by Casey Philip Wong* & Julissa O. Muñiz* | *equal authorship

 

In the problem-space of the mid-2020s, we face a moment of global fascism and imperialism that has called into question our “principles,” ath–thawābit (الثوابت) (see: note 2), in ways that are more visible than they have been in decades. It is no longer “hidden” that the exploited labor of U.S. workers are being directed towards the racialized erasure of the unhoused and most oppressed in the context of the U.S. nation-state itself (i.e., via arrest, imprisonment, and murder, as well as now even forced displacement outside of the nation into prisons and colonial landscapes abroad), nor is it hidden that our exploited labor is being directly deployed to create, buy and ship arms to a settler colonial entity that is systematically and aggressively engaged in an attempt to enact a “final solution” for a decades-long genocidal campaign against the Indigenous peoples of Palestine. 

With this context, faced with systems that we cannot yet disentangle ourselves from (Bonilla, 2015), we consider what it means to acknowledge and confront our complicities in ways that do not ignore, evade, or resign, but instead proactively eradicate the logics, ideologies, and structures that make our complicities possible. We begin with an overview of our conceptual framework, followed by two vignettes that we co-selected and wrote in coordination with each other. We conclude with a critical reflection guided by the following question:

What does it mean to practice principled, anti-colonial pedagogy in a colonial world?

Grounded in our conceptual framework, we close with a discussion that includes our holistic analysis and synthesis of our respective vignettes into four offerings for educators. We hope that these four offerings can contribute to larger discussions on how to enact pedagogies that can generatively contribute to abolishing and decolonizing structures, institutions, and processes of oppression.

 

وأن ينتقل من لسان إلى لسان: Conceptualizing An Approach to Sharing Principled, Anti-Colonial Pedagogy

In 1965, celebrated freedom fighter, educator, and writer Ghassan Kanafani released his collection of short stories, عالم ليس لنا (A World Not Ours). This was not a one-off exercise or cursory approach, but a theory of change that explicitly centered “the people” as the machinery of collective liberation. In so doing, poetry and story sit with purpose beside his perhaps more famous essays, driving their argumentative and theoretical directions. Explicating this power, Kanafani notes in his work Al-Adab Al-Filistīnī Al-Muqāwim Taḥt Al-Iḥtilāl: 1948-1968 (Palestinian Resistance Literature Under the Occupation: 1948-1968), “Poetry can spread without being printed, moving from tongue to tongue…” (Batarseh, 2013). And in so doing, he elaborates on its importance to resistance in the face of overwhelming oppression, “. . . it is capable of piercing through the siege encircling it” (Batarseh, 2013). While a theoretical article might require study to unpack its learnings, or a pamphlet might help to give direction to revolutionaries or organizers within planning forums, an aesthetically lush accounting of life via poetry can migrate with a person by means of its rhetorical and aesthetic power; even through a siege, a wall, or prison bars, inside and outside of containment, control, and persecution. By nature of human memory, the beauty, poetics and illocutionary force of a well-told story or artful poem can encircle, flank and outwit forces that uncreatively propel mono-dimensional rhetorical treatises and demands, and the physical force that tells and does not ask. As illuminated by Kanafani himself in his analysis of “literature of resistance” and “poetry of resistance,” this is a recognition that has connected intellectuals engaged in resistance across oppression (Brehony, L. & Hamdi, 2024). This is well-documented among intellectuals who embraced the arts as a key aspect of their communion with humanity, and the people whom they sought to engage, from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) to Ericka Huggins (Newton & Huggins, 1975). It is in this spirit that we write from and think through poetics and story in struggle. 

Moreover, as Kanafani sought to engage poetics and the literary, he operated from a revolutionary anti-capitalist ethos that refused what has been referred to by scholars such as Tuck (2009) as “damage-centered” narratives, in favor of a “desire-based” approach and radical truthtelling (Brehony & Hamdi, 2024). Kanafani refused individual and personalized condemnations of behavior outside of social context (i.e., “beside phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny,” Fanon, 1967) in favor of telling stories that situated how material conditions indelibly affected people’s best attempts to live principled and ethical lives (Brehony & Hamdi, 2024). That is, rather than operating from a standpoint of exhibiting the destruction, death and pain, in the hopes of stirring the humanity within some benevolent, rich oppressor, we consider what may move “us” and “everyday people” to come together to halt oppression. This is exemplified in Kanafani’s (1969) novel Returning to Haifa (عائد إلى حيفا), which crosses back and forth across time to tell the story of a Palestinian couple, Safiyah and Said. Safiyah and Said are forced to leave their home in Haifa in 1948 and tragically have to make the choice to leave, not knowing whether their son Khuldun is alive or dead. And they don’t give up. They continue to search for him via friends and the Red Crescent for 20 years, before finding their way back to Haifa 20 years later. Upon their return, they find their home occupied by a Jewish woman, Marian, and her husband, Iphrat Koshen. Safiyah and Said come to know that the couple had adopted Khuldun, now called “Dov,” from a Jewish Agency after a neighbor found Khuldun. They wait for Khuldun to return to the house, only for “Dov” to come and disavow them. He blames them for leaving him, not acknowledging the context of Zionist seizure of their home and city. Amidst this heartbreak, Said comes to think about his other son, Khalid. Said had forbidden Khalid from joining a group of Palestinian freedom fighters (fidayeen) before he left, and now hopes that Khalid has dishonored his initial wishes, and joined the fidayeen while he was gone. In this story, we do not find propaganda, a simple narrative of “right and wrong,” or a romantic tale of overcoming. Instead, we find messiness that reveals perhaps a more important lesson about what and how it means to struggle in the name of collective liberation. In this way, we think about the sharing of principled, anti-colonial pedagogy as embracing the unexpected and untidy, in the name of finding our way within a world that is not so easily named or “theorized.”

