ABSTRACT. This cross-cultural, mixed-methods study investigates how institutional environments at Moi University (Kenya) and Indiana University Indianapolis (USA) foster or hinder students’ sense of belonging. Guided by questions on physical space, institutional culture, and the role of allied communities, the research explores how belonging impacts mental health, healing, and resilience. Using student surveys, leadership interviews, and policy analysis, we reveal narrative insights that illuminate how inclusion and exclusion are experienced across contexts. Findings emphasize that belonging is both a psychological and structural need—deeply tied to identity, safety, and student success—and offer actionable strategies for cultivating healing-centered educational environments.

ABSTRACT. This presentation will discuss a collaboration between an HBCU in South Carolina, United States, and an Afro-Brazilian serving institution in Fortaleza, Brazil.

In partnership with UNILAB, a public university in Brazil, I designed an English as a Foreign Language training for Portuguese-speaking faculty from across disciplines (philosophy, languages, religion, science, and math); they requested help improving their academic English so that they could publish in a wider variety of academic journals because they were having trouble attaining tenure. I designed two ten-week trainings for the cohort, meeting with them twice a week on Zoom. At the end of the academic year, three colleagues and I went to Brazil to visit their campus and to meet with several other universities who wanted similar training. The goal of the project was to empower university faculty at minority-serving institutions by providing them language resources and instruction.

The second half of the collaboration was for UNILAB faculty to create and teach a Portuguese course for students and faculty at an HBCU in South Carolina. The course was delivered over Zoom and allowed students to learn language and culture directly from Brazilian professors. The students were also encouraged to apply to study in Brazil as exchange students after they had completed the course. This partnership allowed faculty and students from both countries to learn how to collaborate across borders and to create meaningful programs and relationships that met the needs of both institutions.

ABSTRACT. Schools are important sites of language and learning diversity. Teacher educators must consider how to prepare emerging educators to engage with designing curricula for all learners. Experiential learning is one way for teacher educators to enrich the preparation of educators as they learn how to design, adapt and modify curriculum.

ABSTRACT. Counter-praxis is a theoretical framework founded in LatCrit’s counter-storytelling and Freire’s concientización. It centers the stories of students who have been marginalized in STEM education to challenge and dismantle dominant, oppressive narratives. The framework asserts that communities can actively resist and transform systemic injustices in STEM education.

ABSTRACT. This presentation cliques the influence of Christian fundamentalism on LGBT+ rights and policy making. Drawing on Queer Theory and activist history, it argues that religious ideologies should not be given equal weight to LGBT+ issues especially in regards to educational policy.

ABSTRACT. Bilingualism automatically begets a borderlands existence. Linguistic access to cultural spaces and the space between them creates a third space. Queer people experience this third space, and queer bilinguals live in a complex borderlands landscape that exceeds duality. This autoethnography explores queer and bilingual third spaces through an educator’s epistemology.

ABSTRACT. As a Haudenosaunee Mother-Scholar who theorizes Indigenous mothering, Indigenous women’s literatures, and colonial violences; Matriarchal Worlding emerges as an overarching theme that shapes my teaching, writing, and community work. This presentation offers ‘rematriating justice’ for Indigenous women as praxis for renewing kinship care and the revolutionary love of Matriarchal Worlding.

ABSTRACT. Este libro forma parte de una colección que tiene como objetivo principal proporcionar contenidos útiles para otras personas u organizaciones interesadas en abordar las necesidades psicosociales de comunidades rurales, migrantes y/o indígenas de México durante la pandemia del COVID, con la aspiración de que estas experiencias sean revisadas, aplicadas y enriquecidas en otras partes del mundo. Se presentan diez intervenciones de psicoeducación llevadas a cabo por integrantes de la Red Corymi en diferentes localidades de México, con el fin de disminuir los riesgos psicosociales y fortalecer los recursos psicológicos de estas comunidades. Se presentan experiencias de apoyo a la crianza en comunidades migrantes indígenas, trabajo con niños para prevenir el abuso sexual, talleres de prevención de la violencia de género, entre otros. Además, se mencionan estudios sobre indicadores de sustentabilidad en productores agrícolas y el Programa de atención psicológica a distancia implementado durante la pandemia. Estas intervenciones han impactado a varios grupos de personas, logrando una participación de aproximadamente 580 personas y mostrando resultados positivos en el fortalecimiento de recursos psicológicos y reducción de riesgos psicosociales. Confiamos en que su lectura te dejará inspirado y preparado para el acompañamiento psicosocial de comunidades rurales y migrantes en México.

