Against abstraction: Reclaiming and reorienting to embodied collective knowledges of solidarity

This article asks what kinds of places are we making within academic institutions concerned with racial and gender justice, decolonization and reconciliation when the terms of justice are fostered through the violence of abstraction? As queer scholar-activists, we share firsthand accounts of our movement from sites of community activism to the halls of academe, revealing the techniques and consequences of abstracting racist and gendered violence and dispossession. We insist on a reorientation, meaning a return to and towards, our embodied collective knowledges as sources of authority on and against the violences of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. We first recount the roots of our activism when we met in spaces of solidarity in unceded Coast Salish territories. We then describe the ways we have experienced this collective knowledge being represented back to us as we moved into academic spaces, emphasizing the epistemic violence of abstracting knowledge from its messy, hard-wrought foundations. Finally, we share strategies and experiences of reorienting ourselves toward collective and embodied knowledges in which solidarity is once again at the centre. In dialogue, we reject the violence of abstraction while asserting knowledge sovereignty in which communities maintain agency within the terms in which their lives are represented.


Introduction: Writing on unceded stolen lands
Throw away abstraction and the academic learning, the rules, the map and compass.Feel your way without blinders.To touch more people, the personal realities and the social must be evoked-not through rhetoric but through blood and pus and sweat.(Anzald ua, 1981: 173) As we write this article, fires rage across the unceded territories of Indigenous nations in what is now called British Columbia, Canada.Writing in Lekwungen territories or so-called Victoria, we sit across from one another typing on our laptops, situated as guests and uninvited visitors on these stolen lands.One of us, May, is a Filipinx 1 settler professor of geography and gender studies and the other, Sarah/Tłaliłila'ogwa, is a mixed Kwakwaka'wakw and white settler professor of Indigenous political ecology.As queer activist-scholars, we write this article as we field emails and text messages from our networks of community relations with whom each of us has collaborated, conspired and conducted research over several decades.Learning of the 380 wildfires that rage across the territories of B.C. nations, we discuss the difficult decision of whether or not to travel in the coming weeks to visit with old friends and pass condolences on to family who have lost a loved one, amidst the intense smoke, heat and evacuation alerts that weigh on community.We learn about the failing health of an elder who has been hospitalized, messaging with family about a care and meal schedule.We share salmon sandwiches around the kitchen table and commiserate about the challenges of navigating the seasonal pace of research and teaching as pre-tenure faculty, sharing the moving and yet challenging work of supporting Indigenous, racialized and queer students.These are the material and affective conditions in which we come together to write this article as queer feminist Indigenous and Filipinx geographers working without a map or compass for navigating our professional lives, but, instead, working with a shared commitment to engaged activist and community-led scholarship.
Neither of us started our research, teaching or activism as scholars.Rather, as we share in this article, our journeys into this work began in community spaces in which each of us were engaged in the embodied and relational work of seeking justice with and for our loved ones.With roots in community activism and everyday terrains of struggle and survival, our early experiences of knowledge creation were necessarily collective, involving intergenerational efforts at addressing urgent inequities and violences facing Filipinx and Indigenous women in particular.In recent years, we have reflected together on the ways we have been confronted with this very same community knowledge in new forms, repackaged and presented back to us in disembodied, abstract and often unrecognizable scholarly analysis.As critical geographers, we have discussed the way this collective, lived and hard-won community knowledge has become separated from the material and emplaced contexts in which it originates, as it has come to circulate as critical theory framed by experts working in dialogue with one another rather than the people and communities whose lives are at stake.Working in institutions which are concerned with such buzzwords as 'reconciliation' with Indigenous peoples and 'equity, diversity and inclusion', these questions are particularly urgent as we contend with the representation of experiences of migrant, racialized and Indigenous women, gender diverse and queer people in academic contexts that continue to be constituted through white settler colonial heteronormativity.This article, then, is concerned with tracing these processes of abstraction through our individual and collective movement from community activism into academia and then into dialogue with one another, across several decades.We follow Indigenous geographers, Black geographers, and geographers of colour before us who have used autobiography and autoethnography to trace racialized and gendered knowledge moves in the discipline (Cahuas, 2022;Daigle, 2019;Pulido, 2010) in order to "reimagine what constitutes geographical research" (Cahuas, 2022(Cahuas, : 1514)).As Tanja Burkhard (2019) writes, autoethnography is a methodology by which scholars of color come to grapple with not having the language to describe their lives, interweaving literature and analysis with memories, journal entries and marginalia to create new terms in which to represent their lived experience.Further, the culturally distinct Chicanx/Latinx feminist methodology of testimonio transforms knowledge production through "reworking what constitutes knowledge, asserting that knowledge is produced relationally and collectively, and connecting research to social change" (Cahuas, 2022(Cahuas, : 1517)).Aligned with Cahuas' testimonio, our coalitional autoethnography is traced through firsthand accounts of our movement from sites of community activism and activist-research to the halls of academe, which reveal the techniques and consequences of abstracting racist and gendered violence and dispossession.As Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2010) writes, The violence of abstraction produces all kinds of fetishes: states, races, normative views of how people fit into and make places in the world.A geographical imperative lies at the heart of every struggle for social justice; if justice is embodied, it is then therefore always spatial, which is to say, part of a process of making a place.( 16) What kinds of places are we making within our institutions, the halls of academe, when the terms of justice are fostered through the violence of abstraction, as Indigenous and racialized activist-scholars encounter our own relational experiences of struggle repackaged as disembodied knowledge which serves as the basis of our colleagues' expertise?A placemaking formed in and through the reification of white settler colonialism.
