Breaking the mold: Working through our differences to vocalize the sound of change

Abstract

This paper orchestrates alterethnographical reflections in which we, women, polyphonically document, celebrate and vocalize the sound of change. This change is represented in Kamala Harris's appointment as the first woman, woman of color, and South Asian American as the US Vice President, breaking new boundaries of political leadership, and harvesting new gains for women in leadership and power more broadly. With feminist awareness and curiosity, we organize and mobilize individual texts into a multivocal paper as a way to write solidarity between women. Recognizing our intersectional differences, and power differentials inherent in our different positions in academic hierarchies, we unite to write about our collective concerns regarding gendered, racialised, classed social relations. Coming together across intersectional differences in a writing community has been a vehicle to speak, relate, share, and voice our feelings and thoughts to document this historic moment and build a momentum to fulfill our hopes for social change. As feminists, we accept our responsibility to make this history written, rather than manipulated or erased, by breaking the mold in the form of multi‐layered embodied texts to expand writing and doing research differently through re/writing otherness.

Why does political representation of the marginalised matter? Teaching classic literature using intersectional and decolonial approaches

“…Several recent works are available and should be taught alongside these classic works (e.g. Evans and Reher 2020 ; Magni and Reyholds 2021 ; Szlovak 2017 ; Abdellatif et al 2021 ).…”

Moving from responsibility learning inaction to ‘responsibility learning-in-action’: A student-educator collective writing on the ‘unnoticed’ in the hidden curriculum at business schools

“…In this work, we have experimented with 'collective writing' (also known as collaborative writing) as a form of writing differently. Collective writing enables us to resist, together (Abdellatif et al, 2021). It is a form of epistemic resistance, through providing writers the opportunity to redress unequal power relations, access and take part in knowledge production (Jandrić et al, 2022).…”

The “new normal” of academia in pandemic times: Resisting toxicity through care

“…This can all too easily turn into competitive jealousy or hatred as our vignettes also highlight. But, exactly therefore, solidarity starts by bridging the existing assumptions and the structural isolation that divide us (Abdellatif et al., 2021), not to stress “otherness” or “sameness” but rather a “withness” by which our differences become a collective strength (Irigaray, 2002).…”

“…In attempting to not just understand, but also resist and perhaps even reconfigure the suffocating, oppressing effects of this toxic new normal, we unfold a relational feminist approach of writing together which acknowledges and thereby cares for our lived experiences, with all their differences (Abdellatif et al, 2021; Gilmore et al., 2019; Plotnikof et al., 2020). This, we hope, can mobilize shared voices of critique and sensory encounters in ways that may move us together and even transgress the individualizing toxicity into liveable worldings (Haraway, 2016) touched by feminist solidarity and ethics of care, not in spite of but through our differences.…”

“…Putting our experiences of vulnerability and shameful, filthy affects onto the page allows us as co‐authors but also our readers to apprehend our unfolding realities; when we read another's pain, that pain invades us (Slote, 2007, p. 13; cited by Hawk, 2011). This way, writing differences together as care may resist and transgress individualizing competition across injustices and inequalities (Abdellatif et al., 2021; Amrouche et al., 2018; Gilmore et al., 2019; Plotnikof et al, 2020). This creates senses and spaces for “withness” rather than “sameness”; that is, the insistence that love, or here care, depends on an openness to otherness, newness, diversity and what these may teach us about ourselves and life (Irigaray, 2002; cited by Lund & Tienari, 2019).…”