Back at the Kitchen Table: querying feminist support in the academy

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• academia
• critical race methodology
• counter-storytelling
• praxis

Introduction

This intervention is a record of a praxis of conversing, restoring, and repairing what has been ongoing between us – four early-career women of color (WOC) academics – for several years. Necessarily reductive, this praxis could be called a “conversation,” standing in for engagements both regular and flexible, transnational, on screens, over meals, an emotional space, an intellectual space, a site of support and resistance. We have called these conversations our “Kitchen Table” in gratitude to the scholars Tami Navarro, Bianca Williams, and Attiya Ahmad (2013), whose pioneering account of the experiences of early-career WOC anthropologists motivated our own collaborations. Navarro, Williams, and Ahmad (2013, 448) themselves use the terminology of “sitting at the Kitchen Table” in deference to the “legacy of the women of Kitchen Table Press, path-clearing feminists who challenged the often disparaging and dismissive representations of WOC in academia and mainstream media, as well as insisted on intersectionality and inclusivity.” Put differently, this intervention and our very existence as a collective is due to the labor done by WOC academics before us (Gutiérrez y Muhs et al. 2012; Haddix et al. 2016; Lyiscott et al. 2021; Niemann, Gutiérrez y Muhs, and González 2020).

The Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press was particularly groundbreaking as an initiative whose founders prioritized the voices of WOC. As Barbara Smith (1989) explained, the name also incorporated a place that connotated home, a space historically for women. The kitchen table metaphorically represents an elevated place, where we are seated and gather to be nourished. Like the kitchen table, where generations come together (elders, kin, and young people), our Kitchen Table has also encompassed this aspect of women at various stages of their academic journey. Just as there would be respect and kinship at our homes’ kitchen tables, the same is true for this Kitchen Table praxis.

This article, like many others that have come before it, makes visible and legible the often unseen ways of relating, building community, and resisting that have helped countless marginalized people to survive in academic spaces. The reason for translating this praxis beyond our own space is to draw on the bravery of those who have preceded us and to promote a visible and accessible space of solidarity and representation for WOC across universities, geographies, and temporalities. As with the generosity of most scholars who have embarked on this kind of intervention (see for example Navarro, Williams, and Ahmad 2013; Niemann, Gutiérrez y Muhs, and González 2020), we aim to show intergenerational care, to offer something to those future WOC academics who will join “what may be the last bastion of elitism and sanctioned racism” (Gutiérrez y Muhs et al. 2012, 3). As Navarro, Williams, and Ahmad (2013, 443) note, the effects of this include “overwork, lack of respect, underrepresentation, difficulty obtaining tenure, job-triggered mental and physical complications, and overall unhappiness – [which] have long been documented by scholars.” What we hope for ourselves and the next generation of WOC academics is not merely survival, but also – radically – security, representation, respect, well-being, and happiness.

Sharing our stories and feelings with other WOC in a safe and private setting serves emotional, relational, and professional functions. The Kitchen Table is a “cross-cultural space” in which colleagues, friends, and mentors recount incidents of systemic racism and sexism, centering rather than burying integral discussions about non-normative experiences in the academy (Navarro, Williams, and Ahmad 2013, 448). Intentionally carving out this safe space and actively supporting one another, we impactfully mitigate some of the strains, violences, and silences noted above. It also gives us a chance to communally reflect on and unpack our ever-shifting and blurred positionalities and their relationship to our research and workplaces (Kohl and McCutcheon 2015).

The Kitchen Table not only has therapeutic, alliance-building, and community-building effects but also a knowledge creation function. In the tradition of critical race methodologies, we assert that the experiential knowledge of people of color is a crucial and epistemically valid way of understanding intersectional subordinations (Solórzano and Yosso 2002). It is also an effective means of comprehending the structures of universities and the power dynamics generated by them (Samuels-Wortley 2022). Critical race scholars tell us that WOC are the “canaries in the academic coal mine” (Niemann 2012, 446; see also Guinier and Torres 2003) and highlight the toxicities in academic spaces for marginalized groups. In her seminal work on universities, Sara Ahmed (2021, 310) interrogates the multifaceted role of complaint:

You might be chipping away at the old block, those structures, that wall, that barrier, and all you seem to have done is scratched the surface. That scratching is learning. We learn how structures stay up from how they are justified … We cannot always perceive the weakening of structures until they collapse. When structures begin to collapse, the impact of past efforts becomes tangible. Complaints can participate in the weakening of structures without that impact being tangible. Impact is a slow inheritance.

