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 rooted in lived, racialized, and politically situated experience (Foucault, 1980; Collins, 2000). What follows is both an introduction and a declaration—of who I am, how I write and teach, and why this space exists.

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 that quietly mark certain voices as excessive, overly personal, or insufficiently “academic” (Ahmed, 2012; Collins, 2000; Smith, 2012; Tuck & Yang, 2012). These practices rarely announce themselves as censorship; instead, they shape whose knowledge is granted legitimacy, how rigor itself is defined, and which epistemologies are rendered credible within academic institutions. 

Scholars such as Cainkar (2009) and Naber (2012) further demonstrate how racialized and colonial knowledge regimes render Arab and SWANA subjects hypervisible as objects of study while simultaneously marginalizing their epistemic authority within U.S. academic and political discourse. 

For a concrete example of how my teaching was policed, read my reflection here: Academic Hazing Dressed as Evaluation: A Critical Reflection. 

Thus, I situate my work within the lineage of poets, and scholars such as Audre Lorde (1984), Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), bell hooks (1994), Patricia Hill Collins (2000), and Sara Ahmed (2017), all of whom document 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. My work is not an individual grievance, but part of an ongoing struggle over whose voices count and what forms of knowledge are allowed to matter in academia.

I do not write from a position of neutrality, nor do I aspire to. Neutrality in 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 traditions that make my work possible (hooks, 1994; Ahmed, 2017; Brown, 2018). This is not a neutral space. It is a situated one. 

Moreover, I do not seek validation through dominant metrics, but authentic meaning-making through connection and care. By dominant metrics, I refer to the narrow measures that often stand in for scholarly worth—such as citation counts, publication prestige, and institutional recognition—while overlooking the relational, pedagogical, and community-based labor that sustains teaching and learning in higher education. 

I invite readers not to agree with everything I write, but to engage with care, curiosity, and awareness of their own social positioning and privilege.

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 lover of language, art, culture (when it's not oppressive!), and trees. Above all, I am a seeker who believes 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 theorizing about Freire and social justice in the abstract 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 me, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (p. 130). In academic spaces that benefit from self-doubt and erasure, self-preservation becomes a form of quiet rebellion. Writing, for me, is both survival and offering: a way of affirming the self while extending an ethic of care through teaching and scholarship as practices of healing and resistance.

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

Writing is how I make meaning and honor 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 scholars are not simply references; they are intellectual kin.

Throughout my training, I was taught—explicitly and implicitly—to rely on theorists positioned as neutral “experts,” often grounded in Western, Eurocentric traditions presented as universal and sufficient (Collins, 2000). Only later did I come to understand how political those choices were, and how alternative epistemologies were excluded not by accident, but by design.

For example, over time, I became increasingly aware of the limits of how critical theory—particularly Marxist frameworks—is often preached in academic spaces. While this theory is effective at naming how oppression persists, it remains abstract and offers few concrete, accountable solutions for disrupting oppression in practice. I saw this most clearly in theories commonly taught as “foundational.” Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, for example, is rarely examined in relation to how it extracted and reframed Blackfoot ways of knowing while erasing their Indigenous context (Safir, 2020). This pattern of theoretical abstraction and extraction—analysis without accountability—reshaped how I understand "foundational knowledge" itself, revealing how even critical frameworks can reproduce the very power relations they claim to critique. 

Further, I recognize this same logic at work in how labor operates in academia. The intellectual, emotional, and diversity labor of BIPOC scholars—especially women—is frequently welcomed when it serves institutional needs, yet remains disconnected from recognition, full protection, or care (Flaherty, 2019). Scholarship naming these patterns helped me understand my own experiences not as personal failure, but as an institutional practice of gatekeeping (Masters-Waage et al., 2024). 

Citing scholars such as Collins and Ahmed is not a rejection of academic rigor. It is my practice of a more honest, expansive, and accountable rigor—one that refuses to dismiss harm in the name of “knowledge making.”

Teaching, Power, and Writing and Leading from the Margins

For me, writing, teaching, and leadership are not primarily about authority or institutional advancement, but about sensemaking—helping people name how power operates, how harm becomes normalized, and how alternative ways of knowing and relating become imaginable (Weick, 1995; Collins, 2000). I understand this work as a form of leadership that prioritizes ethical clarity, relational accountability, and courage over comfort (hooks, 1994; Brown, 2018; Ahmed, 2017).

My training in Anthropology first taught me that power is never neutral; it shapes whose knowledge is valued and whose labor is rendered expendable. This awareness deepened as I earned an M.A. in TESOL, where I confronted the paradox of being credentialed to teach in the language of the colonizer. I continue this inquiry as a doctoral student in Educational Leadership at Sacramento State, where my critical inquiry focuses on epistemic justice and improving assessment practices in higher education.

As a writing instructor, I see these dynamics play out clearly. Standardized English and white, middle-class norms shape what counts as “good writing,” while multilingual, narrative, and culturally grounded forms of expression are often devalued. While I do not exclude dominant conventions, I advocate for a more holistic understanding of composition—one that honors multiple ways of knowing and composing.

Sara Ahmed (2017) names the “institutional brick wall” that women of color are repeatedly expected to push against. This blog documents my own push: my efforts to make visible what institutions often prefer to overlook. Writing from the borderlands, as Anzaldúa (1987) teaches us, can transform invisibility into resistance.

As a Yemeni Arab American woman, I write from systems never designed to sustain me. I claim my identity on my own terms, understanding self-definition not as permission-seeking, but as a necessary practice of survival, resistance, and truth-telling (Lorde, 1984).

What This Space Holds

This blog is a space for critical reflection, pedagogical inquiry, and autoethnographic scholarship. It is also a space for witnessing—of teaching, learning, and living between cultures, languages, and identities. Alongside written work, I occasionally share reflections through a small podcast as another form of dialogue and connection.

Writing helps me give shape to my truth. Dialogue helps bring that truth to life. Through both, I hope to nurture spaces of care, transformation, and collective healing—from where I sit and where I stand: at the margins.