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
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. This colonial reality shaped not only everyday life on the island, but also the scientific landscape I would eventually enter. … Continue Reading Inheriting the Lab: An Auto-ethnography of U.S. Scientific Violence in Puerto Rico
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 it means to conduct embodied research. As scholars, I feel like we have the tendency… Continue Reading A Conversation With Kamana’okekai and pim
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 Kānaka Maoli and Filipino diasporas, we propose that it is crucial, now more than ever,… Continue Reading Theories From the Diaspora: A Kānaka Maoli–Filipino Relational Praxis Toward Embodied Knowledges
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 walked, the clouds sailed gently overhead and the sacred rice was starting to grow. When… Continue Reading We Came Here to Live a Good Life: An Ode to Indaanisag
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 moved to New Jersey with our two sons. The decision came so abruptly that we… Continue Reading What I Inherited as a Mother: Language, Schooling, and the Early Years of Korean Immigrant Parenting
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 to mention him in class. My first slide featured a photo from his performance. “Who… Continue Reading The Revolution Will Not Be Ageist: My Semester Teaching Environmental Justice
“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 and Black bodies. Most important to my parents was their belief that access to a better… Continue Reading Lessons Learned and Taught: Stories and Memories of Refusal and Resistance From My Parents About the Hidden Black Curriculum
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 given when I was just a few days old is Standing in the Good Sky.… Continue Reading Rekindling the Original Flames: The Anishinaabe Origin Story of Fire and a Reflective Conversation Between Mother and Son
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, I developed my dissertation prospectus under duress. From 2020 to 2021, the initial phase of… Continue Reading Black Healing Through Spiritual Storytelling, and the Limits of Academic Practice