conclusion & collaboration

Through this project and the ethos we take forward from it, we disrupt academia by committing to reclaiming knowledgeable experts, many of whom are elders in our community and centering them. Beginning with them. Not only are we learning about their lived experiences, but we are also co-creating knowledge alongside them. Why is it important to have participatory practices in my scholarship? I feel uncomfortable being the author of my dissertation, this article, and this work, because I’ve learned, been inspired by, and survived through the work of the WOC in my life. How can I not honor them in this space? How can I not have them as theorists and collaborators.

ongoing par-chive: community collaging

Every year in June, I continued to hold space for creating and contribution to the archive via community. We continued engaging with the work during the pandemic and adapted as needed. Connection was primary and we found ways to continue that connection with the work. In 2020 during the pandemic and the height of racial uprising/reckoning?, I hosted a workshop for my WOC colleagues, friends, and community to interview a woman they wanted to honor. With stay-at-home orders, I wanted us to leverage our time at home to interview community members and stay connected across space and time. This space was incredibly vulnerable as I presented my work, its importance to me, and how I felt stuck/complicated about its importance during a time when the world was on fire. In 2021, with everyone masked up, we engaged in-person collaging of visual altares for our matriarchs. Community members sent images of their abuelas and mothers ahead of time, and created collages full of textures: fabric, thread, bead sewing. And, in 2022, the last group of K-12 students I taught graduated high school the same month that we celebrated giving them their flower --- a full circle moment of celebration.

ongoing par-chive: public annotations

Some of the ways we co-create knowledge is using social annotations on Manifold where folks can contribute to the knowledge written and outlined in these chapters. Manifold has a filter where you can read the chapter and the knowledge without and of the annotations, but if you’d like to read alongside someone’s thinking, you can turn that filter on. Through this feature, you’re able to follow the internal dialogue of the author or reader. It also is low stakes in that you can also have initial reactions and there are no parameters around what you write when you annotate. This can be liberation and open while also cause for pause. With such openness, we have less parameters of how someone is contributing. There are also ways that we can create a space where violent/inappropriate comments are made when annotations are public. But there are ways that we can include a private reading group and then those users would be included/approved in a particular way and their annotations can be set to public.

That’s part of the purpose in having these tools so that this knowledge is not static but rather is a space that’s living, is revised, and always evolving. Through these live participatory tools, we never know if we’ll look at the same version of my dissertation and that’s the purpose. The irony in my love of archiving a process is that this participatory aspect won’t be as well documented, and I’m ok with that. I think. It’s part of the scope and parameters of this project that not everything can be documented and that there are some things you just had to be there to experience. Another version of oral storytelling that is present throughout this piece is in the audio preserved through the interviews. But I’m thinking about how this discourse, although it’s written, you are writing the way you speak. The way that it organically comes out of your mouth.

an offering...

We invite you to reflect on the following questions: .

Thanks for being here. We can't wait to see how you honor your ancestors --- how you give them their flowers.