This roundtable discussion brings together Filipinx American scholars, activists, and educators committed to the work of liberatory Ethnic Studies and History in their communities across California. Guided by the spirit of reorienting subjects that have been “Othered” in Asian American Studies (including intersectional histories of solidarity between Filipinos in the Philippines, Filipinx Americans, and Palestine), discussions will be grounded in the concept of kapwa, a Filipinx framework of interconnectedness. Participants will discuss their roles in contemporary struggles to transform curriculums and develop pedagogies that make accessible the narratives of minoritized populations in the United States and beyond.

Participants will share how they engage in this struggle from their positionalities as activist-educators, union organizers, and professional historians. Moreover, Raj Desai’s formulation of Critical Kapwa as a “revolutionizing ideology, epistemology, and spirituality” that both combats “the daily manifestations of the residual hegemonic trauma” of colonization and cultivates thick solidarity to “empower the individual to operate outside of those hegemonic ideological structures” is a common theme across each participants’ work. Participants will discuss how their work demonstrates the embodiment of Critical Kapwa as a way to see themselves in the communities they serve and to protect community members from racist ideologues, gendered violence, and Zionist attacks on education.

Our roundtable participants are daily engaged in a praxis of sharing out intersectional narratives of Asian American solidarity, resistance, and radical change to communities with direct stakes in their telling. By highlighting histories that have otherwise been suppressed, diluted, or erased, our participants are actively confronting attacks on Ethnic Studies that occlude the critically significant connections linking Filipinx Americans to Third World liberation, National Democracy in the Philippines, and the ongoing struggle for Palestinian liberation in the afterlives of the Asian American Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Participants will discuss the tensions, contradictions, and conditions of possibility that emerge in the deliberate acts of kwentuhan (talk-story), collaboration, strategizing, advocacy, and co-conspiratorship. We will invite attendees to engage with each other through art, storytelling, and critical reflection so that they might learn to feel the themes of solidarity, radical love, and community building from their own positionalities.

How has education traditionally been weaponized against marginalized communities? How does an embodied Critical Kapwa allow us to identify, resist, and transform these structures of domination in education so that we might experience, as bell hooks writes, “a revolution of values” rooted in radical love? What bridges communities together and how can we mobilize historical memories to strengthen transracial, transpacific, and cross-cultural solidarities?

Our discussion will grapple with the intimate connections between the ongoing genocide in occupied Palestine, the movement for indigenous sovereignty in the Philippines, and Filipinx American diasporic organizing. It will offer responses to these questions in an attempt to reorient current organizing frameworks toward a Critical Kapwa lens that challenges existing structures of domination in education.