Joining together in this project of transforming universities into workplaces where WOC can not only survive but also experience security, representation, respect, well-being, and happiness is likely a long game. However, as we collaborate across time and space – in scholarly endeavors, praxis, activism, resistance, and community – we learn about the structures that attempt to determine our experiences, and perhaps about the resilience of our own joy.

Over the course of our Kitchen Table meetings, we have come to the realization that we have all encountered (self-proclaimed) feminists who have either exploited our labor, downplayed the importance of our research, or acted as gatekeepers to opportunities, often relating it to “fit.” In this article, we use our own stories to illustrate how mainstream feminism within the academy often excludes our unique experiences and rarely makes room for our struggles. We argue that this is why we have had to carve out a space for ourselves by creating our Kitchen Table, inspired by other disenfranchised WOC in academia. By sharing our experiences in a conversation-style format, we see that our true, authentic selves are not wholeheartedly accepted by other feminists and the academy, more broadly. In response, we must find alternative forums such as our Kitchen Table to feel that our marginalized identities are truly supported, resourced, and protected. This insincere – and sometimes predatory and damaging – support from other feminists impedes true and nuanced epistemologies, even amid the broader push for feminist perspectives in higher education.

The article proceeds as follows. First, we outline our methodology, which includes a description of our positionality and our modes of data collection and analysis. The next section offers the results of our Kitchen Table meetings, providing our first-hand accounts and dialogue as powerful means by which to communicate how our experiences of race have been impacted and negated by feminists. Finally, in the conclusion, we ask whether academia further reinforces harms for us as WOC scholars, and suggest that our recent experiences, as early-career researchers, demonstrate that little has changed from the experiences of the original Kitchen Table authors. We end with a call for action to support spaces such as our Kitchen Table as a means to feasibly and effectively assist WOC academics as we navigate the trials and tribulations of being racial minorities in the academy and society at large.

Methodology

Positionality

When we began to have our Kitchen Table meetings, we were all early-career academics. Now we occupy diverse academic roles, including tenure-track, contracted, and PhD positions across four different universities and two continents. We all live and work in settler colonial countries. As WOC, our positionality in this context is marked by the intersections of gender and race. Three of us are also mothers, so our experiences are shaped by caregiving responsibilities and broader structures of power related to motherhood (Ward and Wolf-Wendel 2012). We represent diverse racialized identities, and often our experiences of race are different based on these distinct histories and contexts. The histories of these identities are informed by many of the themes emerging from this study, including colonization and racial capitalism.

The Kitchen Table and critical race counter-storytelling

Our Kitchen Table meetings have taken place since 2022 and are an ongoing practice. Meetings mostly take place over Zoom¹ with all four members present. Each meeting focuses on a different theme or dilemma such as fieldwork, classrooms, administration, and work/life balance, but all meetings are rooted in first-hand experiences of race. In order to preserve organic dialogue, meetings are open ended and do not ask a set of questions, nor do we enforce time limits on members’ responses. Over the course of an hour and a half, each member of the Kitchen Table shares a single experience related to the theme, which is then followed by comments, questions, and words of affirmation from the other members. We move beyond the notion that we, as WOC, are simply victimized and have no agency by highlighting strategies for survival, moments of growth, reclamations of our power, and our inspirations.

Figure 1. Picture of the meal from one of our Kitchen Table meetings in August 2022.

Kitchen Table meetings are recorded on Zoom and transcribed by one of the members; the dialogue in the Zoom chat is also saved. All transcripts, recordings, and files are saved in a secure, shared folder that can only be accessed by the four Kitchen Table members. The four main themes that structure our results – security, representation, respect, and well-being – were generated by subjecting each story to the six phases of thematic analysis outlined by Lorelli S. Nowell et al. (2017): getting deeply familiarized with the data, producing initial codes, looking for themes, reviewing and triangulating themes, defining and labeling themes, and reporting on the reasons behind the choices.

