Back at the Kitchen Table: querying feminist support in the academy

This intervention is a record of a praxis of conversing, restoring, and repairing what has been ongoing between us – four early-career women of color (WOC) academics – for several years. Necessarily reductive, this praxis could be called a “conversation,” standing in for engagements both regular and flexible, transnational, on screens, over meals, an emotional space, an intellectual space, a site of support and resistance. We have called these conversations our “Kitchen Table” in gratitude to the scholars Tami Navarro, Bianca Williams, and Attiya Ahmad (Citation2013), whose pioneering account of the experiences of early-career WOC anthropologists motivated our own collaborations. Navarro, Williams, and Ahmad (Citation2013, 448) themselves use the terminology of “sitting at the Kitchen Table” in deference to the “legacy of the women of Kitchen Table Press, path-clearing feminists who challenged the often disparaging and dismissive representations of WOC in academia and mainstream media, as well as insisted on intersectionality and inclusivity.” Put differently, this intervention and our very existence as a collective is due to the labor done by WOC academics before us (Gutiérrez y Muhs et al. Citation2012; Haddix et al. Citation2016; Lyiscott et al. Citation2021; Niemann, Gutiérrez y Muhs, and González Citation2020).