Doing as the Trees Do Two Femmes of Color Resisting Institutional Violence

Oct 15, 2026

Relationships in academia, including advisee/advisor ties, are often taught as career resources, functioning through hierarchy and institutional violence. The article examines authors’ resistance and healing from EuroAmerican epistemologies via an autoethnographic duet drawing on Maya cosmology. It explores how relational practices can honor wholeness and wellness, and how centering “tree relatives” guides understanding of how to be well together.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages19

Reading Time29 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Introduction-Seeds

Doing as the Trees Do Two Femmes of Color Resisting Institutional Violence Briana K. N. Rodríguez Kari Kokka The Journal of Educational Foundations Vol. 34, No. 1 2021, pp. 132-150 Copyright 2021 by Caddo Gap Press Abstract Relationships, such as the advisee/advisor relationship, in academia are typically taught to be used as a resource (a commodity) for the advancement of one’s career. Problematizing the advising relationship draws attention to the inherent hierarchies and violence an advisor may perpetuate. In this article, we explore our resistance and healing from EuroAmerican epistemologiesin hopes of building a present and future that honors our wholeness and wellness. We examine our relationship, through an autoethnographic duet, drawing on Maya cosmology and inviting our Tree relatives to guide us in understanding how we might be well together. Keywords: racial battle fatigue, advising, doctoral studies, mathematics education, cosmology Introduction-Seeds Entering this doctoral program, I (Briana) had preconceived notions of what the academic industrial complex (Stuart, 2004) might seek todo to my spirit and being. Pausing to breathe slowly, as Patel (2015) reminds us to do, I looked for spaces and people in which to create my safe place. But there are no safe spaces in academia (N.M. Garcia, 2019) . U.S. academia endorses EuroAmerican epistemology as normative (Dawson, 2020) and clings to white normative standards (G. A. Garcia, 2019), such as SAT, GRE, grades, so-called pedigree, and publishing in “top Briana K. N. Rodríguez is a thought partner/doctoral student and Kari Kokka is an assistant professor of mathematics education, both in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Leading at the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. E-mail addresses: [bkr15@pitt.edu & kokka@pitt.edu](bkr15@pitt.edu & kokka@pitt.edu) 132 tier journals”to sort and categorize students and faculty. EuroAmerican epistemology promotes individualism and scarcity while maintaining hierarchies (Clark, 1995), which manifests in every nook and cranny of the doctoral schooling experience. From the onset, GRE scores serve asa gatekeeping mechanism into higher education to “weed out” potential candidates based off an achievement score (Rogers & Molina, 2006)—ascore having little to do with a person’s success, nor how well they may contribute to a field (Moneta-Koehler et al., 2017), as measured by dominant norms. We begin with my (Briana’s) voice in this article because we choose to center the experience of doctoral students in resisting hierarchies and advocating for advisors to relinquish (settler) property rights of knowledge (Tuck & Yang, 2012) . As Grande (2015) offers us in Red Pedagogy,“living radical relationality is itself the possibility of contesting and further disrupting the colonial conditions that continue to be undone”(p. 47) . I (Briana) invited Kari to write this article with me, and we alternate our voices speaking from our first-person narratives (from an “I” perspective) and from our collective perspective (as “we”) . This autoethnographic duet (Lee & Gouzouasis, 2017) intentionally calls on our spirits, bodies, and hearts rather than only centering our minds. The untraditional format of our writing seeks to plant seeds of resistance to conventions of academia and offer healing-centered epistemologies. When we entered academia after teaching secondary mathematics to predominantly students who are racialized as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC),1 we brought our former middle and high school students into the space with us. Consciously calling in their being and spirit to the center of dialogue and discussions about the educational institution means unlearning the “norms and [mimicked] behaviors to become the right fit for the…institution”(Rodríguez, 2018, p. 1), and disrupting the hierarchical relationships between our bodies and spirits. To problematize advising relationship

FAQs

How does the article challenge the advising relationship in academia?

It problematizes advisee/advisor relationships as structures that can perpetuate inherent hierarchies and violence rather than merely serving as career resources.

What method do the authors use to explore resistance and healing?

The authors use an autoethnographic duet, alternating voices from first-person and collective perspectives to connect minds, bodies, and hearts.

Which epistemologies and cosmology inform the authors’ approach?

The article draws on resistance and healing from EuroAmerican epistemologies and invites guidance from Maya cosmology, using “tree relatives” to support relational understanding.

Oct 15, 2026

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