In this way, we also share a piece attempting to not let go of the truth, to hide or obscure our complicities, nor to surrender to them. Instead, we think about how we have struggled to refuse and to enact education that does otherwise, and to critically reflect on the lessons that we have learned. While we value the contributions of anti-colonial theory and its related works, we seek to follow in the tradition of Kanafani (1969) and anti-colonial theorists who have aspired to theorize from the “ground up” through practice (e.g., Ghassan Kanafani; Brehony & Hamdi, 2024; wa Thiong’o, 1986). Our stories bring up the messiness of attempting liberatory educational practice under colonial conditions. And further following what has been referred to as a desire-based approach (Tuck, 2009), we do not think about “desire” as a filling a “lack” by means of a predetermined, prescribed vision of what is “free” within a capitalist world of market and exchange, but rather think about desire as the human drive to connect and to be in community in ways that allow us to move more freely with each other (Deleuze & Guattari, 1977): What might allow Said, Safiyah, and Khuldun to embrace and to end the system that blinds and protects Marian and her husband? Thus, we tell stories as professors and educators who are attempting to live principled, ethical lives within a colonial system of racial capitalism that requires dispossession, exploitation, and eradication of dissent (i.e., via assault, murder, genocide, ethnic cleansing, imprisonment; Landeros, Montes, Muñiz, & Urrieta, 2020; Wong, 2026). We tell these stories acknowledging, and overtly considering, how our lives and work are indelibly complicit with colonial violence, especially as we engage in educational work that is supported by and within colonial institutions, “non-profits,” “universities,” and carceral facilities (Tuck, 2018). Ultimately, we take this approach to consider what we have learned and to seek to enter into conversation with decades of anti-colonial theory to assess what really stands in the way of learning towards a world defined by just and ethical relations across lands, waters, peoples, and more-than-humans, across time (Simpson, 2017).

In alignment with a desire-based approach that centers radical truthtelling (Tuck, 2009), we also purposefully follow this tradition, exemplified by Kanafani and his work (Brehony & Hamdi, 2024), which does not focus on leaders or prominent figures. Like ourselves, the youth and adults who appear in our respective stories are not leaders of prominent organizations or widely known prisoners, do not have widespread presence on social media or media platforms, and do not come from families who have significantly accumulated and/or been passed on capital. In the anti-colonial struggle in Palestine, Kanafani sought to lift up and complicate the stories of everyday people living and doing their best to live with and to resist colonialism (Brehony & Hamdi, 2024). While there continues to be reward within a capitalist system, propelled by a global bourgeoisie, for telling narratives that invoke “liberation” or “change” as the possession of elites, “leaders” and the privileged (Robinson, 2000), Kanafani refused this theory of change across his work (Brehony & Hamdi, 2024). Like so many anti-capitalist, anti-colonial scholars who have come before and continue to work within this tradition, he recognized that it was “the people” who are the makers and transformers of history (Zinn, 2015). In this way, we also aspire to share stories of everyday people, seeking to move everyday people, in the name of collectively working for a future not dominated by dispossession, exploitation and domination of the masses in the name of the accumulation by the few (Wong, 2021).

 

Resisting Punishment Logics in a Prison Classroom- Julissa’s Vignette

Teaching in prisons requires having tough skin and not for the reasons you might think. As someone who has taught or volunteered in some capacity in carceral spaces for nearly 14 years, it is not the students who it takes time adjusting to, it’s the carceral environment itself. It’s the echo of the slamming heavy metal doors reverberating through the halls and into the classroom. The constant visible presence of correctional officers walking past the classroom windows peering in as students learn. It is the chatter of the guards’ walkie talkies interrupting the silence while students’ think. It is students walking in late, frazzled, upset and apologetic because a correctional officer deliberately refused to distribute their movement passes making them late to class even though they were in their dormitories on time and waiting. It is the restrictions imposed by subjective policies and practices that govern the conditions of teaching and learning (Muñiz, 2025), creating yet another unforgiving space students must navigate. It is the looming reminder that although you might try to create a space for generative, dignity affirming teaching and learning, the classroom itself exists within the belly of the beast. While teaching at a women’s designated facility in Texas, I was constantly reminded of these dynamics, particularly as I built relationships with students and made decisions about how I wanted to show up as an educator in that space. Teaching in carceral spaces has taught me the importance and need to teach in an ethical and principled manner that centers human dignity, care, and compassion. In practice, it meant choosing to see my students first even in difficult moments that might have required more formal institutional responses. By choosing to see my students, as an educator it also meant resisting the colonial urge to react and instead listen in order to forge a path forward that is forgiving and life-affirming. 

In 2022, while teaching at a women’s designated prison in Texas, I, Julissa, had an incident with a student in the class that involved plagiarism. While reading through the student’s final paper I noticed a drastic change in writing style and voice. The more I read, the less the paper sounded like her, yet somehow the writing itself was familiar. Soon I realized that part of why it sounded so familiar was because the student had lifted some of the writing from the course readings. I did not want to believe that she had plagiarized so instead I opened the course reader in an attempt to prove myself wrong. Yet, after skimming a few pages I started to see verbatim sentences from the reading in her final paper. Using a highlighter, I marked the portions of her paper and the readings that were exactly the same. I wanted her to see that I had taken the time to read her final paper thoroughly and that rather than just “accuse” her of plagiarism I did my due diligence to confirm my suspicions first. While I grappled with the disappointment of knowing that she had plagiarized, I knew that I wanted to talk to her to better understand what had led her to make that decision. For nearly five months I saw the development of her thinking and the sophistication of her thoughts, eloquence of her writing, and her ability to engage in thoughtful and critical dialogue such that the plagiarism felt incongruent with who I knew her to be as a writer and learner. I knew her to be a strong and confident writer who liked to incorporate vivid imagery and personal anecdotes, but the writing in the final paper read like any other peer-reviewed article devoid of lived experiences and personal connections to the content. I decided that I would handle the matter privately and informally without reporting it to any prison officials. I trusted that her and I could come to a resolution that did not require formal recourse or intervention. More importantly, I stayed true to my abolitionist commitments that no student deserves to be thrown away, much less a student who had already experienced and felt the gravity of being pushed out of public education. 