Within these power relations, Minelle Mahtani (2014) argues that geography needs to pay more attention to the production of 'toxic geographies' or "emotionally toxic material spaces, for geographers of colour" (360).Through interviews with women of colour in geography, Mahtani argues that toxicity "literally poisons our field" (360), tracing a gap between scholarship on race and colonialism contrasted against the marginalization of scholars of colour within the field, creating, she argues, exclusionary and toxic environments.We build on Mahtani's work here by focusing on the everyday, lived, affective and relational experiences through which this toxicity is fostered, recounting the way in which our lives are used as the material grounds of the discipline as we are simultaneously disciplined into conforming to academic standards founded in epistemic violence.As defined by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988), epistemic violence is the work of discourse in creating and sustaining boundaries around what is considered real and, by extension, what is unable to be seen as real (or seen at all).Within the geographies of settler colonialism, however, this definition can be expanded to include not only discourse but the material practices of producing and reproducing scholarly knowledge, including the discipline of geography, in creating boundaries around knowledge and knowledge-making.We understand these material and discursive practices as both structural and intimate sites in which settler colonial violence is reproduced and rendered normative, and, thus, beyond the bounds of analysis.Our personal experiences with the toxic geographies in which epistemic violence circulates are recounted by tracing the techniques of abstracting racist and gendered violence and dispossession and laying out the consequences as we experience them personally and within our scholarship.We do so in dialogue in order to reorient ourselves toward one another's collective and community struggles, and the expansive networks of solidarity held within the lands, histories, ancestors and movements to which we are connected.
Why reoreintation?As Sara Ahmed (2010)  Following Ahmed, we reorient to collective solidarities in two ways.First, coalitional reorientations situate our bodies spatially in relation to one another and the place-based lineages of activism within which we are situated.This has the potential to transform the disembodied knowledges of our lived experience into emplaced and vibrantly coalitional knowledges by relationally reconstituting the academic spaces our bodies occupy.Second, as "orientations are about how matter surfaces by being directed in one way or another" (Ahmed, 2010: 235), a reorientation away from academic matrices of value in which we are reduced to abstraction and toward the fleshy, material, lived and storied spaces of shared struggle, serves to make ourselves and our communities matter differently.Fleshy accounts go beyond the descriptive to share our situated, embodied navigation of everyday conditions of life on these unceded lands (including our lives as academics), across the several decades over which our analysis developed.Drawing on the visceral theorizing of colonial heteropatriarchy offered by poets, artists and community activists, we value the felt dimension of our lives and those of our relations as sites and methods of analysis.As Chrystos (1988) wrote to white feminist conference organizers: Here, fleshy theorizing values the groaning and moaning in order to reveal the ways the material and discursive are interwoven in geographies of white settler colonial power and coalitional knowledges formed in solidarity.Rather than each being constituted through our individual orientation toward settler colonial knowledges, institutions and disciplines, we are instead reconstituted through a shared orientation toward collective sites of struggle which are necessarily genealogically linked through the mobility of our coalitional praxis.Together, this reorientation breathes life into the movements we are part of, rather than serving to matter to those who shape our institutional constraint.We take up this work as a "performative ontological project" (Gibson-Graham, 2008: 616), bringing new worlds into being through the articulation of decolonial queer feminist solidarities in order to make them more viable and alive in our everyday movement through and across the spaces we embody as activist-academics.To orient ourselves towards the fleshy shared spaces of struggle and the possibility of bringing liveliness to the complicated spaces we embody in Hunt/Tłaliłila'ogwa and Farrales academia, we take turns recounting our movements within and between community struggle and the university.We recognize, however, that our contribution is conditioned by the situated knowledges we each bring to this conversation -meaning that our embodied, relational, coalitional knowledge is at once grounded in and limited by the specific voices represented here.We have engaged a queer, feminist anti-racist citational politics which honors the wider networks of feminist of color organizing in which our own scholar-activism has formed, including scholars whose theorizing unfolds across differently situated community formations.In The Black Shoals, Tiffany Lethabo King (2019) proposes the shoals as "an analytical and geographical site where Black studies attempts to engage Native studies on ethical terms that unfold in new spaces" (10), encouraging readers to "engage the nontraditional geographies (visible, uncharted, and invisible) that connect Indigenous and Black diasporic thought reparatively" (12).King decenters paradigms which position Indigenous land seizure and Black labour and bodies as the defining features of settler colonialism, instead centering oceanic spaces of migration, relationship and knowledge exchange between Black and Indigenous peoples.
The Black shoals is resonant with our theories of relational and embodied knowledge in calling for new epistemologies grounded in the material and theoretical land-water spaces embodied by generations of Black and Indigenous people in the midst of settler colonial violences.Our approachis defined by the immediate and lived geographies that arise from our own lifetimes and by the relational networks through which our embodied knowledge comes to have meaning.When Sarah speaks of a water-land meeting place, that place has a specific name in the Kwak'wala language -a name which is connected to her own name through origin stories passed down genealogically.It is those culturally-specific relations that form Indigenous epistemologies, orienting us within emplaced solidarity networks (formed through distinct linguistic, cultural and historical terms) in which we come to form the foundations of our theories for change.
In dialogue, we open by each recounting the roots of our activism and coming into political awareness during the 1990s in unceded Coast Salish territories of so-called Victoria and Vancouver, BC, Canada.It was during that time that we first met as we worked in solidarity on issues of women's labour rights, migrant rights and anti-violence work.We then each describe the ways we have experienced this collective community knowledge being represented back to us as we moved into academic spaces as geography graduate students and then as faculty.Finally, we share strategies and experiences of reorienting ourselves toward collective and embodied knowledges in which solidarity is once again at the centre, as we insist on epistemic alignment with the lived, fleshy and messy grounding of community knowledges.This is not only a rejection of abstraction but also an assertion of knowledge sovereignty in which communities maintain agency and authority over the terms in which their lives are represented.

