Liberation literacies and pedagogies of witnessing: a collaborative autoethnography of education scholars as they (re)humanize “the missing people”

Abstract

As a family of critical literacy educators and education doctoral students, we see liberation literacies as the center of our praxis and at-home discussions. In this critical collaborative autoethnography (Kelly et al., 2024; Lahiri-Roy et al., 2023), we theorize what writing towards liberation means to us and how our efforts are liberatory to ourselves and hopefully other scholars, educators, and readers. We recognize that true liberation is not possible without humanizing, affirming, and loving those facing oppression while working within racialized schooling that systemically harms us. Writing has become our form of truth-telling, where we interrogate, declare, and bear witness to our Palestinian, ancestral, familial, cultural, and religious literacies (Abu-Loghod, 2013; Baxley & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021). As researchers, we are affirmed by Al-Nakib (2014) and Deleuze’s (1995) “the missing people” phenomenon or a people whose sense of place is becoming. This is not to suggest that we, and scholars of color like us, do not already have strong community ties in our schooling experiences or that our presence is “missing,” but liberation allows for healing as an exploratory process of becoming one’s whole self and hoping to meet the self it uncovers.