As I considered what to do next, I weighed the impact of what it would mean to disclose the incident not only to the Director of Education at the prison, but also the host university. The course was sponsored and offered through a large selective public university’s extension program, which meant that the course and its policies mirrored that of the university’s, especially as it related to academic integrity. Under that logic, as the instructor of record, I likely would have needed to report the plagiarism to the university’s office of student misconduct. However, this wasn’t a traditional college course, the stakes were much higher. Unlike traditional college courses, this class was offered in a medium security private prison where students had to earn their seat in the class by demonstrating a documented history of “good behavior,” such that any accusation of plagiarism could jeopardize the student’s eligibility and access to higher education. Further, given the precarity of postsecondary programming in prisons, I also worried that the incident could negatively impact other students, future students, and the entire program. I feared the institutional response on both ends including how the university might respond and use the case as an excuse to withdraw their support for the program. I also feared the backlash of deficit narratives pertaining to the students and their perceived worthiness that could arise as a result of the incident. Moreover, I feared that the prison would use the incident to justify cutting the program altogether and deny us and the students the opportunity to teach and learn. To be ethical and principled in that moment meant thinking through all of the possible consequences for all those involved, including the student, the other students, and the life of the program. It meant assessing the pros and cons of following prescribed policies and instead finding a way to hold the student accountable to their actions while minimizing potential harm and retribution. 

Guided by principled, anti-colonial and abolitionist ethics, I opted to talk to the student the next time I saw her. Given it was near the end of the semester, the next time I saw her was at the End of Year Celebration that the university-based program had planned. The event was meant to be uplifting and celebratory with students and professors from across the program. While I hated the idea of having the conversation in a setting that was meant to be celebratory, this was the last scheduled visit before the start of the summer and the only opportunity I would have to talk to her before grades were due. 

It was a brutally hot Texas day, so much so that the prison let us borrow two large industrial fans in an attempt to keep the gymnasium somewhat cool. Although I arrived early to help set up, students had already started trickling in and many were assisting with the set up arranging food, chairs, and offering to help in any way they could. The energy that day felt light and joyful, which made the pending conversation all the more difficult to sit with. I eventually saw the student enter the gymnasium, but I didn’t approach her right away. Instead, I waited until she had settled in and eaten. I approached her with a smile and asked if we could speak privately. I found a place within the gymnasium where we had relative privacy and could speak without yelling over the buzz of the fans and chatting people. I started by asking how she was doing and how she was feeling now that the semester was nearly over. I could tell by her body language that she was nervous and perhaps a little uneasy, so I did my best to reassure her through my body language and tone that I was there to listen. After a few minutes of chatting, I eventually pulled out the folder from the clear bag I was carrying and told her that I wanted to talk about her final paper. Immediately, I saw her shift her weight around and smile nervously in my direction. I started by telling her that what I was about to say did not change how I saw her as a student and that all semester she had demonstrated strong written and oral communication skills. I told her how much I enjoyed reading her work because she was a gifted writer, which is why I noticed the discrepancy in voice and writing. I then handed back her final paper and explained that everything that was highlighted were excerpts that were verbatim plagiarized from course readings. While her skin was brown, she blushed and was speechless. I assured her I was not upset or angry, but that we needed to come to a resolution. I started by walking her through my process and eventually I asked her what exactly had driven her to make that decision. By then I could see the tears welling in her eyes as she struggled to explain. She shared that in the two weeks leading up to the final, she received some devastating news–she was denied parole–and was having a hard time processing the news. She explained that following the news, she felt the urge to give up on everything she was doing, including college, because none of her efforts were “enough” in the eyes of the parole board. As I listened, I empathized with her situation and the weight of the news she was carrying. I assured her that I understood, but that I could not ethically move forward with grading the final paper she had turned in. I explained to her that she had two options:1) she could choose to get a zero on the final which would bring her overall class grade down to a D or low C, or 2) she could redo the final but that any type of academic dishonesty would not be tolerated moving forward. Her eyes swelled up again as she asked, “Julissa, why are you doing this? Why aren’t you reporting me?” I explained that in my opinion reporting her to the office of student misconduct would not solve the issue and would arguably exacerbate an already toilful situation. I also explained that as an abolitionist, I believed in transformative justice as a means for addressing harm, or in this case academic dishonesty, to which she thanked me and agreed to redo the final paper. We discussed an appropriate timeline, and agreed to a week, at which point she would turn it in to the Director of Education who would forward the final paper to me. I asked if she had any questions about the final. For the rest of the conversation, we talked about the prompt and different readings she could draw on to support her argument. Despite some of the initial discomfort we both felt, at the end of the conversation we hugged before returning to the celebration. She thanked me profusely and assured me that the next draft I received would be “all her.”

 

All That’s Left to You – Casey’s Vignette 

When I, Casey, reached what felt like the edge of Birmingham, Alabama, approaching by car, it felt like I had driven onto an old movie set from the 1970s. I double-checked Google Maps, looked left, looked right, the sidewalks and streets were empty. I halfway expected a tumbleweed to blow across the hot summer road, but instead my eyes drifted to a faded yellow sign that said the building was a shelter from nuclear weapons. Holding that thought, the peacefulness began to feel ominous, but then I saw 2 cars shoot past the corner and land on the curb in front and behind me. As a few young folks stepped out of the car, they recognized me through the old Toyota window and waved. My breath eased, it looked like I was in the right place after all.

I had been invited over the previous few sweltering summer days to remap, reimagine our understandings of freedom in communion with a group of young folks from Tongva lands, Tovangar. Young folks who had, themselves, been previously trapped behind bars and—more “and” than “or”—had close family who had been deemed unworthy of grace, second chances, and having their stories told. They visually carried cues that were celebrated by loved ones in their neighborhoods, but were also read as “signs” of being “up to no good” by suburban soccer moms who locked their doors when they quickly coasted by. In that same way, their ingenuity, perspicacity, and resourcefulness that they carried often did not garner job opportunities and invitations to apply and attend Harvard, but instead marked them as threats and being “too smart for their own good.” They came from communities that had been historically boxed in with redlines by housing associations, regularly patrolled by men who needed to keep them in “their place,” and somehow left out of schedules for street cleaning—even though it was often their Tío, Tías, Uncs and Aunties who were the ones doing the cleaning across town.