ABSTRACT. In this book talk, the author will discuss Shaping Muslim futures: Youth visions and activist praxis (Eidoo, 2021)—a research-based pedagogical book that amplifies the counter-narratives of activist Muslim youth living into their desire futures and creates space for readers to clarify their own.

ABSTRACT. This presentation examines a chapter in a book I am working on focused on curricular understanding within the context of Gandhi’s life. In this chapter, the focus is on the plethora of representations of Gandhi’s most famous civil rights movement, a post-approach to life histories research, and what it might mean to do messy work toward a peace education for now times.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores possibilities for nurturing nonviolent education through study of the Forest School for Children in Cyprus. In elaborating upon its grassroots curriculum and forest pedagogy, we draw upon contemporary currents in curriculum studies to theorize about what might constitute such a vision conceptually as well as practically.

ABSTRACT. This paper draws from comadre sessions with Indigenous participants to co-theorize Indigenous futurities rooted in Yana Wana lands and waters. Grounded in Indigenous feminist methodologies, it explores water-centered visions addressing climate change, intergenerational healing, and community education, while confronting colonialism and emphasizing relational accountability and strategies for collective futures.

ABSTRACT. The confiscation of territories belonging to rutal communities by large corporations with the blessing of the Mexican government has led to mass human displacement, cultural loss and murder. This paper highlights two cases that illustrate this on-going encroachment and rural communities attempts to fight back against these forces. The first is the massacre and territorial dispossession in Viejo Velasco, Chiapas, and the forced displacement of Triqui families in Tierra Blanca Copala, Oaxaca. Both cases demonstrate systematic patterns of human rights violations, including extrajudicial executions, forced disappearances, forced displacement and torture, in the context of a struggle for territorial control of rural communities. In addition, this paper discusses how the extractive projects and industries continue to create distress in the lives of marginalized indigenous including through the destructions of sacred burial grounds, significant cultural locations and ancient archaeological sites.

ABSTRACT. Child sexual abuse and parental alienation are forms of child maltreatment with lifelong repercussions. A quantitative study was conducted to analyze, in the adult population, the prevalence of long-term effects of parental alienating behaviors, associating them with the presence of migration. Implications of the results were discussed.

ABSTRACT. MISOL is a transnational travel-based program which supports Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) beneficiaries. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) allows DACA recipients to petition for Advanced Parole (AP) to travel internationally and return to the U.S. Four cohorts of students have participated in the MISOL program.

ABSTRACT. This paper shares a work in progress on a critical qualitative study that uses testimonio, autohistoria-teoría, and papelitos guardados to explore Cholo/a, Chicano (used synonymously) students' lived experiences in Alternative Education Programs (AEPs), challenging Eurocentric educational narratives and advocating for culturally rooted healing, resistance, and transformation.

ABSTRACT. Editors of the forthcoming text Redefining Resistance: Narratives of Marginalized Students, Teachers and Communities will speak about their experience composing a text with writers addressing their experiences resisting harmful practices of educational institutions, policies and practices.