Critical race methodologies, as described by Daniel G. Solórzano and Tara J. Yosso (2002, 24), center race, racism, and its intersections with other axis of marginality (such as gender) “in all aspects of the research process”; use unconventional strategies to unpack inequities for those at the margins; suggest novel means of transforming hierarchies of power; and specifically focus on the experiences of racialized groups. We employ a specific critical race methodology, counter-storytelling, which foregrounds the stories of those at the margins and draws attention to their often ignored experiences, thereby revealing the complexities associated with navigating a society structured by racial hierarchies. Compared to more common methods such as interviews and surveys, counter-storytelling is an unconventional research practice that generates robust understandings of socio-political issues while simultaneously resisting racial subordination through the act of simply organizing, supporting one another, and naming oppression.

As part of this methodological approach, our dialogue during Kitchen Table meetings serves as both the data and analysis for this article. Put another way, our personal stories and co-created understandings are the means by which we critically unpack how feminists have excluded, silenced, and not supported us as WOC. We intentionally chose to let our stories speak for themselves by reproducing our dialogue with verbatim quotes rather than by summarizing our discussions. As such, we hope to preserve the power of our words, our community-facilitated analyses, and our on-the-spot reflections. For these reasons, we avoided qualitative data analysis software so that it did not skew our analysis or shape the lens through which we viewed our dialogue (Zhao et al. 2016).

Contributors were asked to create a reflective journal, which served purposes beyond simply providing an audit trail of decisions made for trustworthy qualitative research (Ortlipp 2008). The journals were instrumental in helping us to prepare for our meetings, ensuring that we used our meeting time effectively. They gave us a forum to reflect on and record our feelings, thoughts, and values. The journals also enabled us to keep track of experiences and reflections as they popped up randomly in real time so that we captured a wide range of experiences and could select those that were most salient to the meeting topic. Over a two-month window, we used the journals to recount our memories of how feminists have personally let us down and expand on how these experiences reflect power as it relates to race.

The stories that we chose to discuss in this article are not exceptional and highly publicized accounts of feminist disavowal of race and allyship, though these instances are increasingly well known. Instead, we made the conscious choice to center relatively mundane, everyday experiences of control, exploitation, and discourtesy. These common or everyday experiences are like drops in the ocean, but big waves are sometimes made from these seemingly isolated drops. Inspired by science and technology studies (STS) approaches to ontology, probing the mundane

not only serves to display the multiplicity of realities hidden under everyday and seemingly undisputed signifiers – it is also … a method of drawing attention to “a penumbra of not quite realised realities,” the failed, unseen or not-yet-real possibilities hinted at by ordering practices. (Woolgar and Lezaun 2013, 323)

These everyday experiences are analytically valuable given that they are more relatable to other people of color, and they are taken for granted and are less visible. Power can sometimes operate more insidiously in these more common spaces, and it is in the mundane that our racial identities are entrenched and most commonly acted on and through.

Results

The call put out by the Conversations Editors of the International Feminist Journal of Politics, to which this article is a response, was specifically for submissions concerning the harms that feminist academics and activists do to one another. While our accounts touch on these traumas and wrongdoings, they also reflect the power hierarchies of broader institutions and systems within which feminists are embedded. The stories shared here are categorized based on four main themes: security, representation, respect, and well-being. Our experiences and conversations illustrate well-known concepts such as racial capital (Leong 2013), predatory inclusion (Taylor 2019), and coercive control (Stark and Hester 2019). Racial capitalism, in this case, is how we and our identities are exploited, the benefits of which accrue to those who wield race as a commodity. Predatory inclusion comes about when people or groups are included in projects or are provided with opportunities in an unequal way that (often covertly) undermines autonomy, adds burdens, and fortifies power discrepancies and transnational power. Coercive control is experienced in the form of psychological control that exposes an individual to exclusion, retribution, and intimidation in order to enact the perpetrator’s will. All three also reify race and racial hierarchies.

The main experience shared by each Kitchen Table member is in a shaded box, and members’ responses to these experiences immediately follow and are flagged as reflections.

