Why I Write Here

Before introducing myself, I want to be explicit about how and why I write in this space. This is not a conventional academic “About Me,” nor is it meant to be. I write as I teach: expansively, relationally, and with an awareness that academic institutions have long questioned and constrained forms of knowledge that emerge from lived, racialized, and politically situated experience.

Like many scholars working within feminist, decolonial, and critical traditions, my teaching and writing have been shaped by forms of academic policing that operate not only through overt critique, but through evaluative norms—norms that quietly mark certain voices as excessive, overly personal, or insufficiently “academic.” These practices rarely announce themselves as censorship. Instead, they shape whose knowledge is granted legitimacy and how rigor itself is defined.

Audre Lorde (1984), Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), bell hooks (1994), Patricia Hill Collins (2000), and Sara Ahmed (2017) have each documented how scholars who refuse disembodied neutrality—and instead write from the margins of race, language, gender, and power—are often rendered suspect within institutions that claim objectivity as their highest value. I situate my own work within this lineage not as an individual grievance, but as part of an ongoing struggle over whose voices count and what forms of knowledge are allowed to matter.

I do not write from a position of neutrality, nor do I aspire to. Neutrality within academic spaces has often functioned less as a commitment to fairness than as a shield for dominant norms. What I offer here is not objectivity in the abstract, but accountability—to my students, my communities, and the intellectual lineages that make my work possible. This is not a neutral space. It is a situated one. I invite readers not to agree with everything I write, but to engage with care, curiosity, and an awareness of their own positioning.

Who I Am

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

I began this blog in 2020 to document my journey as a first-year writing instructor and teacher–scholar in higher education. At the time, I was searching for ways to move beyond talking about Freire and social justice in theory and toward intentionally practicing those commitments in the classroom. Writing became a way to think, to witness, and to remain accountable to the values I claimed—especially within institutions that often resist such accountability.

As Audre Lorde (1984) reminds us, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (p. 130). Writing, for me, is both an act of survival and an offering. It is a way of affirming the self (myself) in a world that often denies our fullness, and of extending an ethic of care through teaching and scholarship as acts of healing, resistance, and collective possibility.

Citation, Discipline, and What We’re Taught to Value

Writing is how I make meaning and honor my lived experience. It is also how I resist the pressure to translate myself into forms that feel safe or palatable. I cite who I cite—here and throughout this blog—because their work made it possible for me, and for many others, to survive and speak within institutions that were never designed to sustain us. These writers are not simply references; they are intellectual kin.

Throughout my journey in higher education, I was taught—explicitly and implicitly—to support my claims by citing scholars my professors positioned as “experts.” At the time, this was framed as academic rigor. Only later did I begin to understand how political those choices were. These scholars were often selected not because they offered the most expansive or inclusive understandings of knowledge, but because they aligned with Western, Eurocentric, and scientific traditions that present themselves as neutral while dismissing other ways of knowing as secondary or “too political.”

I saw this clearly when we were asked to cite theorists like Vygotsky or to rely on Marxist critical theory to explain how we arrived at our current capitalist hierarchies—and then stop there. These frameworks were treated as sufficient. Rarely were we offered alternative epistemologies or reminded that Vygotsky should not be the only lens through which we understand student learning or teach children. The absence of those conversations mattered as much as what was included.

Extraction, Erasure, and “Foundational” Theory

I later began to notice similar patterns in theories presented as foundational. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, for example, is often taught as a universal theory of human development. What is rarely discussed is how Maslow’s thinking was shaped through his encounters with the Blackfoot Nation and their deeply relational ways of organizing life—knowledge he extracted, reframed through an individualistic Western lens, and stripped of its Indigenous context.

Blackfoot ways of knowing became part of Maslow’s framework, while Blackfoot people themselves disappeared from the narrative. As Shane Safir (2020) explains, this is part of a broader pattern in which Indigenous knowledge is whitewashed and absorbed into dominant theories without acknowledgment or accountability.

Learning this shifted how I understand “foundational” knowledge—not as neutral truth, but as knowledge produced through taking, silencing, and selective recognition.

Knowledge Extraction and Labor Extraction

Over time, I came to understand that this same logic shapes how labor is treated in academia—especially the labor of BIPOC scholars. Our ideas, mentoring, emotional labor, and diversity work are often welcomed when they serve institutional needs, yet disconnected from us as people. Like Indigenous knowledge in Maslow’s theory, BIPOC labor is frequently extracted and absorbed into institutions, while the people doing that work are denied the full recognition, protection, and material benefits of their contributions. Too often, we are pushed to the margins as those in positions of power maintain systems that reward comfort and mediocrity.