ABSTRACT. This book talk previews the forthcoming volume titled: Racism in the Enacted Curriculum. This book chronicles the work of experienced and skilled antiracist educators to explore why even the best-intentioned curricula for resisting racism often fall short. Featuring case studies from different educational contexts across the US, as well as the author’s own experiences as a classroom teacher in Chicago Public Schools, it highlights the challenges and frustrations faced by teachers working to implement antiracist curriculum nationwide. To meet these challenges, the author develops a theory rooted in posthumanist and new materialist thought, which understands the role of ideas as agential forces in and of themselves. Included as one of these agents is anti-Black racism, an adaptive force that requires the adaptation of antiracism to resist it. The book concludes with a practical discussion of how teachers might use such a theory to better respond and adapt curricula to combat anti-Black racism.

ABSTRACT. We enter the twenty-first century within an anatomy of general-structural crises (De Alba, 2007). The anatomy of crises comprises ecological disaster, vast wealth disparities, continental migrations, devastated peripheral economies, unimaginable wealth accumulation, gendered elderly and child care, international and national racializing inequalities, inaccessibility to basic educational and health care services, to name several (Fraser, 2021). The global-capitalist accumulative-extractivist order is fractured, both reacting and lashing out. Within the anatomy of crises ongoing, our impulse has been to band together as critical scholars and educators locally and transnationally, striving to forge local-transnation autonomous communities. Within the anatomy of crises, we seek to organize communities of resistance and dissent (Jupp et al, 2025). We hope and understand others will be needed in our organizing, but towards the praxes of community among several projects already underway, we created the Aztlán-Anáhauc-Ixtepec community in local-transnational support and solidarity. One collaborative effort from the Aztlán-Anáhauc-Ixtepec community took place at the end of April and the beginning of May 2025 within the Gloria Anzaldúa Archives of the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas, Austin. As part of this collaborative project, we engaged Anzaldúa’s main texts (1987, 2009, 2015) and archival documents (Anazldúa Collection, UTexas, 2025). We engaged these tests as a radical act of enunciative, liminal, border thinking (Mignolo, 2021). As we articulate the Aztlán-Anáhuc-Ixtepec community, we praxeologize what what Victor Turner (1969) and Nathalia Jaramillo (2012) called comunitas, a driving, resistant, and popular flow of alliance-oriented throngs, desiring, loving, becoming, always liminal and in the making. We know our work is in the seed, but our community projects both engage and create critical communities beyond solipsistic and sometimes narcissistic academic writing and both reflect and overflow into our local-transnational communities. This symposium, below, seeks to share our community labor with others. Against-the-odds and against-the-grain, we return to the anatomy of crises as an opportunity for differently-oriented- world-making that might enunciate alternatives. With and for our communities, we present our emergent work themed through our reading and collaboration with our memory Gloria Anzaldúa, her archive, and her writings.

ABSTRACT. Are you interested in learning more about immigration justice, community organizing, and advocacy at the intersections of immigration status, race, gender, gender identity and sexuality? Come and learn about this newly developed paid fellowship for undergraduates at a state institution aimed at cultivating creativity, connection, and action.

ABSTRACT. This book is a collection of short essays that interrogate familiar phrases in education that get absorbed into our lexicon and become commonplace but that direct our activity in ways that might not be in the best interests of our students or even possible to achieve.

ABSTRACT. Join us for an engaging session dedicated to sharing the vision and mission of the Curriculum & Pedagogy (C&P) Group—a vibrant community committed to critical scholarship, inclusive pedagogy, and transformative educational practices.

This session will offer a comprehensive overview of how to become actively involved in the group’s work and initiatives. Whether you're a long-time member or new to the community, you'll learn about:

• Ways to Get Involved: From attending conferences to joining working groups and committees, discover how you can contribute to and shape the future of C&P.
• Mentorship Opportunities: Learn about our mentoring network designed to support emerging scholars, graduate students, and early-career faculty.
• Publication Pathways: Explore opportunities to publish with C&P, including our journal, edited volumes, and collaborative writing projects.
• Upcoming Events & Awards:
• Networking & Community Building: 

We invite all attendees to bring questions, ideas, and energy as we continue building a dynamic and inclusive space for academic and community engagement.