As I grabbed my bag with my laptop and portable speaker, I stepped out and felt the blanket of heat roll over me, both comforting and heavy. I went over and said wha’s up to my comrade, dear friend, Mateo (see: note 5), who had schemed and dreamed this beautiful trip into existence. Knowing the work I did, he had told me to come and “do that Hip Hop shit or whatever, I trust you, brother,” and I couldn’t say no. I asked Mateo how the past day had been, because I knew it had been heavy. Mateo smiled a knowing smile and let me know the deal—he told me that it absolutely had been heavy, that the young folks were still processing. Among a group of young folks, with ancestors from the African and Latinx diasporas, they had grown up in a city that had at one time been viewed as an “escape” from “that.” They had grown up hearing about “the South,” and their curiosity had only been elaborated as they learned and theorized about abolition—learning about the connections of enslavement to incarceration, from “Jim Crow” to what scholars like Michelle Alexander (2010) have referred to as the “New Jim Crow.” All the mythologies inspired Mateo to have them make the physical trip, as researchers, to see and assess for themselves, and to think about what the lands and waters of “the South” might help them create—because the young folks were also visiting as part of an organization dedicated to the power of the arts and creativity, from personal to collective liberation.

With our brief greeting, I followed Mateo, the young folks and a few older teaching artists and educators who had also come along into one of the old store fronts. One of the older teaching artists, a poet who had made the connection to this location, led us. We stepped into what looked like a small café or artist’s studio, and the poet excitedly greeted his friend. Mateo and the older educators had picked up some to-go food and they got to eating at a few rounded office tables after what had been a long day.

I looked around trying to prepare myself. I was supposed to be giving a Hip Hop workshop and Mateo had to change the space at the last minute to accommodate their scheduling. I only saw a medium flat screen TV, which would require some glasses from onlookers without 20/20 vision, and felt grateful that I had brought my own speaker with me. I told him I would make it work. It definitely was a make it work situation. While I felt an unease because of the setup, and because I had only met the young folks two days earlier, I also remembered how warm and deep they had been with each other when I first met them for our set of workshops 2 days earlier. I was also reassured by a space that seemed under construction, and without a lot of offerings for workshops and presentations, but was grounded in community that was represented in all the aesthetic accoutrements that were slowly coming to adorn the walls and surroundings.

I carried a confidence that I was about to offer a Hip Hop workshop that I had varyingly done with kindergartens to elders, from schools to community learning spaces, to prisons. We would engage Hip Hop through a critical pedagogy that followed in the legacy of organic intellectuals from James Spady (2013) to Davey D (Chang & Cook, 2021), from scholars like Paulo Freire (1970) to H. Samy Alim (2009): that knowledge was not something that can be passed on like handing a dollar to a cashier—that you can’t own knowledge and deposit it into an account in your brain, like you would money in a bank. Instead, knowledge is something that is constantly (re)born and (re)named in dialogue amongst and within people, in community. Knowledge is dead the moment it hits the page, offering only a visual, semiotic representation of the memory of what came before. Knowledge is given new life and meaning when taken back up by people, as related to that moment in space and time. From this vantage point, we cannot ever become authoritative “experts,” but instead can simply become more experienced and practiced knowers and learners.

In this same way, building from H. Samy Alim’s (2009) analysis in his work, “Translocal style communities: Hip hop youth as cultural theorists of style, language, and globalization,” the Hip Hop workshop that I was going to offer invites groups of folks to think about what “is” and “is not” Hip Hop through a “problem-posing” approach (Freire, 1970)—we don’t search for what’s “right,” but instead, based in everyone’s own respective experiences, we search for what everyone thinks that it “is” from their standpoint and relations to systems of power. The workshop functions by giving everyone time to make arguments based on evidence, a series of Hip Hop music videos from artists across the world. To put everyone on the same playing field, and also to make it fun, for each workshop I deliberately choose music videos that I imagine the respective group will not have seen, from artists whom they would likely not be familiar with. We watch, freewrite, pair and share, and then discuss amongst the whole group, documenting our findings video by video. Till this day, no group of folks have defined Hip Hop the same, even if they watched the same series of videos. There are recurring themes, patterns, and motifs that speak to Hip Hop as a “culture”—like so many across the globe—but it comes to be a moment of self and collective literacy of Hip Hop culture in each learning space. After each iteration, across dozens of times across the years, I have continued to witness passionate diatribes, smiles, laughter, and full hearts—especially from “the heads.” That is, the Hip Hop aficionados who loved the music, the culture, and gettin game, who love elevating and sharing their “knowledge of self.” I have gotten to learn so much about Hip Hop as I have engaged with folks across communities and contexts.

But then came Birmingham, Alabama, where perhaps I learned even more about the problem-space of racialized politics in 2025.

Once all the young folks had finished eating, and absolutely looked like they were still processing visits to lynching sites and museums commemorating lost lives, I began. Given that the young folks had not really gotten a chance to know me, the Asian abolitionist guy invited by Mateo, and also given they were all artists or creatives, I started off differently than usual. I started with a short story that I had written to share how I had learned to love in the name of collective liberation. It was also a short story that shared how I had grown up being “systems-impacted,” even though that had not been a thought that came to my mind until years later. Following my sharing, with the warmth and generosity of spirit that they offered me, as well as given the ease they engaged with each other, with how tired everyone looked, I made the decision to skip what I had nearly always done before—community agreements. I jumped straight to the workshop.