May
My path first crossed with Sarah / Tłaliłila'ogwa's over 20 years ago now.This was in the late 1990s.This was in the late 1990s in so-called Vancouver -a place where community activism was bubbling as different communities grappled to find language to make sense of the ways that neoliberalism and globalization were structuring our lives; a place where community organizers converged and clashed to find tactics to meet the dispossessions and displacements shaped by free trade agreements and the crises of colonialism and capitalism.It was a time and place when and where feminist movements and organizers were refusing the liberal niceties of white feminism in the city.And, although I did not appreciate it then, it was a time when Indigenous women like Lee Maracle (St o:l o), Viola Thomas (Secwepemc), Kelly White (Musqueam), and Philippa Ryan (Gitxsan) were leading this refusal by living their Indigenous sovereignties.I was finishing my undergraduate degree, and I started organizing with different Filipinx activist organizations.The organizations were started by domestic workers who had come to the city to work as live-in caregivers.I was being pushed out of my comfort zone by their conditions and calls for change at the same time as I was motivated by their sophisticated and layered analysis of global migration and the disposability of their labour and lives.
One thread of analysis that we were unravelling revolved around a need for us to get a sense of understanding why more Filipinx women were entering Canada as live-in domestic workers under temporary working visas.Under Canada's then-called 'Live-in Caregiver Program', women entering through this foreign domestic worker program were tied (as they are still now) to their employer, could only work as domestics for the one family they worked for, and had to live and work in their employer's home.As we gathered in community meetings, sharings, and discussions, it became obvious that, while a personal choice, the choice to migrate and leave families behind to risk making money in Canada had everything to do with colonial legacies, imperialist plunder, and capitalist extraction that underpins the reason why so many people are leaving the Philippines to this day.As someone who grew up in Vancouver, raised by Filipinx parents, aunties, and uncles who left the Philippines in the 1970s and 80s, I felt like my world got bigger and my relations clearer as I began to see myself as part of this larger migration experience of displacement.Why would anyone choose to leave their home, why would so many people (3000 a day) make that decision to leave?Why did Canada seek out and need the racialized, feminized and cheap labour of so many women?It was questions like these that animated our discussions, gatherings, and organizing.Such questions animated our relationships with communities who were growing analysis and politics around their own experiences of displacement and precarity.We wanted to -and in very material ways had to -talk, not only to each other in our community, but with communities beyond us.I found such points of connection with other migrant and racialized women and youth.Points of connection were developing between Black women (both scholars and activists) around the histories of domestic work and Canada's use of the racialized and gendered labour of Black Caribbean women and Filipinx.I was also learning from Indigenous youth who were putting out sharp critiques of colonialism and the Canadian state they shared through Redwire Magazine.Later, I would have the opportunity to learn from organizers of No One is Illegal whose anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics added to anti-racist analysis and organizing in the city.
These were just a few points of connection that formed a lattice of local embodied knowledges and struggles.These connections were not always easily made, maintained or evenly appreciated.As King (2019) might suggest, these connections at times recentered the conquistador human by playing into settler colonial liberal multicultural identity-based politics.For example, calling for the Canadian government to recognize the educational attainment and foreign professional degrees of Filipinx migrants recentered white heteropatriarchal settler visions of modernity buttressed in anti-Black and anti-Indigenous logics of containment and erasure.This sort of politics oriented towards securing entitlements from the settler state, while vital to the day-to-day survival of racialized migrants, skirted analysis being forwarded by scholar-activists like Agnes Calliste (1993aCalliste ( , 1993b) ) who were theorizing the anti-Black foundations of Canadian settler immigration programs.
While such discussion simmered, connections continued to be made in disagreement, debate and held together by a common need to resist structures underpinning our different communities' daily lives.In an interview, activist theorist Harsha Walia (as quoted in Hayes, 2022), reflects on the interconnectivity of global structures and local struggles: If you're working to fight against gentrification in your neighborhood, if you are running mutual aid networks in your neighborhood, if you were stopping police and or military recruitment in your neighborhood, if you are providing sanctuary to undocumented migrants in your neighborhood, that is all intricately connected.So when we all play a role in unravelling this massive web, it will actually be undone.There's a saying in Oaxaca, which is that we are many hands in one heart in the struggle.[. ..]What we do need is many hands in the struggle, and all trying to do our part and seeing that it's connected.
It was in this sort of webbed and interconnected collective struggle that Walia describes that my path first crossed with Sarah when we began working with and learning from the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) Canada.

Sarah
When I think back to those early days of organizing with GAATW Canada, what comes to mind is a smudged black and white photo that now sits on a desk in my office.I took the photo at my first Take Back the Night March in 1996, standing amongst a small crowd of friends, holding a painted cloth banner that reads "in order to get control, we must take control".The anarchy symbol painted inside the A in "tAke" matched the handmade patches I wore on my camo jacket back then.I was 19, in my first few years of university, and had just started volunteering at the women's centre after being introduced to feminism by my roommate.I had shaved my head, given away my make-up and handmade dresses, and fully thrown myself into feminist activism, a continuation of my high school activism around environmental issues, anti-racism and Indigenous rights.I belonged to a feminist bookstore collective.I had my first official girlfriend.I was in my element.
Like so many others, my turn toward activism with an explicitly gendered focus came out of tragedy.My cousin had taken her own life after speaking out about sexual abuse and being met with silence and inaction.Although these were not new issues to me, I had not seen experiences of young people like myself -queer people, girls, women, gender diverse relations -being centered in any of the other grassroots spaces I wove in and out of since junior high.Raised in a single parent household where civil rights and anti-racism were frequent topics of conversation, rebellion and resistance were in my marrow, but because of the intimate and pervasive nature of gender-based violence, it did not occur to me that this too could be a space of political mobilization.
I was 17 when I started classes at UVic and originally wanted to take anthropology to understand the terms in which my family had been documented by anthropologists like Franz Boas, who worked in collaboration with my great-great-grandparents George Hunt and Lucy Homiskanis.The racism underpinning modern anthropology soon became clear when I tried to challenge what our textbook said about Kwakwaka'wakw law and culture in a chapter called "The Origins of the Destructive Potlatch".Walking in the hall past the Anthropology department office one day, I stopped to look at photographs of the faculty's areas of research -there I saw a photo of clay pots beside a photo of my greatgreat-grandparents. Seeing their faces stare back at me from the black and white photo in those very halls where I was being stripped of my expertise over my own culture, I knew I had to leave.I walked, in tears, to the Gender Studies office and asked the Chair if she would supervise a directed reading of Indigenous feminist literature because there were no Indigenous profs in the department at the time.
