Emina
I am a scholar-activist working at the intersections of migration, globalization, and structural oppression. My work is grounded in transnational feminism and critical pedagogy. I utilize qualitative research methods such as collective memory writing, ethnography, and narrative inquiry. I am currently obtaining my PhD in critical education and human rights at the University of Minnesota. The piece I will be presenting at the conference with Denise was an important experimental dive into personal aspects of researcher’s positionality on one hand, and closer work with the collective memory writing method, on the other hand, that I shall utilize in my primary scholarship on experiences of refugee students in education.
Denise
Denise Hanh Huynh is an artist, educator, and scholar. Her work centers on regaining agency and healing trauma through anti-oppressive education. She is pursuing a PhD in Education at the University of Minnesota focused in art, literacy, culture and teaching. Denise is interested in humanizing methodologies through collective memory, arts based research, and other forms of qualitative inquiries.
Denise & Emina’s Contribution at the Symposium
I am the bird not the ornithologist. A poetic inquiry into queerness, transnational feminism & collective memory
We are two friends, scholars, and women determined to dismantle and dissolve hetero-patriarchal schemes invading our everyday lives, our sexualities, and our academic and personal experiences. We came in to write this paper from two locations: one is the location of our complex individual experiences with queerness; the second location is the one of our
friendship which has been nourished through dialogical sharing of our encounters with love and sexuality. Through this context, we challenge fixed understanding of sexuality, heteropatriarchy and white supremacy, while investing ourselves in articulating knowledge that emerges from sharing and documenting our memories.
This paper shares our current interpretation of Haug’s work by utilizing her method of analysis with shared personal stories of our classmates and offers our humble contribution in understanding and complicating this method. Working with Haug’s method of collective memory writing, our aim is to bring forward questions and thoughts that might push the two
of us, hopefully our collective, and wider circuits in further utilization of critical method(s) of memory writing as a possible tool for dismantling heteropatriarchy and white supremacy.
Within this text, we theorize with transnational feminist theory, particularly using voices of Gloria Anzaldúa, Gayatri Spivak, Audre Lorde, bell hooks and Ella Shohat. We also draw upon the works of poets such as Mary Ruefle, June Jordan, and Adrienne Rich, among others. In this paper, we offer our thoughts in three interconnected parts: 1) We explore our
collective class question of how queerness is constructed, 2) We provide critique and complicate the method of collective memory writing, and 3) We think through the questions moving us forward as a research(ers) collective. Ultimately, we are interested in connections between memory, queerness, heteropatriarchy, and the ways our bodies’ memories speak the
stories of oppression.