Security: stealing my research and my ideas

Being racialized women, quite often we’re not heard or believed or seen. So, I think that feminism quite often is used to draw us in, but is often used as well to exclude us. Probably my most egregious example is a white woman researcher, in essence, stealing my research and my ideas, and no one believing me. But when I had a moment to sit and think about that, I realized that that might have been the big “Aha!” moment for me to see that this whole idea of support was used to weaponize and isolate me.

We as WOC come into academia and we’re not the norm. So, we are going to gravitate towards individuals who seemingly show support and say:

You are amazing.

You’re great.

I’m here for you.

I’m going to look out for you.

I’m going to be here to support you.

So, you gravitate towards that person or that energy. And quite often it’s wrapped in “We as women have to support one another.” And I realized that, throughout this process, it’s a way to start isolating you. It’s a form of isolation because you start feeling like you can’t trust anyone else but this person who is feeding you everything you want to hear. In that process, you start feeling – I believe, and I’ll say for myself – like you have to uphold that idea of what that person has painted of you, of what you think they see of you. So, I will do what I can in order to make sure this person continues to like me, make sure this person thinks that I’m worthy, make sure this person thinks that I belong here. You will do everything in your power to do what they say. You’ll follow every word, all the advice that they give you. And I think it’s through that process that I started realizing that it was their tactic, to keep me away from others. It started becoming:

You should not be talking to this person.

You should be talking to this person.

You should be doing this.

And, again, because you think that this is a person who’s there to support you, you’re going to do everything to follow what this individual says.

It really has made me realize that it is a form of deep isolation [as you start] to pick at your sense of self. And being a racialized person, when you do try to express to others that there are issues when it’s a [person in a] position of power, when it’s somebody who is more senior than you or somebody who is more well known than you, when you’re looking at a professor and a student, who are they going to believe? So, that is, again, this process of isolation and a sense of being ostracized.

I think the whole point that I’m trying to say is I find white feminism very dangerous to us because it doesn’t represent us. When we do try to have a voice within this space, it is quickly excluded and not seen as worthy. I think that white feminism is used as a way to draw us in, but it also does a great job of excluding us and pushing us out.

I don’t think I’m capturing this the way that I want to. Because I don’t know if I’m supposed to be giving a specific incident. I don’t think I’m putting it well, the way that I should.

Reflections on the complexity of trauma

I understand why it’s hard to talk about this and why you can’t give specific examples. I just really want to uphold you and highlight the fact that our lives would be a lot easier if it was a single instance. It’s every day – that’s the problem. That’s the complexity of this trauma. It’s like we can’t isolate it because it’s a huge ongoing problem. It’s a relational dynamic. It’s everywhere. I think that’s why you can’t give specific incidents. You could give a thousand.

Reflections on the weaponization of feminism

I just couldn’t help but think that what happened to you was really related to weaponization. White feminism is this weapon that’s being used to hurt others and protect a few. It was being used to protect this white woman and actually the institution that was protecting her. And there’s legitimacy behind the person who’s wielding white feminism as a weapon.

Reflections on racial capital as a system

It’s not one isolated incident. It is so, so much larger and systemic. I’ve read and seen lately about a lot of the remaining Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion positions² and the plights of racialized students and questions of race. Post-2020 and Black Lives Matter, the people remaining in the top positions are, by and large, white people. They set up these systems when it was the “it” time to do so. And so, again, using bodies and people in these places to ultimately continue to just reproduce and re-amplify white feminism and white supremacy.

Representation: closed workshops

I can’t shake this feeling that my research is constantly Othered. Particularly the kind of approaches I take, which look at racial inequality to explain the current relationships that are occurring in the world and current power dynamics. Almost like when you put your kid’s ugly art on the fridge, it’s not about the quality of the art. Do you know what I mean? I can’t shake that. It’s like Person X’s research talks about the actual state of the world, whereas mine is like a nice artistic representation, lacking any connection to the real world or real people. It disavows the fact that these epistemologies actually represent a large proportion of the world. I’m never able to break through this dominant space of white research being the factory settings that our research has to survive and navigate.