Reading Lee Maracle's I am Woman (1996) alongside Indigenous lesbian poets like Chrystos (1988) and Beth Brant (1994) was transformative.They wrote themselves into dialogue with a network of racialized, queer feminist scholar-activists, refusing to submit themselves to white feminist agendas.I am Woman was a kind of truth-telling to power I had never witnessed before, speaking truth to patriarchy, whiteness, Christianity and capitalism, addressed directly to women like me and founded in healing and love for herself and one another.As Maracle (1996) wrote That white women only want to hear from me as a Native and not as a voice in the women's movement is their loss.Embodied in my truth is the brilliance of hundreds of Native women who faced the worst that CanAmerica has to offer and dealt with it.Embodied in my brilliance is the sea of knowledge that it took to overcome the paralysis of a colonized mind.I did not come to this clearing alone.Hundreds walk alongside me -Black, Asian and Native women whose tide of knowledge was bestowed upon me are the key to every CanAmerican's emancipation.( 139) In This Bridge Called My Back, Chicana feminist Gloria Anzald ua (1981) wrote in dialogue with other activist-writers to document the feminist fad of adopting women of color as their cause, while "still expecting us to adapt to their expectations and their language" (167).Here, Audre Lorde named the ways that white feminism reproduced anti-Black racism using the very same patriarchal tools they proposed to work against, marginalizing Black lesbians as subjects who "stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women" (Lorde, 1981: 99).Developing feminist analysis in community, in anger, in the agony of loss was a strategy of survival -we needed one another.Identifying with this chorus of voices writing from bathrooms, smoke breaks, or kitchen tables, "writing from life" (Brant, 1994) was not precious or pretentious.Theirs was a kind of theorizing based in their own deeply wrought analyses of power.As Chrystos wrote, "My purpose is to make it as clear and as inescapable as possible, what the actual, material conditions of our lives are" (Chrystos, 1988: n.p.).The conditions of our lives.This our -author, audience and subject -was not limited to Indigenous women, but included networks of queer women and feminists of color engaged in creating knowledge from within shared terrains of struggle.
Local anti-violence organizing became a space of collective action that introduced me to the interconnected struggles of women, queers and gender diverse relatives across the globe.Taking a class called Poverty, Patriarchy, Prostitution with Jyoti Sanghera, there was space to begin to understand the social and political contexts in which the disappearance of a dear family friend from Vancouver's downtown eastside had been met with silence.While there was not enough information about Indigenous women's involvement in sex work nor experiences of trafficking or anti-trafficking measures at the time (Hunt, 2016), I carried the stories of loved ones with me, seeing how patriarchal legacies of colonialism, stigmatization of sexuality, global capitalism and state violence bore down in the lives of women and feminized people globally.Together, students in the class supported professors Sanghera and Annalee Lepp in launching the GAATW Canada, gathering in one another's collective houses to make handouts, put together participant packets, and prepare to host a convergence of feminist organizers from around the world who were mobilizing around antitrafficking, migrant rights and workers' rights.Here, the experiences of migrant workers driven to Canada by globally induced poverty, were interwoven with analyses of state and capitalist violence as they shaped realities in my own family.These were knowledges that could only be brought to life in the hard-won spaces of outrage, grief, and whipsmart analysis based on lived entanglements with structures of power, and a relentless commitment to struggle toward change.As Dr Sanghera once told us: we are born into struggle, we are meant to struggle.Accepting that, understanding what that meant, in our collectivity and across our specific socio-political contexts, was core to moving forward in struggle together.
Supporting a fundraiser for a migrant women's organization, where I first crossed paths with May, was an ordinary part of building those coalitions of solidarity across shared and yet distinct movements for justice.I learned about the conditions of precarity and dispossession driving migrant workers into exploitative labour in Canada, in the very same communities in which I also engaged in anti-violence work as a queer Indigenous youth.These coalitional spaces allowed for practices and strategies to be shared across grassroots movements (I say 'movements' but this often included small collectives of three or four people)as May mentioned, we learned popular theatre, how to organise rallies, marches, teach-ins, and advocacy campaigns.We also cared for one another, took care of each other over hot pots, salmon feasts and cups of chai.We developed a shared understanding that police indifference and victim blaming were rooted in racist sexism against Black, Indigenous, and Asian women in particular, given the historic roots of those communities in Vancouver's downtown eastside.All of this formed the foundation for collective antiviolence work seeking justice for loved ones who had gone missing (Livingston and Hunt, 2018), and then in rural and remote communities wherever other Indigenous women, girls and gender diverse folks invited me into relation.Throughout, the insistence on centering the lived knowledge -the actual feelings, words and stories -of the everyday lives of our communities remained central.This work demanded that I grapple with power differences and navigate contradictions, like the risks of cooptation and reproducing oppression (Cahuas, 2022) that no university course or textbook in feminist research methodologies had prepared me for.I saw myself as both a member of the communities I worked with and someone with skills that could be used to bridge sites of power -bringing our voices into spaces of authority in order to advocate for change.This brings us to think about what happens when our voices and the bridges we hope to build across sites of power enter the spaces of academic authority.

May
When I entered graduate school, it took a while for me to get oriented and tuned into the ways that knowledge is produced in academia.Between the 15 years from finishing my undergraduate degree in Geography to starting my MA in human geography, I had been involved in community-based research efforts with the Filipinx community.We developed our own research and study materials that were relevant to our lives.I worked on one research project that gave us insight on the housing issues and needs of Filipinx migrants.We were also working with feminists at both UBC and SFU.We routinely participated in and transcribed research interviews and focus groups for their research projects.We developed our community-based protocols around working with mainly white academics and students who were primarily interested in the issues of domestic workers.We also worked with other communities concerned with housing justice, poverty, migrant work, and racism.Explicitly following popular education models that some of us learned from organizers in the Philippines, teaching ourselves to implement Paulo Friere's 'pedagogy of the oppressed', and doing our best to practice bell hook's 'teaching to transgress', it became routine for us to build analysis and theory collectively, in practice, and in struggle.In essence, it was just normal -we needed to learn about and understand the systemic underpinnings of the issues racialized (im)migrants were facing daily in order to even attempt to change things, and we needed to work with other communities by finding common ground from which we can change things bigger than us and beyond our capacities.