This is not abstract for me. I have experienced this kind of extraction at the very institutions I serve—where my labor is relied upon and praised in the abstract, while my presence, boundaries, and well-being are far less protected. I also know I am not alone. Many scholars have written about this same pattern, helping me understand my experiences not as personal failure, but as part of a broader institutional practice of gatekeeping.

My defiance, then, is not loud or careless. It is intentional. I cite scholars like Patricia Hill Collins and Sara Ahmed because they do more than contribute to a field—they interrogate how fields are built, who they serve, and who they exclude. Citing them is not a rejection of conventional rigor; it is my way of practicing a more honest, expansive, and accountable form of scholarship and rigor—one that refuses to dismiss the harm done in the name of “knowledge making.”

Teaching, Power, and Writing from the Margins

Studying Anthropology taught me that power is never neutral—it shapes whose knowledge is valued and whose voices are silenced. While earning degrees in Anthropology (B.A.) and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (M.A.) at Sacramento State, I confronted the paradox of earning credentials in the colonizer’s language while questioning its dominance, and reckoning with my own complicity within academic traditions that reproduce these hierarchies. However, this does not stop me from interrogating these hierarchies. 

I continue this work as a doctoral student in the Educational Leadership Program at Sacramento State, where my collective, critical inquiries center on epistemic justice and what it truly means to enact diversity, equity, and inclusion—particularly through assessment practices that can either reproduce harm or open possibilities for more just teaching and learning. This blog shows how I try to live those commitments through my teaching practice.

As a writing instructor, I see how standardized English and the white, middle-class norms embedded in composition curricula shape what counts as “good writing.” These systems privilege linear argumentation, an “objective” tone, and mastery of Standard American English while devaluing multilingual, narrative, and culturally grounded forms of expression. While I do not exclude these conventions, I advocate for a more holistic and fluid understanding of composition—one that honors multiple ways of knowing and communicating.

In higher education, it is easy to feel invisible—to have one’s labor absorbed without acknowledgment or care. Sara Ahmed (2017) names this experience the "institutional brick wall", one against which women of color repeatedly push (p. 137). This blog documents my own push: my efforts to make visible what institutions often prefer to overlook.

As Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) reminds us, writing from the borderlands can transform invisibility into resistance. The borderlands exist “wherever two or more cultures edge each other” (p. 3), and it is here, in these margins, that I trace the tensions, contradictions, and daily negotiations of navigating systems never designed for persistent women like me—and certainly not meant to sustain us.

As a Yemeni Arab American woman, I grapple with the limits of the term "women of color", particularly when it has been used in ways that leave Arab and SWANA women at the margins of U.S. racial and feminist conversations (Cainkar, 2009; Naber, 2012). Still, I claim this identity on my own terms. Following Audre Lorde, I understand self-definition not as permission-seeking, but as a necessary practice of survival, resistance, and truth-telling.

Like bell hooks (1994, 2003), I understand teaching as an act of love and liberation. Lorde (1984), Anzaldúa (1987), and Patricia Hill Collins (2000) teach me that transforming silence into language, crossing borders, and occupying the position of the “outsider within” can generate knowledge that challenges dominant structures and reimagines what is possible within them.

When Audre Lorde (1984) writes about confronting racism and homophobia in academic spaces, she insists that speaking out—even at the risk of isolation—is an act of survival. Similarly, Anzaldúa (1987) describes life in the borderlands as a continual negotiation of language, culture, and identity, transforming in-betweenness 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. 

I do not seek validation through dominant metrics, but meaning through authenticity, connection, and care. By dominant metrics, I mean the narrow measures that often stand in for scholarly worth—citation counts, publication prestige, and institutional recognition—while overlooking the relational, pedagogical, and community-based labor that sustains teaching and learning. In other words, I am committed to sustaining the change I seek from where I sit and where I stand: at the margins. 

What This Space Holds

This blog is a space for critical reflection, pedagogical inquiry, and autoethnographic scholarship. Like Sara Ahmed, I believe persistence itself is a feminist act. Like Bettina Love, I understand abolitionist love as an invitation to imagine collective freedom even amid constraint.

Beyond the classroom, this space is my way of witnessing—of making sense of what it means to live between cultures, languages, and identities. I also share these reflections through a small, 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, I hope to nurture spaces of tenderness, transformation, and collective healing.