care, might citations then become less about personal fame and more about community acknowledgment? When knowledge production gets framed cooperatively, each person’s growth feeds the collective feast.
We carry such visions forward through the communities we nourish. Just as real kitchen tables can be spaces that foster liberatory knowledge production and empowerment for those who courageously fight within majority white institutions and encounter patriarchal dehumanization, our weekly meetings have become grounds of radical care that transform structures of scarcity dividing us. Classrooms may yet turn into sites renewing the social fabric strained by injustice when the connection gets centered. The kitchen table models a path that heals.
Professional kitchens and academia share surprisingly parallel histories of gatekeeping tied to oppressive notions of gender, race, and class. For centuries, creative culinary experimentation remained walled off as the domain of male chefs, while women’s household cooking was dismissed as rote labor rather than artistry. Likewise, the “life of the mind” in scholarly realms excluded women, people of color, working classes, and other marginalized groups. Access to resources, training, credentials, and authority to produce “legitimate” knowledge was strictly policed along the lines of identity and background. In claiming the title of chefs here, we intentionally disrupt norms dictating who gets seen as intellectual chefs worthy of shaping culinary and scholarly discourse. We embrace the activist legacy of boundary-pushing that enabled our presence in elite institutions, not originally created for scholars like us. Now, we gather around the kitchen table, ingredients in hand, ready to concoct our own revolutionary recipes drawn from our diverse seasoning blends. Like renowned family recipes passed down for generations and then mass-produced without consent, intellectual traditions and knowledge systems created by marginalized peoples have long been co-opted and commodified by dominant structures of power. Everything from homemade abuela remedies, to ancestral farming practices, to African oral storytelling forms, has been repackaged, plagiarized, and attributed to colonizing forces throughout history. Academia holds its own legacy of “discovering” then extracting and erasing the labor of women, Indigenous, and global south thinkers from shared canons of knowledge. As resilience, communities guard cultural intellect through secrecy, coding, and strategic sharing. We navigate institutions founded on historically extractive approaches by bonding together in support. Through collective writing spaces, like ours, that center an ethics of acknowledgment, consent, and care, we develop innovative frameworks advancing liberatory visions. Our solidarity as a writing collective provides a refuge where recipes and ideas may simmer safely. When we, as women of color scholars, “intellectual chefs,” gather together in spaces by and for ourselves, we birth new formulas that are disruptive of academic traditions used to silence voices like ours. In community lies the antidote to cultures of thievery seeking to subsume marginalized genius for imperial gain. Here we cook in a single kitchen. Here we reclaim our tongues.
Postscript: Tasting Our Own Ingredients
In writing this piece collaboratively, care nourishing our intellectual labor emerged, not as self-congratulatory abstractions, but as lived experiences woven into composing this analysis. We tasted our own ingredients, so to speak. When we first gathered to sketch initial visions for this piece, creative differences arose amidst open laughter. What themes truly conveyed our journeys of solidarity and encapsulated our arcs of growth? How much background context was needed for readers unfamiliar with our specific disciplines? Discussing these questions sparked moments of productive friction as we shared candid critiques of early drafts. With compassionate listening and letting go of ego, we gained clarified focus. In revising various section drafts, we further witnessed the fermentation process unfold. Ideas once vague or disconnected gradually acquired depth and coherence by absorbing each others’ suggestions, over weeks. As our manuscript simmered between meetings, we kept tending the conceptual stew–adding theoretical spices here, blending in personal stories there. We exchanged resources, edited sentence by sentence, and brainstormed metaphors until satisfied with each part’s flavor.
Still, the overall flow of the piece lacked a certain punch. Then inspiration struck during a late-night writing sprint session. We playfully riffed off the food metaphors, re-organizing our narrative’s structure until landing on the menu format. Suddenly flat sections popped with personality. The manuscript’s previously awkward structure became tighter and more coherent, thanks to this creative risk-taking borne of collaborative care, not authority. Our scholarly kitchen had alchemized disjointed pieces into an integrated appetizing feast through gradual layering of care. Of course, some remnants of friction lingered even during final polishing. Debating the balance between radical informality versus academic conventions in our prose stirred productive tension. We weighed parameters for unpacking theoretical intricacies while retaining accessibility. A shared editing document revealed just how much intensive labor and love permeates each sentence, paragraph and section.
In sum, we did far more than write about principles of ethics and care undergirding our scholarly community; we enacted those principles through the very process of co-constructing this piece. Moments of laughter, debate friction, vulnerable story-sharing, and patient revision modeled the themes explored on these pages. The undeniable care permeating every revision was our secret ingredient, carrying us through inevitable sticking points toward coherence. Our journey as a collective of women of color scholars poured fully into this writing, reminding us through tangible examples just how revolutionary academic work can become when grounded in radical care.
References (Chefs of Reference)
Anzaldúa, G. (2021). Speaking in tongues: A letter to third world women writers. In C. Moraga & G. Anzaldua (Eds.), This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color (Fortieth anniversary edition) (pp. 165-174). State University of New York Press. (Original work published 1981).
Lorde, G. A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches (1st edition). Crossing Press.
Smith, B. (1989). A press of our own kitchen table: Women of color press. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 10(3), 11–13. https://doi.org/10.2307/3346433