Sitting in graduate seminars and lectures and reading alone was very different from this experience.I felt jarred.I was no longer familiar with this style or way of learning and producing knowledge.While academic forms of learning and knowledge production felt unfamiliar, what was eerily and weirdly familiar were the theories and case studies we were learning from in classes.I saw the ideas and analyses that I witnessed built in community meetings, through placard-and mural-making, in cross-community conversations and political campaigns circulate in graduate classrooms.The sophisticated and layered analysis, that I understood came from domestic workers to make sense of their experiences of displacement and labour migration, was packaged in concepts like 'flexible citizenship' and 'economies of care'.I was beginning to see how we circulate in disembodied ways for academics to work through ideas and theories.I learned how to do such work.I learned how to write in ways that clean up the messiness of contradictory feelings, political aspirations, and lines of thinking to write proposals, journal articles, and dissertations.As a result of this training, my own work has slipped into what Katherine McKittrick (2021) critiques as the descriptive in knowledge production in what she calls identity-disciplines'.She writes, "Description is not liberation" (44), revealing how studies of identity formations reproduce violent knowledge categories that contain and restrict.Even if such studies want to demonstrate that biology is constructed in social terrains, discipline-bound scholarly works are not "displacing biology but, rather, empowering biology -the flesh -as the primary way to study identity" (39).In what we share here, thinking with McKittrick's critique, our attention to flesh is in the fleshiness of theorizing made possible by the people and places who refuse to be rendered objects in the geographies of settler colonialism.
Throughout this journey, the tension between where I came from, who I learned with, who I learned from, and the institutions of individualized and expert knowledge has only become more apparent -trapped if you will in what Filipinx non-binary artist K!MMORTAL (2019) describes as an 'Ice Palace': K!MMORTAL interprets the workings of white heteropatriarchy as an ice palace that is made and designed by and for a particular human."He", as K!MMORTAL puts it, has "it all figured out" pointing to the ease "he" feels as he "talk(s) slick".I see parallels in the ways in which K!MMORTAL's "he" feels comfortable and the unburdened ease of knowledge production in the halls and classrooms of academia in general, and geography in particular.Building on Laura Pulido's Reflections on a white discipline, Black and Latinx geographers Tianna Bruno and Cristina Faiver-Serna (2022) write that in the whitedominated discipline today: "The climate of geography still weighs on geographers of color" (157).They go on to describe how the multiple and layered embodied knowledges of Indigenous, Black, and people of colour are disciplined out of the discipline: [Geography] disciplinary norms continue to ask of us to compartmentalize ourselves, our experiences, and our knowledge traditions for the sake of a faux "objectivity" that is foundational to disciplinarity."Other" ways of knowing-queer and trans spatialities, women of color feminist methodologies, Indigenous onto-epistemologies, a Black sense of place, and other "indigenous ways of knowing"-have shown us over and over again that not only can "othered" peoples produce knowledge, but we do so through ways of being and knowing beyond the confinements of what Western epistemologies delineate and demand.( 158) As Bruno and Faiver-Serna point out, there are "Other" ways of knowing.It is these other ways of knowing, like the Indigenous knowledges that Sarah centers in her work that refuse the supremacy of the settler state and insists on the sovereignties alive in Indigenous geographies, that can form a centrepoint that I as a Filipinx settler can turn towards and be in relation to as I work on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples.Reorienting myself to this responsibility means returning to the lessons offered by Indigenous women and youth in community activist spaces and renewing a commitment to recenter the knowledges and solidarity made in the interconnected web of struggles.

Sarah
Returning to the academy after more than a decade of community-based anti-violence work, I also found myself confronted with the experience of having my life, and those of my community, turned into an object of someone else's expertise -just as I had in the halls of anthropology many years earlier.In the wake of Canada's recognition that Indigenous girls and women were in fact being murdered and disappeared, as Indigenous people and community advocates had been saying for ages, the phenomenon of MMIWG now circulated in the very same departments where I had earlier struggled to find Indigenous readings.I saw feminist geography syllabi with a week or two dedicated to Indigenous women, but instead of Indigenous voices being represented, I saw scholars like Sherene Razack who laid bare the gory details of our loved ones demise, including the police-involved death of one of my cousins.It seemed normal, expected even, to write (and cite) books or articles on Indigenous death and trauma without engaging with Indigenous scholarship and, oftentimes, without talking to Indigenous people -a gulf was being created between our lives and the knowledge about us being held up as authoritative.As May described so well, I was also being disciplined by practices of research and writing that involved cleaning up the messiness of our lived realities -including writing myself out of the frame, no longer theorizing from life.
Rejecting terms of analysis and representation which cut us off from the conditions of everyday life, it became necessary to create analytic and representational tools which foster knowledge which is embodied.We define embodied knowledge as knowledge formed through the affirmation of social, material and affective realities in which we live our lives, individually and within collectives -knowledge always formed in-relation: in relation to one another, in relation to the specific genealogies of our own families and communities, in relation to radical coalitional scholarship, and in relation to the lands where we are currently situated and to which we are ancestrally connected.These relations are not in the past or far away but alive, active contributors to our sense-making as we move through the world.As embodied knowledge, we bring these relations to life in the everyday geographies in which we come to observe and, in this observation, analyze the changing conditions in which our lives are made legible within academe.Importantly, experiential knowledge formed prior to, outside of, and in resistance to the academy is central to this approach, creating epistemic alignment with the realities we seek to represent in our scholarship.Thus, embodied knowledge is a relational praxis that guards against the epistemic violence of whiteness as "an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they 'take up' space" (Ahmed, 2007: 150), as it conditions the terms in which we 'take up' and actively 'make up' space from within queer, Indigenous, Filipinx, and allied geographies.
