Price: $39.95
Page Count: 248
Publication Date: September 2025
ISBN: 978-1-77258-550-6
BLURBS
Home(place): Honouring, (Re)membering and (Re)storying the Process of Matriarchal Worlding as Kinship is a powerful offering. Edited by Jennifer Brant, Whitneé L. Garrett-Walker, and Qui Alexander, it takes up bell hooks’ idea of homeplace as a space where care, resistance, and healing happen, even in the face of violence and loss.This book brings together voices that reflect on what it means to build and protect home on our own terms. The contributors speak from lived experience, memory, and community. They explore how home is shaped by colonization and racism, and how matriarchal knowledge, kinship, and radical care can guide us toward something different.For students, educators, and anyone committed to social justice, this collection opens up a space to think with others. It reminds us that home is not only where we live, but how we live with one another. It teaches that the work of unlearning violence begins in the places we make together.
- J. Maki Motapanyane, Ph.D., Department of Women's Studies, Mount Saint Vincent University
Amidst current heightened conditions of structurally induced precarity, this is a timely and necessary contribution towards possibilities for creating more livable, reciprocal and collective worlds, at multiple scales within and beyond the places and spaces of formal education. The contributions brilliantly co-theorize and extend bell hooks’ conception of Homeplace threaded through with rich insights on the kinds of care, imaginaries, relationality, and curiosity that are necessarily towards enacting Homeplace as a site of livingness, resistance and liberation.
- Dr. Fikile Nxumalo, Associate Professor, OISE, University of Toronto
Introduction
Opening Piece : home air
Section 1: Resisting Violence and Honoring Homeplace
1 : Little Corners, Little Chairs: When Black Girls Create Spaces
2 : Constructing an Oppositional Gaze: An Autoethnographic Use of Photography to (Re)Conceptualize Black Girl Imagery
3 : Kitchen Tables, Libraries, and Bookstores: The Geography of Black Women’s Literary Kinship
4 : Re-Claiming and Re-Learning Indigenous Girlhoods
Section 2: Healing and Re-storying Home
5 : Rituals of Soil and Seeds: Black Queer Collective Mothering as Worldmaking
6 : Embodied and Emotional Ritual Logics
7 : Mothers of the Olive Tree
8 : Kith and Kindle: Queer Wahkohtowin for Black-Indigenous Relations in Literature
Section 3: Collective Care and Ethical Relationality in Education
9 : Cultivating Black Radical Love, Healing & Joy: How Three Black Women Nurture Homeplace in Education for Liberation
10 : Building a “Home-Place” in STEM: How Women of Color Educators Cultivate Spaces of Hope, Healing and Transformative Resistance for Students of Color
11 : Decolonial Abolitionist Kinship as a Liberatory Praxis in the Academy
“Is you down?”: Tensions and Contradictions in the Work
Contributors
Dr. Whitneé L. Garrett-Walker (she/her) is a Black, Indigenous and Queer woman (enrolled member of the Natchitoches Tribe of Louisiana). As a scholar-practitioner with over a decade of service to urban public schools in Oakland and San Francisco, California, Dr. Garrett-Walker actively engages liberatory frameworks to understand the context, self-definition, healing, and opportunities for solidarity between and among Black and Indigenous women educators and administrators. Whitneé believes deeply in collective liberation and solidarities beginning with the intentional centering of love and Land. Dr. Garrett-Walker is the Assistant Dean of Credentialing and Partnerships at the University of San Francisco, School of Education.
Dr. Qui Alexander is an Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Trans Studies in Curriculum and Pedagogy at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Their teaching and scholarship centers Black trans studies, abolition & transformative justice and education outside of formal school contexts. Grounded in their experiences as a community organizer, Qui views their scholarship as a place to articulate the cultural work they do in relation to their communities.
Dr. Jennifer Brant belongs to the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk Nation) with family ties to Six Nations of the Grand River Territory and Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory. Jennifer is the founding director of the Indigenous literatures lab and an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Jennifer teaches about Indigenous maternal pedagogies, Black and Indigenous feminist solidarities, and Indigenous literatures and writes to honour Indigenous maternal histories, and storied lives. Jennifer positions Indigenous literatures as powerful narratives that humanize Indigenous peoples through multiple calls for justice, and accountability, and extends this revolutionary body of work to inspire resistance, rebirth and renewal.
Jasmine Pham is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Jasmine’s research explores the experiences of Chinese Canadian students in Mandarin-English bilingual programs across Alberta, particularly in relation to Sinophobia, the Model Minority Myth, and anti-Asian racism. Her work draws upon Critical Race Theory in Education, Asian Critical Theory, and Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Pedagogy.
