Lettering Trust: Theorising Women of Colour (WOC) as Knowledge Producers in Finnish Academia and the Nordics

Session conveners: Aleida Luján Pinelo aleida.a.lujanpinelo@utu.fi,
Dionysia Kang dionysia.kang@abo.fi,
Kolar Aparna kolar.aparna@helsinki.fi,
Yulia Dergacheva yulia.y.dergacheva@utu.fi

Session description

This is a call for letters from and to WOCs in Nordic academia to dialogue about our roles as writers and knowledge producers. We draw inspiration from Gloria Anzaldúa’s letter “Speaking In Tongues: A Letter To 3rd World Women Writers”, viewing letter writing as an intimate and relational act to address the struggles of WOC,  re-member and build on the works of predecessors. Lettering trust is a way of communicating with each other, re-membering, and acknowledging our genealogies in ethical ways that resist epistemic injustices.

In this call, we define ‘WOC’ as a political concept and praxis emerging from lived experiences as intersectional, diverse and fluid – linked to phenotypical racism but not exclusively. We situate such praxis in the diversity of gender experiences, considering heterocentric gender binary as colonial violence.  WOCs experiences are unique in the intersection of racism, patriarchy, misogyny, colonialism, and class oppression, amongst other axes.

Using letters, we explore how epistemic injustices structurally betray, neglect, tokenise and compromise WOC’s trust and solidarity. In this call, we explore what memory/knowledge is held by our letters and why letter-ing matter to our many tongues, especially from the peculiar location of Finland and/or the Nordics against the triple, quadruple oppressions our bodies write against. 

Eurocentric and patriarchal traditions of knowledge production tend to stonewall, conditionally listen to and tokenise WOCs as knowledge producers. Trinh Minh-ha (1989; p. 104) describes WOCs are ‘immediately seen as betraying either man, her community or women herself’ when taking up a feminist fight as Euro-American systems of dualistic reasoning pit anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles against one another. The non-recognition of WOC as knowledge producers and their dynamic and heterogenous knowledge fosters precarity and abandonment when WOC deviate from imposed categorical boxes. Hence, we use Letters and Lettering as a way to detach from the colonial-patriarchal conventions of knowledge production imposed upon us. We reject being essentialised as homogeneous, powerless ‘Third World Women’ victimhood or culturalist generalisation that deny our epistemic plurality and relationalities (Mohanty, 1984; p.338). As Barbara Christian (1987, p. 52) writes, “People of color have always theorized — but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic (…) our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking”. 

We are particularly interested in discussing about: 

• How do WOC sense, live, and experience processes of knowledge production in the neoliberal Nordic context? 
• How are WOC knowledges situated, dismissed or co-opted in the sphere of neoliberal knowledge production? 
• How can WOC legacies of knowledge production in the Nordics guide the immediate struggles WOC face today? 
• How can we ethically navigate our complicated, imperfect, or difficult relationships while acknowledging that not all of us bear the same responsibilities, burdens, or capabilities within those relationships?
• How can letter(ing) serve as a record of, and memory, of WOC producing knowledge who came before, along and after us?

Format of letter submission and roundtable participation

We invite WOC researchers, writers, and activists in the Nordics to submit a letter addressed from and/or to WOC (max. 500 words, in pdf/word docx. format). This includes cisgender women, trans women, non-binary people, and Global South and Indigenous gender identities. People within and beyond academia, without disciplinary restrictions, are welcome to participate; including those who left Nordic academia. 

We welcome all forms (e.g. signs, prose/poetry, audio-visual), especially knowledges considered outside the “normal” of academia.

After submitting one’s letter, the organisers will contact writers with more information about the roundtable. The roundtable format is an on-site closed, communal participatory roundtable; presenting space for dialogue, convergence and care, to theorise/re-member otherwise neglected knowledge. The session is designed as a closed session as we prioritise the facilitation of a safer and restful space for WOCs to feel secure in sharing insights that may be personal, at the same time reducing burden of WOC having to educate about underrepresented experiences and preventing WOCs being subjects of trauma porn consumption. Participants will engage in discussion and activities surrounding 1) the dynamics of being a WOC in knowledge production spaces, and 2) systems and technologies of othering WOC in knowledge production. If you are unable to attend in person, you are also welcome to send a letter, someone can read your letter aloud during the session so that your voice is still part of the gathering. The session will close with discussing future aspirations emerging from the session.