One case that made me really feel like that – and not only me, but a lot of my colleagues, which was a crap experience – was after the murder of George Floyd and the prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement. There was this strange response by a lot of people in the academy engaging with race for probably the first time. And it wasn’t a very informed engagement. Various colleagues of color and I who were working on related issues were invited to consult on how we can further the research intersection of race and inequality. Given that this research problem disproportionately affects the Global South, that’s quite an important question to engage with. A lot of our time was burnt in these consultations about what we could do in this “moment” and how we can further this research agenda.

And then there was silence.

We heard back from the organizers that the things we were discussing were “too much.” Instead, what they could offer us was a closed workshop where it was just us researchers of color discussing our own research – not for the general consumption of the university at large.

In that case, it was like “You’re too dangerous,” which I’m sure we’ve all heard a lot. It’s like our own voice, our own experiences or the experiences of so much of the world, and in some cases, the entirety of our participants, are dangerous. Or, in some cases, it’s like your work is weird. It’s all these different ways of excluding what should be a very central perspective.

Reflections on minimizing race research

What that often speaks to is that, again, our voices are so easily excluded. It’s like they throw us a bone: “OK, yeah, we want to know your ideas, we want to hear what you have to say.” And then when we do that, they put the brakes on it, saying: “No, no, no, no, no, but not like that.” In order for us to truly understand our foundations collectively, the foundations of our society, it’s rooted in understanding that that has a lot to do with race and racism. And it’s disgusting that this area continues to be seen as a niche in its own space, that “those folks need to have isolated discussions on their own.”

Reflections on conditional inclusion

Ultimately, there’s control of our research and the narrative. They’ll ultimately prioritize the fragility or comfort of the powers that benefit from that system. And so, even when you’re invited, it’s on their terms, which means that, at the end of the day, we’re only ever going to get as far as those powers and systems will allow. Because as soon as I cross the threshold of what they deem “acceptable,” I’m not going to be afforded the same opportunities and connections.

Reflections on conditional inclusion as trauma

It’s not enough to just be invited to a table because the table in itself can be ostracizing and bring up all these ideas again of racial trauma. They’re like “Oh, you’re included, and yes, you may eat our food at our table.” So, we’re seated at the table, but we’re grouped at the very end, or we’re separated like a kids’ table. Our Kitchen Table is much different. It’s an aunties’ table that’s comforting and it’s filled with aunties making sure that you’re constantly nourished, fed, supported, loved, and equal.

Respect: policed around how many hours I was working

I was shocked because I thought these WOC were my allies and protectors, but ultimately I did not feel safe, supported, and valued by them. I was shocked because this is where I thought I was going to get that support. But it’s complex and why it feels unresolved is because I don’t know what they’re contending with as Black women in the institution. This is why I don’t want to make it personal or ever call them out (i.e., confront them).

For example, I was being policed around how many hours I was working. I remember I was always full of anxiety when I’d meet my supervisor because she’d be like “And how many hours are you working?” And saying “Oh, you’re only taking two courses. I’m worried you’re not” – I still remember this phrase – “I’m worried you’re not challenging yourself academically enough.” And I remember just thinking “What standard are you using?”

I remember telling her that it was my first year with the PhD and first-year students go through a lot. So, I was personally going through a lot. I remember she made a joke about “Oh, yeah, a lot of people hand in their thesis with divorce papers” and just kind of laughed. I would always just feel like they’re not looking out for me, they’re not supporting me.

When I went on maternity leave after, there was a publishing opportunity that was 100 percent related to my thesis. So, I wish she would have just told me or contacted me. Especially because I expected she would understand there were limited opportunities available to me due to not only being a woman of color but also being a parent with caregiving responsibilities. The opportunity was still available when I came back from maternity leave, so I straight up asked about contributing. And she just said “No” in polite words. She was like “It kind of started when you weren’t here and, you know, there’ll be other opportunities for you in the future.”

