Abstract
In this chapter the author draws on Black women’s storytelling/testimony, as well as Anzaldúa’s conceptions of borderlands and border-crossing to describe her experiences as a Southern Black woman pedagogue in the academy. Using imaginative and creative form, she explores issues of home and not-belonging. Woven into these explorations is an examination of the multiple locations that shape her pedagogical and curricular practice.
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Academyland, often referred to as the academy, academe, academia, or the Ivory Tower, is a perplexing place. It is in this land where intellectuals, or the “intelligentsia” (Franco, 1994, p. 360), gather to write the rules of knowledge production and epistemology. While Academyland invests greatly in appearing cosmopolitan, it shares a strong genealogical and cultural relationship to Europe. Migrants and visitors to Academyland that do not possess an inherited or at minimum adopted European affiliation often encounter great difficulty traversing its terrain.
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Edwards, K.T. (2018). Stories of Migration: Passing Through, Crossing Over, and Decolonial Transgressing in Academyland. In: Perlow, O., Wheeler, D., Bethea, S., Scott, B. (eds) Black Women's Liberatory Pedagogies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65789-9_5
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