I explained how the workshop would go, how we would engage each music video, and then made another choice. Given nearly everyone in the room had collectively been raised in North and South America, I would start our global Hip Hop journey with the music video, “Sígueme,” from two Indigenous, Latinx artists Xiuhtezcatl and Renata Flores. Moving between the U.S. and Mexico across his life, Xiuhtezcatl has rapped in Spanish, English, and Nahuatl to advocate for social and environmental justice, and likewise his collaborator, Renata Flores, is a well-known Peruvian artist who has rapped in Quechua, Spanish, and English to call attention to coloniality and the need for educational justice. I thought of the song and music video for “Sígueme” for how it pushed the bounds of imagined, widely circulating Hip Hop. The subtitled video showcases Xiuhtezcatl and Renata Flores within a beautiful, naturalistic setting on Indigenous lands outside of “urban” centers, rapping in Quechua, Spanish, and Nahuatl, and dressed in Indigenous clothing. As an aesthetic homecoming, the song and music video invite Indigenous peoples across the world to honor and embrace their Indigenous roots, lands, and knowledges on the way to a decolonized future.

I played the music video and I saw familiar smiles across the room, but also noticed some curiosity, some unease. After freewriting, we moved into pair and shares. As the buzz of the room began to echo, with folks deep in conversation about what they thought “was” and “was not” Hip Hop in the music video, I noticed that one pair—a Latino young man (“Che”) and Black young woman (“Fannie”) (see: note 6)—seemed playful, but tense. As we moved to the whole group, I asked what everyone thought. 

Che passionately was the first to jump in. 

Che explained how he loved how the music video showcased Hip Hop in Spanish, from a Latinx perspective. He argued that the rapping in Spanish was Hip Hop. Beside him, Fannie shifted in her seat, and looked hesitant to share. 

It was clear that Fannie had something to say. 

Folks looked her way, hoping Fannie would, and she opened up. Not looking Che’s way, Fannie shared how she felt like Hip Hop was Black, and had been Black, but how it had been increasingly taken up by everyone else, and how she wasn’t sure if she could agree. She brought up a great point that I hoped would arise. Hip Hop artists and intellectuals have long noted and argued that Hip Hop has been known to center Blackness, and embrace all oppressed peoples in a vision of collective freedom, but only as far as those oppressed peoples don’t embrace anti-Blackness themselves—amidst other differentiations across sociohistorical contexts. But before I could dive in to ask her to lift up an important conversation, Che dove back in, “So Latinos can’t do Hip Hop?” And Fannie looked at him, and told him that’s not what she was saying. Fannie sat back in her chair. He playfully nudged her to say more, along with the rest of the room who had become drawn to the conversation. I didn’t know her well enough to read her body language, but given her previous words, I presumed that she was just collecting her thoughts before she would reenter the conversation.

All seemed good, until it wasn’t.

Fannie suddenly proceeded to tell Che off, and he then responded in turn. It happened so quickly, I still cannot remember exactly what was said. As it was playing out in real time, I held eyes with Mateo and the other older educators in the room, working with them to intercede and defuse the situation, but the two young folks were locked in. Before we knew it, Fannie stood up. She stormed out. Some folks followed Fannie outside, some went to talk to Che. It quickly became clear that we needed to close out for the day. Still making sense of what had happened, I walked out. I tried to talk to Fannie, but she was in a deep conversation with one of the older educators in the backseat of the car. I turned to the car with Mateo, where Che was riding, and he apologized. But he also said that he meant what he said. Mateo, sensing the need to collect everyone and get them to a place where they could process and rest, he let everyone know that he would regroup with the young folks at the hotel. Mateo passingly let me know not to worry, that he’d break down the situation with Che. We would all reconnect for the closing celebration at his house the next day.

As I walked back to my car, I played the scene over and over in my head. I tried to make sense of what happened and how I could have done it all differently. I instantly regretted not having started with community agreements. I had presumed that there were no tensions between a group that seemed “close” and “cool.” And from my brief words with Mateo, that did seem so–but appearances can and often are deceiving. I thought about how the placement during the day, at the end of a long, filled trip, was not ideal. I thought about how it was not great to have a workshop engaging Blackness and anti-Blackness so soon after engaging with sites of deep anti-Black pain and violence. I thought about how I could have done more to hold Fannie in the space, without stifling the excitement and passion of Che. I thought about how difficult that was to do in the context of late spring 2025, post-presidential election, when larger societal forces had been increasingly positioning Black and Latinx communities as not only “separate” (i.e., regardless of there being many folks with Black and Latinx heritage), but “against” each other from multiple vantage points. I knew being racialized as an Asian man in the context of Los Angeles didn’t lend me to being someone who they imagined could be trusted to grapple with such politics. I sensed that there were issues of patriarchy and gender that also played out, but I did not know them well enough to know how it shaped their interactions. My mind continued to critique and assess.

The next day, as we gathered at Mateo’s house, I carried an excitement and deep anxiety. Even though Mateo had shared how conversations with the young folks had been helpful in beginning to understand why it had all unfolded the way it did, I was not sure what to expect. To my surprise, the young folks entered full of energy after a last day filled with nature and fun activities. As I went to grab food and sit, I was even more surprised to find Fannie and her friend come and sit by me at the table. Fannie said she was sorry, and I told her that she had nothing to apologize for. I insisted that it was actually me who had failed as an educator. She insisted that I hadn’t failed and that I didn’t need to apologize either. 

We would go on to talk for hours. 

She would share how she had entered this trip in deep pain—because of the ways that the carceral system had engaged her. Following a domestic violence dispute with a boyfriend, with violent repercussions from the U.S. nation-state, she had been forcibly separated from her child. In that conversation, I also shared how I struggled with the ways that my mother had also had to engage our larger carceral system as she grappled with alcoholism after my father’s sudden passing. Somewhere along the way I smiled to myself, because in part, I knew this was the type of conversation that Mateo had brought us to Alabama to have in the name of abolition. 

As the night got long, it came time to depart, and we said our goodbyes. I told Fannie that I hoped to connect with her and the rest of the young folks again when I visited on a trip back West. We agreed to keep in touch. I went and found Che in the kitchen, talking mess, and we had a laugh. I let him know that I would love to continue to keep in touch and learn with him, and Che shared the sentiment. We exchanged knowing glances; Mateo had let me know that he had had a generative conversation the night before. Che was still working through what had happened with Fannie, but it had opened a door to a line of thinking around anti-Blackness that educational spaces had not really given him space to sit with and hold. While I had imagined it would be a conversation during a workshop that would leave me with a little more insight about abolition and anti-colonial pedagogy, it would be that evening at Mateo’s house which would teach me the most.