Reflections on solidarity and resource scarcity

I think of that saying – I don’t know if you’ve heard it? It’s that “not all skin folk are kin folk.” And it is the idea that we should feel a sense of solidarity with other racialized women, but at times will not. I think it’s even more painful when you don’t receive it from someone who you truly expect will share that space and that pain and that trauma with you, and therefore will support one another to uplift one another. I certainly am not supporting how they made you feel and what they did to not support you. I think what you said in terms of you don’t know what they went through resonates because there’s so few opportunities for these women that they may be holding on to something and not realizing that they’re doing it. This space is so small, because the resources that are unfortunately given to us are – again, we’re being thrown bones. So, we’re trying to get the very little that is being given to us. And then in the same breath, they are turning around and traumatizing others who they should be supporting.

Reflections on intergenerational trauma within academia

Sometimes it’s survival mechanisms that you think you’re passing on. It reminds me of really bad advice that I’ve given to junior scholars of color and colleagues of color who have reached out. They were both really terrible pieces of advice that were relatively dehumanizing, but that was how I was taught to survive. The advice was to not advocate for oneself in the face of institutionalized racism, to make oneself small to avoid further racialized aggression. I feel like this undermines the bravery we can feel collectively. And I don’t think it’s even about success. I think it’s about survival. And I think that that’s what is going to be really important labor in maintaining our table. Working out the ways that we’ve been taught to survive and trying to deconstruct that a little bit.

Reflections on the cost of support

Support comes with a cost. For us to carve out the space for our Kitchen Table, we are having to give up things. We are having to cut into our downtime, into our family time, time that we can spend on working, time that can be spent on doing all this stuff. There’s a cost for this. And quite frankly, if you are a feminist and you want to support racial diversity and equality, you need to give us the space to support one another and to do so within working hours. Or to count that support as a deliverable. That way, other WOC may feel more inclined to sincerely support and protect one another.

Well-being: overspending my sunshine

I’m upset with having to overspend my sunshine. As everyone said, it’s not one singular experience, but a series of experiences that have really been concretized but also made more complex by other feminists. So, I’ll give two examples.

For instance, I had a supervisor at my previous university who was helping me get access to my research site. She would say things and she also was a self-proclaimed protector of women. The majority of the students that she was supervising were women and she prided herself on protecting other women because she herself did not have that protection.

And so, she would say “OK, how are we going to facilitate your access? You need to get in with the boys.” I needed to dress like a boy. I needed to wear Dr Martens, and actually, that was the year I got my first pair of Dr Martens because I needed to take away some of my femininity and kind of blend in. Given that Dr Martens are known as being part of “lesbian dress,”³ there was an underlying tone encouraging me to weaponize my queerness. Passing as both a straight woman and a more masculinized queer woman was useful in the sector I sought access to because the sector is renowned for being hyper-masculine, violent, and dominated by men. So, there was an underlying homophobia and queerphobia in what she was telling me.

As part of this weaponized queerness, I needed to put up with the gross banter, the locker room talk – you need to put up with it. And I needed to pride myself on being able to fit in because she herself prided herself. She was like “I’m one of the only women who have been able to get access constantly and I’m so close with the boss.” You know, I needed to amalgamate to this institution that I quite frankly wanted to query and dismantle. So, I didn’t like the fact that I would have to overspend my sunshine and go against my values in that case.

I have another example. I keep thinking “OK, how can I advance myself in academia? How can I even just survive academia?” Advice that I’ve been given supports these structures that are conducive to white people and white women, and they are more harmful for people of racial minorities. I’ve been told:

You need to work absurd hours and uphold this North American mentality of working on weekends.

You need to be incredibly mobile and move super far away from your family and friends.

You need to accept brutal pay cuts.

You need to do fieldwork and interviews with people and in places that aren’t necessarily safe for you.

You need to do all of this just to be competitive in the job market.

I get that this is advice that they’ve been passed down and that they needed to comply with just to survive. But I’m so opposed to it in so many different ways. I value their opinions and they’re right that in this current climate, you probably do need to do a lot of these things so you are employable. But I’m just not OK with it. And it’s these different types of feminism that I’m having to kind of manage. Like, OK, you’re one type of feminism. But if we’re talking about a transformative and really critical type of feminism, you would not be suggesting this. And we’d actively be working for spaces and ways to circumvent doing that. But, again, they need to survive. I need to survive. We all need to survive.

