Sharing Lessons Learned Intersectional Collaboration, Collective Accountability, and Radical Care in Antiracist Programming

Abstract

This article draws on our workshop presented at the 2021 Watson Conference that showcased the lessons we have learned about antiracist programming from piloting a Certificate in Antiracist Writing Pedagogy and launching the Inaugural Learning/Teaching for Justice Conference at our home insti­tution, the University of California, San Diego. Taken together, these two initiatives have taught us that antiracist work in high­er education necessitates three guiding values: intersectional collaboration, collective accountability, and radical care. In this article, we ground these values in scholarship and analyze the contradictory institutional context from which these values have emerged, namely from within a first-year writing program that expects students to become proficient in academic writing through the counterhegemonic study of social hierarchies and mass movements for justice. We explore the specific work we have done to navigate this contradiction so as to imagine and conspire with our audience towards substantive transformation within higher education. The article takes the form of a gather­ing of reflections from different stakeholders holding different positionalities within our program but who each have used in­tersectional collaboration, collective accountability, and radical care to guide their antiracist work. Specifically, the reflections represent those of the two presenters at the Watson Conference and those of a former student of theirs who was hired to coor­dinate the inaugural Learning/Teaching for Justice Conference. Regardless of our differing positionalities in the institution, we all three share an ethic of antiracist resistance and hope our experiences are useful as you engage in your own projects in the name of justice.