Sibling CoTravelers

We are the Sibling Cotravelers, Alliyah, Ariel, Devan, Kerry, Jeanette, Maya, and Richa, who have emerged from the class of SWG 300: Feminist Ways of Knowing taught by Richa at Smith College. Throughout the Fall 2024 semester, we embarked on a journey together rooted in collectivism, care, and the labors of unlearning and relearning. As a classroom-based community, we have attempted to overcome a “feeling of falseness” (Kerry)—one perpetuated by the limitations of a standardized academic space—through collaboration, collective grieving, and sharing knowledge in a way that challenges the sterilization or elimination of emotion, embodied truths, and non-academic forms of knowledge from our education. We have done so with the intention of coming to a deeper understanding about what effective community organizing across unequal worlds takes, and what kinds of practices we must continuously evolve to hold together a movement or a struggle. As a class that gradually learned to become a caring community, we have immersed ourselves in difficult concepts, conversations, and texts; we have explored ideas and practices of co-authorship and worked to challenge singular notions of ownership of knowledge and authority over subjects; and we have learned about the risks and rewards of radical vulnerability: a commitment to ourselves and to one another to internalize a shared struggle, to surrender our egos in ways that can allow us to dream and walk together, and to determine what it takes to be/come with a movement in entirety—in “belly, mind, body, and being” (Richa).