 

Discussion

As we held the work of Angela Davis (2011), Ghassan Kanafani (1969), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986), Eve Tuck (2009), Huey Newton and Ericka Huggins (Newton & Huggins, 1975) and so many others, we critically reflected on our respective narratives. We arrived at the following four primary takeaways for applying principled, anti-colonial pedagogy.

1) Being Ethical and Principled Is Situational and Contextual

Being ethical and principled requires careful attention to the situational and contextual. That is, to enact ath-thawābit (“الثوابت), “the constants,” from Palestine to the U.S., from Alabama to Texas, from prison classrooms to community-based pedagogical spaces, is to always situate ourselves within what is happening intrapersonally, interpersonally, and institutionally. In the case of the first vignette, one cannot overlook the fact that the incident of academic dishonesty occurred in a prison–a place circumscribed by dehumanization, social control, and a politics of disposability (Davis, 2011; Ellis, 2021; Gilmore, 2007). For some, including carceral agents, that person was nothing more than a “prisoner” or “inmate,” yet while in the classroom she was first and foremost a “student” and “learner,” two identities that are rarely privileged in the carceral context (Muñiz, 2025). As such, to move in an ethical and principled manner in that situation required contextual attention to the physical space, as well as the policies and practices of both the prison and university that dictate what an appropriate response to academic dishonesty entails. During the conversation with the student, it also meant acknowledging the contextual factors that were impacting the students’ decision-making and responding with empathy, kindness, and with a genuine desire to resolve the issue rather than punish misbehavior. 

The second vignette, similarly, asks that we consider the situational circumstances that led to the disagreement between Che and Fannie. While Casey was aware that students were journeying through a multi-day trip focused on the painful history of enslavement and reconstruction in the South, he had not considered how a workshop examining Hip Hop culture could ignite a heated debate and the situation that ensued. Yet, while he could not have predicted where they would be emotionally, spiritually, and perhaps even physically, the context of what they were experiencing and learning should have been more adequately considered in situating the workshop and its intended goals. Done differently, the facilitators could have scheduled a more intentional break before starting the next workshop, which could have served as a purposeful reset. Still, as Casey’s vignette demonstrates, it is never too late to hear, to learn, and to respond to the contextual factors that informed the students’ responses. As we learn, Fannie was dealing with the carceral pressures of the family policing system, and her own family being torn apart, as she was simultaneously bearing witness to the long painful history of enslaved African mothers and fathers being torn from their children. Knowing that context, allows us to fully understand just how much she was carrying into that split second interaction. Taking into account context, as we’ve discussed here, is more than just attending to the physical space, it is also about the intangible environmental and social factors that shape interactions and how we respond, react, and behave. 

2) Holding Each Other Before, During, and After Getting into Learning

European-descended modes of teaching and learning have often privileged and celebrated “objectivity,” “rationality,” and emotion-less spaces as being the most “effective” route to learning. Whether within an incarceration facility or a kindergarten classroom, learners are overwhelmingly encouraged to “leave their lives” at the door and to learn as if what is outside does not affect what happens inside their minds, conversations, campuses and facilities.  This ontological reality has in many ways been the motivation for the emergence of what has been referred to as “socioemotional learning” (SEL), “trauma-informed” pedagogies and restorative justice approaches to addressing tensions and issues with learning (e.g., “basic needs” like food, shelter, and mental security not being met; Kaba & Hassan, 2018). Despite studies increasingly substantiating the effectiveness of acknowledging and meeting learners where they are epistemically, ontologically, and materially “at,” this work has been framed as “soft,” “extra,” or otherwise not necessary. As we interpreted our vignettes, it became clear that they substantiated and added to this important conversation.

In the case of the carceral classroom, Julissa had to not only hold on to what pressures might have motivated a student to plagiarize, but consider how a punitive approach would have possibly jeopardized the existence of the learning space itself. The moment became an invitation to consider what shift in pedagogy might have been needed which would have supported the student to not feel the need to plagiarize. Likewise, in the case of the learning space in Birmingham, Casey had made the decision to engage in a learning activity that was foregrounded by vulnerability, with an unevidenced, misplaced assumption about the dynamics of a learning community he did not have relations with. To partake in such an activity requires the setting of community norms and agreements, regardless of space and time constraints. Moreover, he had not given space to process what was more than likely to impact how young people were going to show up. That is, he was engaging with young people racialized as Black after they had spent time in a spiritual, physical, and historical space of deep anti-Blackness, without a homeplace or home community to ground their processing. In either case, there were not intentional and established structures and processes to consider what learners were bringing into the space. And the “messiness” of each case was only exacerbated by the amount of carceral (i.e., Julissa’s students do not face the same pressures outside of prisons) and/or uncontrollable environmental circumstances (i.e., Casey usually has a relationship with the space and the young people who he is going to be working with) that actively pressed against our work; versus environments where we had much more established pedagogical methods and contextual understandings. However, it is important to acknowledge that staying principled means being able to adapt and find ways to hold what learners are bringing, regardless of the space and time constraints and difficulties. 

More broadly, we need to proactively create space in every learning environment across the carceral continuum for educators to understand and interpret where someone might be coming from and what they may be dealing with. Learning is a social process that is not divorced from the larger societies where we educate, and principled education means providing students with the space to name where they are and what they are bringing, and in turn, what they need. What learners need should not be a passing consideration, but a deliberate approach to building a liberatory learning community. In this way, from Palestine to the lands holding the Palestinian diaspora in 2026, enacting ath-thawābit (“الثوابت”) means that we cannot let go of how the escalation of genocide in 2023 has broadly impacted and should inform any pedagogical work we do alongside and with Palestinian communities. We must hold each other, above and beyond whatever we may want to prioritize as educators, no matter how important those lessons may seem.

