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Theme

Positionality

Where I stand determines what I can see, and what I will miss unless I check.

Journal entries

Milestones

Open questions

Projects

EDOC 7120 · Global Histories and Politics in Education · Fall 2026 · Week 6

History and Evolution of Neurodiversity as a Concept and Political Tool

A co-presentation with Diana Gaukel tracing neurodiversity from 18th-century institutionalization through Buck v. Bell, IDEA, and the self-advocacy movement, into decolonizing critiques and present-day school practice — closing with positionality and a norms exercise for the room.

Reading & influences

Book · bell hooks

Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

Hooks names the move from silence into speech as an act of resistance — "talking back" to authority as daring to have an opinion. I read this as the scholarly version of my own story: I found my voice after fifty, and it still costs something every time I use it. Essential for the voice-and-silence thread.

Book · Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, Jill Mattuck Tarule

Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind

Maps how women experience themselves as knowers — including "silence," a position where women feel voiceless, deaf to their own thinking, and subject to external authority. It gave me a framework for what I lived: the years of listening were not empty; they were a way of knowing I had to grow through, not just out of.

Book · Tillie Olsen

Silences

Olsen catalogues the silences imposed on writers — especially women, especially mothers — by the structure of their lives: the cooking, the listening, the caring that consumes the hours a voice requires. It is the literary evidence for what I felt in my own family structure. Silence is not an absence; it is something done to people.

Article · H. Richard Milner IV

Race, Culture, and Researcher Positionality: Working Through Dangers Seen, Unseen, and Unforeseen

This is the methodological spine of my dissertation. Researching the self, then the self in relation to others, then shifting from self to system — it is why the study is a self-study of my own classroom rather than an audit of somebody else's. The dangers I am least likely to see are my own.

Article · Luigi Esposito & Victor Romano, The Western Journal of Black Studies

Benevolent Racism: Upholding Racial Inequality in the Name of Black Empowerment

The theoretical name for the part of racialized rigor I find hardest to say out loud. Harm delivered sincerely, as help, by people who would fail any test of explicit bias. "I'm hard on him because the world will be" is a sentence I have said myself. I need to be able to critique it without pretending I stood outside it.

Website · Jill Morey

Research Portfolio (ResearchGate)

My own growing body of work in progress. Keeping it here as a placeholder and a promise — the citation list on this page should eventually end with things I wrote.