This approach is akin to the 'felt geographies' of geographers of color, described as the "when, where, and how" (Jones, 2019(Jones, : 1077) ) of everyday life experiences, including "sight, taste, touch, sending and intuiting contribute to their/our embodied experiences, memories and knowledges" (1077) of specific landscapes.Autoethnography is a geographic method which centers feeling in order "to acknowledge how Black geographies already exist, lived, known, and experienced by Black geographic subjects" (Jones, 2019(Jones, : 1077)), an intervention into geographies which account for material realities at the expense of Black peoples' own experience of these realities.Jones' approach at once reveals and intervenes in what Ahmed (2007) calls 'a phenomenology of whiteness' through "experiences of inhabiting a white world as a non-white body" which expose "how whiteness becomes worldly through the noticeability of the arrival of some bodies more than others" (150).This is akin to Lobo's (2014) 'sensory ethnography' -visceral geographies of the affective pressures, energies and sensuous bodies in which racialization is produced in Australia, as "whiteness emerges as a force that gains strength through its ability to spread, change itself, become viscous and claim space" (102).Stratified in particular ways by power and privilege, we aim to show academia itself to be similarly constituted through "the force field of whiteness" (Lobo, 2014: 102-103).Felt and embodied geographies of coalitional Indigenous and Filipinx feminist struggle thus disrupt dominant geographies which name and claim our life experience, and that of our families and communities, as the domain of white experts whose bodies remain not only unmarked as white but unremarkable due to the disembodied nature of western scholarship.
I vividly recall sitting in a restaurant pouring my heart out to a friend and fellow grad student about one of the families I was working with whose daughter had been killed, and how I was struggling to 'make sense' of this in writing up my research.She started citing French philosophers' work on empire, using terminology I struggled to understand.I was flushed with frustration at not being able to recognize the terms of theorizing concerned, purportedly, with colonial violence that was so intimate, it lived in my gut.This reframing had a violent effect.It cut off all the relations of care developed collectively and relationally.And it removed me, and other Indigenous women like me, from a position of being able to voice the conditions of our own lives.I never spoke to that friend again.
I continue to engage in intimate forms of anti-violence work and collective care alongside grassroots networks of incredible organizers.When a loved one was murdered and her story grabbed the attention of national and international media, a network of activists (including, but not limited to, academics), worked with her family to put together a booklet with the story they wanted to tell about her.For months, as her family simultaneously grieved and struggled with the violence of the justice response, this network provided support behind the scenes taking direction from her immediate family.Attending one of my first academic conferences as a PhD candidate, I was taken aback to see numerous papers being presented on this woman's death and her treatment within the justice system -including papers by scholars who had never before written about or researched gender-based violence or MMIWG.There was a disturbing social status becoming associated with scholarship on MMIWG, yet this was detached from the ongoing, lived impacts being navigated by survivors.This seemed out of alignment with many decolonial and Indigenous theories of knowledge, in which knowledge sovereignty is a core component of Indigenous sovereignty (Smith, 1999).
I view this knowledge move as a trick of proximity, avoiding implicating yourself in colonial power relations by associating oneself with people -loved ones -whose lives come to be framed entirely through their victimization.Richa Nagar (2019) powerfully expresses the affective nature of this trick of proximity in Hungry Translations which focuses on building embodied alliances with collaborators in India and the US: yet you demand another story as if my tongue was not my own hot flesh you retell without shiver or stammer without feeling in a piece of your bones for a second my wounded everyday sort of joy, pain. ... [. ...] you will never realize, you cannot know (Nagar, 2019: 203) Students in diverse departments often share stories with me that echo how normative these scholarly practices are, especially as disciplines seek to decolonize, diversify or address racism or heteronormativity in the field.Indigenous students push back against papers 'inspired by' Indigenous struggles for climate justice without referencing any Indigenous authors -never mind including us as collaborators, demonstrating the need to move beyond decolonizing knowledge to unsettling the terms in which knowledge is produced on stolen land (de Leeuw and Hunt, 2018).This echoes the tension May spoke of between sites of knowledge creation and sites of authority over that knowledge -the tender grounds in which struggles are formed are treated as different from the grounds of scholarship about those very struggles.
Turning to other scholar-activists with their roots in community has been a necessity -as May and I have found, it turns out we still need each other.Turning toward one another is a kind of reorientation away from knowledge practices arising in colonial power relations, as we situate our work across shared terrains of struggle, including those struggles to make sense of our lives with fleshy, messy, feelingness at the centre.We understand feminist, queer and anti-violence theorizing to be necessarily textured by grief, loss, conflict and other deeply felt realities in which we navigate what we can write about and what we should keep off the page.This intimate analytic process gives rise to epistemologies aligned with Kwakwaka'wakw witnessing methodologies (Hunt, 2018) which require us to be present with all of our senses and modes of engagement in order to become meaningfully enmeshed in relational responsibilities -embodied knowledge changes us and our own everyday geographies beyond the page.As Cahuas (2022) writes of testimonio, audiences are called upon to refuse an objective or neutral stance within oppressive systems they are also implicated in.We resist reproducing neat and tidy accounts of community dynamics that betray calls for justice from within those communities.
In the process of writing this article, valuing the fleshy conditions of meaning-making meant turning to one another in coalitional sense-making as we formed analysis in between shared meals, dog walks, committee meetings and conferences, unpacking the way we now see our histories and communities being represented in those very spaces.We might consider this a form of "kitchen table reflexivity" (Kohl and McCutcheon, 2014) in which everyday talk comprises both an analytic tool and a source of knowledge which comes to form the material and ideological site of our collaborative theorizing.These unplanned, emergent, unfiltered moments between us (and, often, our families, and the affective terrain of cultural protocol, protest, complaint, rest, and other everyday geographies) comprise the collaborative analysis that gave rise to this article.This leads us to consider how we reclaim and reorient ourselves to the knowledges nurtured in collective/community and in solidarity, which generate new concepts and theories of power that would not otherwise be possible.

