University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses March 2016 Transnationalizing Social Justice Education: InterAmerican Frameworks for Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century Mirangela G. Buggs University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the African American Studies Commons, American Studies Commons, Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, International and Comparative Education Commons, Latin American Studies Commons, Latina/o Studies Commons, and the Other Education Commons Recommended Citation Buggs, Mirangela G., "Transnationalizing Social Justice Education: InterAmerican Frameworks for Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century" (2016). Doctoral Dissertations. 557. https://doi.org/10.7275/7946208.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/557 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. TRANSNATIONALIZING SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION: INTERAMERICAN FRAMEWORKS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING IN THE 21ST CENTURY A Dissertation Presented by MIRANGELA BUGGS Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst inn partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF EDUCATION February 2016 College of Education Student Development Social Justice Education © Copyright by Mirangela Buggs 2016 All Rights Reserved TRANSNATIONALIZING SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION: INTERAMERICAN FRAMEWORKS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING IN THE 21ST CENTURY A Dissertation Presented by MIRANGELA BUGGS Approved as to style and content by: __________________________________ Ximena Zúñiga, Chairperson __________________________________ Maurianne Adams, Member __________________________________ Agustín Lao-Montes, Member ___________________________ Christine B. McCormick, Dean College of Education DEDICATION This work is dedicated to my late uncle Nuri Muhammad, whose outlook, travels, studies and stories regarding Africa and our origins as African-Americans inspired this path. I also dedicate this to all the writers, artists, educators and activists who invoke hope for liberation and decoloniality. A most recent gift of sight came from the writer Junot Díaz who talks about transgressive things like “decolonial love” and who wrote to me about "hope for radical communion across the fractures of our multiple oppressions." That is the work. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am eternally grateful for all the ancestral and embodied spirits, places and people that have shaped my sight and insight. I am grateful for my Afrodescendant family in the Americas, my North Carolina and Virginia Black-Indian people, my Cape Verdean-Afro-U.S. American, Afro-Canadian cousins and their families, my Haitian- American partner, Gardy Guiteau, and all his people, and our daughter Zami Buggs-King who navigates multiple worlds in America. I am grateful to have been able to travel and to have life-changing experiences in places that schooled me deeply. I am forever indebted to Friends World College (now LIU Global at Long Island University- Brooklyn), where in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s I took “the world’s most pressing problems as the basis of my curriculum” as an undergraduate at that amazing, transformative institution. Friends World College sent me to live and study in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, the Borderlands/South Texas/Refugio del Rio Grande, Bangalore, Mysore and Goa in India. Other places that have influenced my life and outlooks profoundly are New York City, Cambridge, MA, Woodstock, NY, Miami, FL, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. My teachers are central in this— Rafael Bolaños, Davíd Smith, Emilio Vargas, Manuel Monestel, Jeff Halper, Pio Celestino, Lisa Brodyaga, M. Jacqui Alexander, Amitabh Rai, Ella Habiba Shohat, Meena Alexander, Dina Siddiqi, Amala Levine, AnaLouise Keating, Luís Marentes, Agustín Lao-Montes, John Bracey, Daisy Rubiera, Ann Ferguson, Sangeeta Kamat, Alexandrina Deschamps, Bailey Jackson, Katya Hahn D’Errico, Ximena Zúñiga, and Maurianne Adams. My woc besties are all over this— Cyndi Suaréz, Nova Gutierrez, and Aleyamma Mathew. Thanks for being comadres, intellectual and spiritual community simultaneously. I offer many thanks to my friends, Mustafa K. Emirbayer, Meg Goldner Rabinowitz, Antoinette Peters, and Allia Matta, who have been cheerleaders and readers for this work. v ABSTRACT TRANSNATIONALIZING SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION: INTERAMERICAN FRAMEWORKS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING IN THE 21ST CENTURY FEBRUARY 2016 MIRANGELA BUGGS, BACHELOR OF ARTS IN INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES, AREA OF CONCENTRATION: WOMEN’S STUDIES FRIENDS WORLD COLLEGE/FRIENDS WORLD PROGRAM LONG ISLAND UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK MASTER IN GENDER STUDIES AND FEMINIST THEORY NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH/ GRADUATE FACULTY OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, NEW YORK, NY Ed.D, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS-AMHERST Directed by: Professor Ximena Zúñiga Social Justice Education currently uses mostly U.S.-based theories and concepts, and it often relies upon nation-specific historical legacies and nation-centric contemporary understandings of patterns of inequality. This study offers interdisciplinary conceptual- historical frameworks garnered from historical studies, African Diaspora Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, along with studies of frameworks and pedagogies in critical and multicultural education to enlarge Social Justice Education. This conceptual study utilizes a world-historical analysis and focuses on the interconnectedness of the Americas—Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America— establishing a hemispheric and regional framework to inspire more transnational work in educational projects. Arguing that there are shared historical and present-day patterns of social oppression across the Americas, this work excavates dynamics of race and gender and how they have lived in similar ways across American societies. Focusing on the African diaspora, this research charts a history of colonialism and the workings of race in various American nations. It also vi utilizes multicultural feminist thought and the theory of intersectionality to expand the frameworks that educators can use to “transnationalize” their thinking and practice, and to work with interlocking systems of gender, race and class in their teaching content and pedagogy. Keywords: the coloniality of power, settler colonialism, interAmericanity, transnational, intersectionality, African diaspora, race, gender, critical pedagogy, Social Justice Education vii CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................ v ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................... vi LIST OF TABLES ...................................................................................................... xi LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................... xii CHAPTER 1 EXPANDED CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATORS .................................................................................................. 1 An Interdisciplinary Conversation: The Coloniality of Power, African Diaspora Studies, and Multicultural Feminist Thought ............................. 1 Social Justice Education (SJE) ......................................................................... 8 The Americas as the Site of Inquiry ............................................................... 10 Recasting “America” ...................................................................................... 13 My Subjectivity, My Perspective and Educational Pathways ........................ 15 Clarifications and Delimitations ..................................................................... 18 On Language .................................................................................................. 20 Descriptions of Chapters ................................................................................ 21 Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 24 2 COLONIALISM AND ITS POWER ..................................................................... 27 Introduction .................................................................................................... 27 World-Historical/Colonial-Modern New World Systems .............................. 30 The System: A Colonial Heritage ................................................................... 32 Colonial-Christian Ideology and Practice .......................................... 33 Slavery and Black Labor as Distinctly Colonial ................................ 40 White Settler Colonialism in the Americas ........................................ 43 The Coloniality of Power in the Americas ..................................................... 46 Coloniality and the Social Construction of Identities ..................................... 48 The Invention, Ideology and Legal Work of “Race” ...................................... 57 Whiteness: Racial Ideology, Customary Law and Racial Subordination ..............................................................................