3) Refusing Disposability and Embracing Care

Schools and prisons ascribe to a politics of disposability, often choosing to remove and throw people away rather than do the difficult work of addressing the underlying issues that contribute to “student misconduct” and “law violating” behaviors more broadly (Love, 2019; Warren & Coles, 2020). Influenced by the 1980s “get-tough” on crime era and the corresponding laws and policies that were passed, beginning in the 1990s, schools started adopting zero tolerance policies and practices which led to the rapid removal of hundreds of thousands of students from schools all across the country–a majority of whom were low-income Black, Latinx, Native, and disabled students (Annamma, 2017; Vaught, Brayboy & Chin, 2021; Triplett, Allen, & Lewis, 2014) attending high poverty, under-resourced schools. Schools became a complicit arm of the state, extending the carceral reach into already vulnerable schools and communities, in many cases, employing surveillance technologies, law enforcement, and exclusionary discipline practices (Muñiz, 2021) to the detriment of student learning. These carceral logics continue to permeate students’ teaching and learning experiences in public schools, such that a politics of disposability have become the norm. Yet, educators can refuse disposability and instead embrace care as the principal approach to working with students and young people, even in instances that could warrant institutional intervention. Thus, among ath-thawābit (الثوابت), the constants, there is a principle we must hold: no human is disposable.

As we saw with the first vignette, Julissa made the choice to not involve the university or the prison based educational program knowing that the consequences of doing so could negatively impact the student as well as other students and the program itself. At one level, if reported, the student risked failing the course, being removed from the college program, and potentially some type of institutional punishment on behalf of the prison (e.g., write up, loss of privileges, and potentially administrative segregation). Each of these actions reinforce a logic of disposability which signal to the student that their learning and humanity are unimportant. Instead, Julissa and the student worked together to find an alternative path forward that did not require institutional involvement, removal, or punishment. More importantly, by centering care in the interaction with the student, Julissa gained a better understanding of what the student was navigating and the impact it had on her socioemotional well-being and ability to complete the final. Students who are incarcerated, unlike “traditional” students, are often deprived of second chances and not allowed to make mistakes. Yet, if we are to extend the category of “student” to include people who are incarcerated then we cannot be selective about what parts we make available to them. Much in the same way that a teacher can anticipate that all students at some point might make a mistake, educators in carceral spaces should also extend grace and compassion to their students inside. 

The second vignette also illustrates how community-based educators can and should refuse disposability and center an ethic of care. While the context of the second narrative was different in that the incident took place in a community space, how the educators responded, including Casey, demonstrate a level of care and trust in the young people themselves and their ability to navigate disagreement. The educators were not overly reactive to the incident, nor did they try to preemptively interfere even as the disagreement got heated. While one could ask, why didn’t the educators jump in sooner or try to diffuse the situation earlier, the reality is that sometimes doing so can land as though you’re trying to silence rather than mediate which would have gone counter to the goals of the organization and intended experience. Instead, the educators attended to each of the young people individually and gave each person the attention and care they needed afterwards. Had the educators tried to address the situation with both young people present, the youth might not have received the affirmation and care needed to move through the discomfort of the situation. At another level, the educators also did not try to force the workshop thereafter and were responsive to what the whole group needed following the argument, which was to break for the day altogether. In doing so, the educators refused the impulse to carry forward with “what needed to happen” versus “what should happen,” signaling that their collective well-being was more important than the workshop itself. As such the learning environments we create, regardless of where they take place, should refuse disposability and in turn center collective care toward learning, liberation, and relationships. 

4) Learning How to Disagree in the Interest of Our Collective Liberation

While scholars, educators and intellectuals are often very familiar with critique, especially of peoples, ideas, and systems that we construct or otherwise declare as “problematic,” we often have much less literacy in how to hold ourselves together in the face of sometimes incommensurable priorities and projects (Liu & Shange, 2018), and outright disagreement. 

As the two young people confronted each other during Casey’s Hip Hop workshop, they each held on to their own respective justice projects, which at first appearance could be construed as mutually exclusive. Che was seeking to consider how his embodiment was being acknowledged within a Hip Hop culture that he grew up within, which has long included Latinx contributions. Fannie was putting front and center how Hip Hop is an African diasporic culture that has too often been commodified and taken up in ways that do not acknowledge anti-Blackness. Rather than giving each other the space to hold on to where they were coming from, there was a collapsing of conversation, even as they had struggled together and were invested in each other’s lives and justice work within the same organization. And in many ways, this did not need to move into a situation where Fannie felt the need to walk out. It was the pedagogical responsibility of Casey to have considered the vulnerable space that the young people had entered, and to have established a pedagogical structure to hold disagreement that did not purely lean on himself, and the adults as “mediators” or “facilitators.” There needed to have been an established set of agreements, co-created by those in the space, which would have pre-emptively anticipated, prepared, and enabled generative conversations to take place. his conversation needed to give space for the young people present to be able to communicate whether they were even in the space to hold disagreement–and if they weren’t, they needed the space to refuse and/or postpone the workshop.

Likewise, in an extremely volatile carceral space, Julissa ran into high-stakes disagreement with institutional rules, ethics and norms themselves. While it is easy to say that we would and know how to engage in the words of John Lewis, “good trouble,” the reality is much more difficult in real time (Brehony & Hamdi, 2024). Even this critical review is not without risk, as Julissa shares that she chose not to follow decontextualized institutional expectations, which were designed out of what might seem like a value that is seemingly easy to always agree with and follow: don’t cheat or plagiarize, and that there should be the same, “equal” consequences for each person, regardless of sociohistorical context and relations. But as noted by so many scholars of justice, “equality” is not the ethical grounding that we are told it is from European-descended narratives (Wynter, 2003). In the case of lying and cheating, this is more flagrant than ever before–as we have someone occupying the highest office of the U.S. nation-state who is well-documented for knowingly stealing and cheating existing institutional structure to get ahead. And he not only continues to face little to no consequences for these acts, but in the context of 2025, is actively punishing anyone who attempts to hold him to his word. As so many anti-capitalist, anti-colonial scholars have noted in regards to “violence,” that the bourgeoisie holds a monopoly on violence, this can also be said in regards to theft and cheating. In many ways, theft is necessary and is defining of the colonial system of racial capitalism that requires stolen labor from the working classes to dishonestly create what it names as “profit” (Fanon, 1963; Brehony & Hamdi, 2024). 