May
I want to move through this question of reclaiming and reorienting myself to the knowledges nurtured in community and in solidarity by sharing spaces where I feel the vibrancy and tensions of collective solidarities.These three spaces unfolded during my time in academia as a graduate student and more recently as a faculty member.
This article is a product of one such space.Over the past year, Sarah / Tłaliłila'ogwa and I, along with colleague Onyx Sloan Morgan, reconnected with one another and have tried our best to meet and check-in regularly.We talk through our writing, our queer lives, and the challenges we encounter in our respective workplaces.And importantly, we just give each other space.
Another of these spaces was when my path crossed again with Sarah's.I went to see one of Sarah's first talks at UBC in 2015 -almost 18 years after our first meeting.I was a graduate student at the time.The room was packed and I was prepared to listen to a public lecture that followed the pattern of talks I had grown familiar with at school.I learned to present in academic spaces that we first lay out the problem the talk aims to analyze, the conceptual frameworks that will be used to analyze the problem, the analysis of the problem, then a resolution or conclusion that will let the audience know what contribution we are making to the field of study.This was the kind of talk I was expecting to hear.But, right from the start of Sarah's talk, this familiar pattern was immediately disrupted.Instead, Sarah reoriented us.She began her talk with a genealogy that intentionally and meticulously laid out who brought her to the space and whose embodied knowledges she was bringing into the space.This genealogy unfurled into her talk as living substance and theory.I had never felt this in an academic space, in a white discipline, in an ice palace.This moment has stuck with me as a moment of possibility of reorientation.And over the years, I have witnessed Sarah engage in ways that disrupt institutional logics which I am so grateful for -from the time she sat across from me during my dissertation defense as an examiner and posed questions that challenged me to return to my embodied knowledges created in struggle to be in better relation with Indigenous peoples and communities, to being with her in this article.
Like spaces I have shared with Sarah over the years, another space has been one unfolding over several years now.As a graduate student, I met a group of fellow Filipinx grad students.From different disciplines across campus, we came together to create a space for ourselves and to share stories of our experiences in disciplines that trivialized the embodied knowledges we wanted to bring to our scholarship.Dr. Dada Docot started the Philippine Studies Series at UBC -the first ever space for Filipinx graduate students on campus.We came together from different genealogies and geographies -some grew up in the Philippines and hoped that their scholarship would return to the Philippines, some of us (like myself) grew up abroad and hoped that our scholarship would mean something to the people we grew up with.For those whose work centered on their communities in the Philippines, I learned the importance of not essentializing and not flattening the people and places of the archipelago.I, in return, insisted that they not do the same to those of us living in the Filipinx diaspora.We talked through the importance of place -particularly the fact that the place we were studying was on the unceded lands of the Musqueam peoples and what responsibilities this entailed for us as Filipinx students.Wanting to hold onto the rare feeling of support and community in academia, even if we had disagreements with one another, we learned to appreciate each other's respective work and where each one of us came from and, importantly, who we brought with us within the walls of academia.Eight years after we met, I am now in the process of writing a paper with Dada and Dr. Dennis Gupa, who was part of the group.We are writing what we are calling a 'collective autoethnography' to map out how different meanings and notions of home unfold from the Philippines to its diaspora and back.
These rare spaces in the white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, and colonial ice palace of academia are, I think, the spaces most akin to what Black lesbian feminist theorist, Audre Lorde theorized as erotic.In a 1978 paper, Lorde (n.p) writes that: The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person.The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.[. ..]The erotic cannot be felt second hand.As a Black lesbian feminist, I have a particular feeling, knowledge, and understanding for those sisters with whom I have danced hard, played, or even fought.This deep participation has often been the forerunner for joint concerted actions not possible before.
These spaces are intentional, spaces where joy and fighting come forth from embodied experiences that "cannot be felt second hand" and form the common grounds for collective action.For me, the erotic is a methodology or politics of possibility, a way to appreciate deep participation and, as Lorde put it, "the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person".As Sarah so aptly put it earlier, we still need each other.This is one way we might wear away at and dismantle palaces.

Sarah
We find ourselves here in the halls of academe, bringing to life the kinds of practices that refuse to uphold the myth of the ice palace as supreme.Talking alongside May, it is clear that we are already engaged in relational processes of knowledge creation that honor the fullness of our movement across the conditions we are trying to make sense of in our work.Here, we reorient toward the land that has supported and fostered life since time immemorial, recognizing the ancestors and cosmologies that vibrantly persist, whether or not we recognize them.We are visitors here, opened up to a set of relations with which my Kwakwaka'wakw ancestors were familiar, travelling along rivers and lakes to trade camas bulbs and medicines, share stories and build kin.The inter-nation relations that have always existed here, governed by local laws and protocols, provide teachings for how to come together and to strategically create new alliances.In previous collaborations with Indigenous scholars (Hunt and Simpson, 2023) and Indigenous kin (Livingston and Hunt, 2018), I was struck -deeply changed -by the writing process, which gave me the gift of new language, new tools through which to understand how to walk in the world as a Kwakwaka'wakw scholar.Often crying on my bus ride home after co-writing sessions or holding my heart when reading comments on the latest draft, turning toward one another was viscerally distinct from other scholarly processes.Geographers Michelle Daigle and Margaret Marietta Ram ırez (2019) describe their collaboration on decolonial geographies as "constellation in formation" (79), turning toward one another to create a new language of decolonial geographies within the impossibility of "the incompatibility of decolonial geographies with colonial knowledge systems" (1).Reorienting toward one another makes the impossible possible.
