My name is Fairuze Ahmed Ramirez, though most know me as Rosie. I’m a mother, wife, and lifelong learner—a cook, a lover of trees, language, art, and culture; that is, when culture is not oppressive. Above all, I’m a seeker who believes that language can connect us through empathy and shared humanity.

I started this blog in 2020 to document my journey as an educator seeking to put into practice the critical theories I studied in graduate school—to move beyond conversation about Freire and social justice and intentionally apply those ideas in the classroom.

This space also exists, as Audre Lorde (1984) reminds me, to affirm the self (myself) in a world that often denies our fullness: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (p. 130). I extend this ethic of care through my teaching and scholarship, treating both as acts of healing, resistance, and collective possibility.

I have always been drawn to questions of power—how people and institutions exercise it, hoard it, and waste it. Anthropology taught me that power is never neutral; it shapes whose knowledge is valued, whose labor is visible, and whose voices are silenced. As I studied how systems harm—and earned an M.A. in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages—I confronted a deep paradox: I was earning a professional degree in the colonizer’s language.

Pursuing degrees in Anthropology (B.A.) and TESOL (M.A.), both from Sacramento State, deepened this awareness and taught me to stay curious, humble, and awake to the patterns that sustain inequity—even as I recognized my own participation in the very systems I sought to challenge. I continue this exploration as a doctoral student in the Educational Leadership Program at Sacramento State, where my work centers on what it truly means to enact diversity, equity, and inclusion—particularly as it relates to epistemic justice and the transformative potential of teaching and learning.

In higher education, it is easy to feel invisible—to have one’s labor absorbed without acknowledgment or care—a reality Sara Ahmed (2017) calls “the institutional brick wall” against which women of color repeatedly push (p. 137). This blog documents my own push—my efforts to make visible what institutions prefer to overlook. Yet, as Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) teaches, creating and writing from the borderlands can transform invisibility into resistance, where “the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other” (p. 3). It is here, in these margins, that I trace the tensions, contradictions, and daily negotiations of navigating a system that was never designed for persistent women like me—and certainly not meant to sustain them.

My experience echoes those of many women of color who came before me—scholars, poets, and educators who sought belonging and justice within systems still learning how to live their values. Like hooks (1994, 2003), I understand teaching as an act of love and liberation, a way to imagine freedom within spaces not built for us. Lorde (1984) reminds me that transforming silence into language and action is a form of survival, while Anzaldúa (1987) and Patricia Hill Collins (2000) teach me that border-crossing and “outsider within” perspectives generate knowledge that challenges dominant structures.

For instance, when Audre Lorde (1984) writes about confronting racism and homophobia in academic spaces, she insists that speaking out about these injustices—even when one risks isolation—is an act of survival. Similarly, Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) describes living in the Borderlands as a process of constantly negotiating language, culture, and identity, transforming that in-between position into creative power. Here, I invite readers to bear witness to my own creative power—my refusal to remain silent through a labor of love: a deep love for reading, writing, and learning. This is a practice of reading, writing, and learning that seeks not validation through dominant metrics, but meaning through authenticity, connection, and care. I embody what Patricia Hill Collins (2000) calls the “outsider within”—a position that, while shaped by marginality within predominantly white institutions, enables me to gain critical insight into power and knowledge. Together, their works paved the way for me, offering the language and vision to name what it means to live and teach from the margins, and to recognize that such a position can be a site of power, creativity, and transformation.

As a first-year writing instructor navigating higher education as an underrepresented teacher-scholar, I observe how dominant systems—such as standardized English and the white, middle-class norms embedded in composition curricula—continue to shape what constitutes “good writing.” These systems privilege linear argumentation, “objective” tone, and mastery of Standard American English while devaluing multilingual, narrative, and culturally grounded forms of expression. While I do not exclude these long-standing traditional norms, I push for a more holistic and fluid understanding of composition—one that embraces both the artist and the scientist in ourselves. In my teaching, I validate code-meshing, storytelling, and community-based literacies as equally rigorous practices that embody what Lorde, Anzaldúa, and Collins describe: transforming silence into language, crossing borders of discourse, and using outsider perspectives to challenge academic gatekeeping.

And, like Sara Ahmed (2017), I believe persistence itself is a feminist act—a refusal to give up on the possibility of institutions becoming what they claim to be. As Bettina Love (2019) argues, to teach and lead with abolitionist love is to believe in collective freedom even amid constraint.

While I recognize that not everyone can see the world through my eyes—and that many cannot fully perceive how whiteness and the legacies of colonialism continue to shape our educational systems—I strive to make these forces visible. Naming these patterns is not an act of cynicism but one of responsibility: to remain awake, to teach with awareness, and to live and lead with intention. Guided by critical and decolonial perspectives, including but not limited to the works of Freire (2000), Fanon (1963), and Mignolo (2011), I seek to create learning spaces—whether in the classroom or on this page—that honor multiple ways of knowing while nurturing curiosity, courage, and care.

Beyond the classroom, this blog is my way of witnessing—of making sense of what it means to live between cultures, languages, and identities as a Yemeni Arab American woman. I also share these reflections through a small (and sometimes sporadic) podcast—a space for honest conversation and moments of connection with myself and with anyone who wishes to listen. Writing helps me give shape to my truth; dialogue helps me bring that truth to life. Through both writing and dialogue, I hope to nurture spaces of tenderness, transformation, and collective healing.