All of this foregrounding does not serve as an “excuse” for the student who Julissa finds to be plagiarizing, but rather it offers necessary sociohistorical and material context for taking the harder path. Julissa centers the learning that she is aiming to offer and considers that the final writing assignment is meant to offer herself and a student an opportunity to apply, share, and get what is needed to elevate and improve as a thinker. From a restorative justice perspective (Kaba & Hassan, 2019), institutional mandates would not have accomplished this goal (i.e., expelling the student from not only the class, but any access to education–and perhaps even with her peers), but having the conversation in the corner of the gymnasium did. And Julissa’s decision would reap what was hoped for by Julissa and the student. The student would go on to complete a satisfactory and fulfilling writing assignment that would honor and push forward her thinking. But even as Julissa would further consider, this unfinished work also meant that she would need to create additional classroom structures and processes within the carceral space that could guide students to see that plagiarism was not needed–that it was their learning that was paramount. 

Moreover, applying anti-colonial principles also means asking the audience here to work with us to get rid of prisons that created these very constraints; as well as the larger colonial system of racial capitalism that unfortunately continues to axiologically orient us to protect lying, theft and cheating from certain classes (e.g., “citizens” of the U.S. nation-state and settler states continue to unethically, varyingly be able to buy and rent land stolen from Indigenous communities, with the protection of the police and military; Tuck & Yang, 2012), and not others (e.g., when you become a part of the lumpen-proletariat, every legal violation is enforced in ways that not even the larger proletariat has to grapple with; Robinson, 2000). Alike to the Palestinian Thawabit, “the red lines demarcating what can not be compromised in the struggle for Palestinian liberation,” ath-thawābit that ground our work should be aligned with our deepest anti-colonial and abolitionist aspirations; not the too often ahistorical, apolitical moral and ethical principles that often come to center the desires of those who are enacting oppression (e.g., all violence enacted by all people across time is morally equivalent; Brehony & Hamdi, 2024). To seek to act on our deepest, most just aspirations and commitments, is to apprehend the last words of Kanafani’s (1969) character, Said, as he reconsiders his son’s resolve to join the fidayeen, “I pray that Khalid will have gone–while we were away!”

 

Conclusion: Committing to Collective Futures

Across both of these narratives, it is important to acknowledge that the levels and varying degrees that each person was confronting structural violence in their lives could not be measured against each other, and was in many ways, incommensurable (Tuck and Yang, 2012; Liu & Shange, 2018). But with an ethics of justice we are left with not the need to follow colonial logics that tell us to find ways to rank each other, and what is “right,” but rather to hold on to the knowledge that we are not going to be able to genuinely get free without each other–which might, and often does, mean disagreeing with a colonial order that disproportionately applies and enacts sets of morals and ethics. If we are seeking to be principled, aspiring to understand what it means to actually enact ath–thawābit (الثوابت), we are left with finding what lets us more deeply grasp at the roots of our disagreements, what Tuck and Yang (2018) refer to as the “inner angles” between us:

We have written before (Tuck & Yang, 2012) about an ethic of incommensurability as an alternate mode of holding and imagining solidarity. Rather than the goal of political unity with commonly shared objectives, an ethic of incommensurability acknowledges that we can collaborate for a time together even while anticipating that our pathways toward enacting liberation will diverge. Incommensurability means that we cannot judge each other’s justice projects by the same standard, but we can come to understand the gap between our viewpoints, and thus work together in contingent collaboration. (p. 1-2)

Finding our “inner angles” does not mean abandoning our principles, but on the contrary, it means holding on to our misunderstandings, assumptions and giving each other the benefit of the doubt when we earnestly see each other trying; doing what we can to press towards interdependent relations that honor our consensual, mutual responsibilities to each other (Tuck & Yang, 2018; Wong, 2019). And this means letting go of our racial capitalist expectations for our respective embodied perfection, and accepting our mistakes–sometimes for quite some time–without letting each other “get away” with it. It means not giving up our “emotions,” but honoring them where we’re at, and accordingly giving each other the space to find ways to come back when we are not yet ready to have the conversations that we need to have. And as we are reminded by Kanafani and so many others, this will not always lead to the romanticized dialogic resolution of contradictions to a singularly understood “right” position for each other (Brehony & Hamdi, 2024). Rather, it all too often means charting pathways that might diverge, with a commitment that we will do our best to come back to each other; because there really is no other way to the collective futures (Paris, Alim & Wong, 2026) that all of our children and more-than-human relations deserve.

Notes

1. (title) Most commonly translated from Arabic as “A World Not Ours,” which is the title of the Ghassan Kanafani’s collection of short stories published in 1965.
2. We enter into conversation with the call of this special issue to consider what it means to enact ath-thawābit (الثوابت), translated as the “constants.” That is, “the red lines demarcating what cannot be compromised in the struggle for Palestinian liberation” (Youssef & Mekleh, 2022).
3. (first section heading) Loosely translated as “moving from tongue to tongue” via Amanda Batarseh’s (2013) interpretation of Ghassan Kanafani’s Al-Adab Al-Filistīnī Al-Muqāwim Taḥt Al-Iḥtilāl: 1948-1968 (Palestinian Resistance Literature Under the Occupation: 1948-1968).
4. (Casey’s Vignette) Honoring the title of Ghassan Kanafani’s (1966/2023) novella (ما تبقّى لكم / All That’s Left to You), which shares a like-minded message as the reading audience is invited to follow 24 hours in the lives of Hamid and Maryam, “which refuses to either turn away from the brutal reality of colonial occupation or resign the oppressed to the violence of structural determinism” (Noakes, 2024).
5. Pseudonym to protect the identity of my friend and the community members he travelled with.

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