Date of Award

2026-05-22

Degree Name

PhD Education for Social Justice

Dissertation Committee

Cecilia A. Valenzuela, PhD, Chairperson; Sarina Molina, EdD; Antonio Jiménez Luque, PhD

Keywords

women of color educators, international schools, transnational feminism, borderlands theory, collective storywork, collective homeplace praxis, decolonial education, embodied knowledge

Abstract

International schools function as global outposts of colonial residue, where neoliberal individualism and Eurocentric expertise are commodified at the expense of relational, embodied ways of being and knowing. This research addressed the systemic marginalization of women of color (WoC) educators in these liminal sites, where institutional comfort masks racialized and gendered exclusion. Guided by transnational feminism (Mohanty, 2003), borderlands (Anzaldúa, 1987), and storywork (Archibald, 2008), the methodology centered relational witnessing—a practice of deep, reciprocal presence—honoring the intellectual sovereignty of WoC educators and treating their narratives as theory in themselves.

Three interlocking themes emerged. First, collaborators described pervasive institutional betrayal, including Eurocentric curriculum dominance, dismissal of non-Western professional expertise, and chronic taxing of the body produced by navigating dehumanizing systems. Second, they articulated multilayered strategies of resistance, radical authenticity, micro- transgressive pedagogy, and the reclamation of embodied knowledge, as professional and intellectual currency. Third, and most significantly, collaborators demonstrated healing and epistemic resistance are fundamentally collective acts, cultivated through relational homeplaces that reject the capitalist and colonial logics of neocolonial schooling.

The study’s central theoretical contribution was the concept of collective homeplace praxis, a structural and relational sanctuary distinct from individual epistemic activism, which this research argued is a prerequisite for authentic institutional decolonization. The global brand of inclusivity in international education is sustained through the invisible, affective labor of the very women it marginalizes. In transforming personal struggle into critical insight, these educators perform the intellectual labor required to move the field toward a relational ontology of care.

Document Type

Dissertation: Open Access

Department

Learning and Teaching

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