One of the highlights of my time at UBC (Musqueam territories) was crossing paths with May again and witnessing the way her family and community were actively engaged in solidarity work for Indigenous sovereignty.I was invited to a fundraiser centered on Filipinx food sharing and cultural practice to build support for Indigenous people being violently criminalized and dispossessed for asserting their inherent jurisdiction over their lands and lives.Beyond the rigid constraints of the university, we shared food, met new friends, and storied our way into new coalitional possibilities.Witnessing May and her family working behind the scenes to bring this relational space into being, enacted through their own cultural practices connected to ancestral Filipinx homelands, I was reminded that, again, this is the way people have always come together to make change on the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish shorelines where the University is situated.Our ancestors would travel far distances in their canoes, gathering to be hosted in community in order to strategize for change -preparations were made by members of the host nation, getting enough fish, enough root vegetables, enough berries, enough oolichan grease, sending traders out in canoes to trade with neighbors, bringing back all the gifts that were nurtured by deeply caring for the lands and water across tens of thousands of years.This preparation work, this hosting work, this convergence unfolded with the sting of seawater, thickness of smoke from a smokehouse, the ache of arms paddling for days, the relief of being given permission to come ashore, step into deeper relation and be hosted in a good way.Coalitional spaces not only resist or refuse white supremacist capitalist patriarchy -they are, or can be, entirely uninterested in it.Turning our backs on the structures that seek to dispossess us of our own histories and life experience, we turn to one another to bring to life these coalitional practices that are ancient yet always already here.
In my own research, I have begun giving myself permission to go back to that photo I encountered in the hallways of anthropology of my great-great-grandparents.I always experienced that history as the terrain of white scholars, of entire disciplines that had the right to study, dissect, make claims, and tell me "you're wrong" -as my Anthropology professor did during my undergraduate degree.Frequently, through tears and deep breaths, I began the process of reconnecting with my great-great-grandmother Lucy Homiskanis to recuperate the knowledge she shared with Boas which has now come to circulate entirely separately from the lands and waters, the families and loved ones, where that knowledge lives (Hunt, 2023).Moving into, rather than away from, the colonial archive to reclaim her legacy, I am on shaky grounds.There are no academic classes, methods or recognized terms in which to reach out to reform embodied relations of Lucy's authority that live in the deadened pages of an archive in Philadelphia.Looking for glimpses of her face in photos from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, my body seeks out the genealogy of women and gender diverse relations that connect me all the way back through time to Kwakwaka'wakw shorelines.I want to hold her face in my hand, look into her eyes -and speak the shared elements of our names, T'łaliłi'lakw and Tłaliłila'ogwa.This is not about the ice palace, this is about what the ice palace sought and failed to replace.It did not succeed.We are still here, needing, nurturing, finding each other in spite of it all.

Conclusion: Gathering in solidarity on unceded stolen lands
Colleagues engaged in decades-long movement work remind us that networks formed in orientation to shared terrains of struggle, shared genealogy or simply a need for one another, are what sustain grassroots activist scholarship everywhere.Richa Nagar (2019) calls for scholarship created through 'radical vulnerability,' which "cannot be an individual pursuit; indeed it is meaningless without collectivity," as "the singular relearns to breathe and grow differently in the plural" (30).Nagar and her collaborators actively upend the processes through which one's power is formed via uplifting those 'in need'.Rather, the social positions on either side of the supposed divide -the academy, on one side, and the 'community of concern' on the other -are not static but alive with movement, fluidity, and vibrant resistance via their interrelation.These reformations of feminist scholarship respond to McKittrick's (2016) call to invest in "undoing the deadly yet normalized workings" (5) of colonialism and imperialism, without gesturing toward the possibility of tidily concluding knowledge creation processes in which violence is absent.Nagar's deeply felt passages combining poetry, theatre and (auto)ethnography demand to be experienced, as we are made to confront the epistemic violence inherent in the impulse to build our own identities via the voyeuristic display of others' suffering.
Thus, within and outside of this article, we seek epistemic alignment in our scholarship by actively resituating ourselves as academics within collective movement work fostered alongside our families and community members, as we reorient our efforts toward one another and the lands and genealogies of our extended relations.Embodied collective knowledges of solidarity align with Michelle Daigle's (2019) investigation of the ways Indigenous lands, peoples and knowledges are taken up in the context of reconciliation, by upholding relational geographies of responsibility "not a performance or feel-good mandate, but relations of responsibility and accountability based on Indigenous law that Indigenous peoples continue to embody, regenerate, and demand for radical and transformative change" (715).Our accountability is, first and foremost, in recognizing the agency of the lands, peoples and relations who have fostered our critical activism and analysis, which continue to be powerfully shaped through settler colonialism and racial capitalism, as well as persistent and ongoing resistance.In returning to such genealogies, we hope to appreciate borders differently than colonial borders that contain, cajole, and control.We hope to remember and reorient ourselves to the relationalities of our genealogies that honour how we are bound together, and in doing so, honour one another's accountabilities.
If "orientations are about the direction we take that puts some things and not others in our reach" (Ahmed, 2010: 245), our experience provides insight into the ways that academia positions justice for Filipinx and Indigenous women and gender diverse relatives as always already out of reach by rendering the material basis of justice an abstraction.Reorienting toward and through the "constellations" (Daigle and Ram ırez, 2018) of our embodied and collective knowledges, activations of solidarity come to be within the horizons of our families, communities and students as "differently situated peoples. ..renewing and creating futures that have always been present in their/our communities" (82).For queer Filipinx and Indigenous scholars, it is significant that this reorientation is made possible through our feeling bodies, as we shift away from defining ourselves and our terrains of struggle in relation to the personal scale of white neoliberal settler colonialism.Refusing to be defined by the terms of white experts -yes, even critical, feminist, or decolonial experts -we can instead define ourselves relationally by taking steps to be in closer proximity to one another and the messy realities of our struggles for change.We show up at funerals and weddings with food.We cry together when we experience loss or joy.We make banners alongside one another, raise funds, drive elders to gatherings, just as we support each other through the health impacts of surviving in academe.Deepening our analyses of power relationally within this affective terrain, our theorizing builds from the shared roots of our early activism rather than the ways in which we have come to matter within white settler colonial and Eurowestern geography.
writes, If matter is affected by orientations, by the ways in which bodies are directed toward things, it follows that matter is dynamic, unstable, and contingent.What matters is itself an effect of proximities: we are touched by what comes near, just as what comes near is affected by directions we have already taken.(234)