Reflections on illusions of well-being

“Overspending our sunshine” is absolutely what we do in this space. And I think as WOC, we do this even more so in a space that is so rooted in everything that feels abnormal to us. There has to be a way that this [Kitchen Table praxis] is the norm. This should become a central praxis of academia to make it better or more inclusive. To make it a space that is deserving of the accolades that it often gets. And we’re not there yet, at all. It doesn’t deserve the prestige that it gets because it is so blind to the nexus of well-being and racial inequity.

We are the examples of what it has excluded. We know what we are losing in order to be in this space. As Mahdis Azarmandi and Sara Tolbert (2022) have previously commented, well-being and other forms of self-care have been incorporated within neoliberal agendas. Institutionally individualizing this idea of well-being has material repercussions as it is enacted materially on our minds and bodies. Well-being through the Kitchen Table is something we have had to create for ourselves, because academia has failed to acknowledge and address our needs, safety, and well-being.

Reflections on resources and mandated sacrifice

I’m just reminded of the things that we’re talking about. We need the time and the space and the resources given to us by these institutions. But it just goes back to “Oh, but not like that. You want funding for this as part of your grad program? You want this to become part of the grad program? You want this to be an early-career researcher? Sure, yeah, we want you to be empowered, but not like that.” So, it’s kind of like “Oh, yeah, we meant be empowered women, but we can’t give you that. We can’t give you that time, space, resources, money to take away from all these other things that we already have.” So, yeah, I just thought of that and how it ties all these pieces that we’ve been talking about together. Sacrificing a piece of your identity or your things or your family. All these pieces. Because that’s in the confines of how they’re seeing how we need to be in academia or what we need to do.

Reflections on racial capitalism through disproportionate labor burdens

I find it so toxic that you’re being told you need to work twice as much as the average hours you’re contracted for in order to succeed. Being told you need to do this to meet a benchmark. And it’s really hard not to code that as “you’re not enough.”

Happiness: the Kitchen Table as a source of joy and courage, and community as resistance

I think we are this little beacon of hope. And what we are doing is transformative. I haven’t heard of anything like what we’re doing in the spaces that I work in. And I’m incredibly grateful to you all and the network that we’re creating in our little community. It’s just beautiful.

So much love to you all, and I always leave this re-inspired. What you said earlier about academia failing “to acknowledge and address our needs, safety, and well-being” makes this space feel even more important. It’s not just about carving out a space for us as a form of resistance, but also what we take way from this space is integral to our happiness. It fills my cup. And I want you to know, every single time I leave you all after we have had our discussions, my cup feels full. No matter how empty it was at the end of the day, my cup feels full. So, thank you.

This feels like the most important part of academia for me. Like when I look at everything that I’m doing and all the pieces, I’m like this, right here, this is the part of academia that I hope for and want and need. This is what academia should be.

The Kitchen Table is not only a support group. It is an ongoing and sustainable strategy of praxis to name, resist, and dismantle insidious forms of power, including when feminism backfires. In being able to validate our lived experiences in solidarity against the intersecting structures of power that shape our everyday, we continuously express how setting our own table and being able to “sit” at it together fuels our joy, courage, and community. In doing so, we cultivate visions of a more equitable and safe academic space.

Conclusion

Not much has changed since Navarro, Williams, and Ahmad’s (2013) piece on their Kitchen Table. From our stories and those in the media and academic research, we can see that WOC are still undervalued, undercompensated, and invisibilized. WOC still do not receive the recognition and respect that they deserve. Our contributions to work on race and racism are still treated as a product of our identities rather than important contributions in their own right. There is still a long way to go before goals of equity, inclusion, and diversity are even close to being achieved.

Academia’s pursuit of knowledge is often influenced or determined by “epistemological fit” (read: white Western ideals). This often excludes other traditions and meaningful ways of knowing. Therefore, the question is: is academia truly dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, when systemic structures reinforce the exclusion of voices and experiences that could lead to more nuanced understandings of racial and gendered violence in society?

Our Kitchen Table and others are not only important in counteracting these systemic injustices. They are also part of the growing body of ethnographic work on women in the academy (see for example Daly and Shah 2022). This type of research is crucial because it ensures that those who identify with the intersecting axis of marginality are the standpoints from which the academy is being studied. Our experience and knowledge serve the function of deconstructing the legitimacy and unquestioned power of the academy, which is what makes this work so powerful and restorative.

Other research on race and racism has shown how the bodies and labor of WOC serve a crucial function by supporting the extraction of value and profit through racial capitalism. As we have illustrated through our stories, one way in which this racial capital is mobilized is through control, surveillance, and placing us in positions of permanent insecurity and precarity. However, as we have also demonstrated, we are not passive and hope-less. Though the academy may deprive us of security, representation, respect, and well-being, we find these attributes in one another and are able to reinforce them through our ongoing Kitchen Table praxis.

We are nourished by the strong legacies of intersectional feminists of color who have documented, researched, and resisted, and we hope to continue this legacy. It is with this inspiration and our own positive experiences of Kitchen Table meetings that we put out a call to action. Allyship is appreciated and necessary, but we require more active support and investment. As we have shown, mainstream feminism within the academy often excludes or discounts our unique experiences and rarely makes room for our struggles.

For feminists and the broader institutions within which they reside to truly support marginalized groups, we implore them to make the time, space, and resources for praxis like the Kitchen Table. WOC need the ability to support one another on an ongoing basis, but to do so in ways in which we are not having to spend our own funds and use time outside of work hours. We want to set our own table and to choose who sits with us. We need to feel encouraged to share these experiences with trusted comrades without guilt, without fear of retaliation, and without shame. We need these meetings to be recognized and valued as part of the affective labor that we require in order to maintain our welfare and dignity in academia. In this way, not only can WOC better work towards security, representation, respect, and well-being. We can also generate and strengthen long-term, sustainable networks that can help to dismantle pervasive and intersecting inequities.

While our Kitchen Table largely interrogates the intersections of race, motherhood, sexual orientation, and gender, we recognize that there are limitations to our discussions. We do not interrogate how additional markers of difference intersect and impact our everyday experiences of feminism and structural oppression in the academy. Future research should consider how our positionalities intersect, and are distinct from, those of disability, migration status, class, and other facets of identity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jenna Imad Harb

Jenna Imad Harb is a Research Fellow in the School of Regulation and Global Governance at the Australian National University, Australia. Her research examines how inequality, regulation, transnational governance, and digital technologies interface in the delivery of crisis relief. She has published on issues of anti-violence technologies, policing technologies, data protection, digital platforms, the regulation and social implications of artificial intelligence, and the financialization of welfare. She has several years of experience conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the Middle East and the United States and collaborating with humanitarian practitioners and researchers on the sector’s use of biometric technology.

Kirsty Anantharajah

Kirsty Anantharajah is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Environmental Governance at the University of Canberra, Australia. Previous appointments were at the Australian National University, and the University of New South Wales, where she undertook a postdoctoral fellowship. Her work explores the intersection of environmental crisis, markets, and inequality as it manifests in the Asia Pacific region. She has published on issues of racial formation in environmental technologies, renewable energy development, and climate change, with a particular focus on post-colonial technoscience.

Kanika Samuels-Wortley

Kanika Samuels-Wortley is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Systemic Racism, Technology, and Criminal Justice in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Ontario Tech University, Canada. Her research explores the intersection of race, racism, and the criminal justice system.

Nadia Qureshi

Nadia Qureshi is a PhD candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is a diasporic South Asian, a Muslim, a teacher, and a mother. Her research interests include anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, and anti-racism, particularly in the context of education. Her doctoral research uses critical race theory to center excluded and oppressed voices in the field of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. She also holds a Masters in Education, a Bachelor of Education, and a Bachelor of Science in biology.

Notes

1 One meeting was held in person, as one of the contributors traveled overseas.

2 For more information on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion mandates, see Beeman (2021).

3 The identification and mocking of queer and lesbian women by Dr Martens and other types of fashion has happened since the 1980s. Cis and trans women who wear certain kinds of clothes are treated with hostility for also “breaking” norms of “femininity” (see for example Blackman and Perry 1990).