Research as cultural activism
“Cultural activisms rework, revisit, recite, and re-cite our cultures of origin, our cultures of choice, our hoped-for cultures and the overlapping of these cultures.
We live and write and think and play and paint and draw and dance and sculpt and desire and cry and scream and hope and pray not only to undermine oppressive foundations,
but also to create and nurture living, exciting, sometimes unforeseen realities.”
— Anne Mamary & Gertrude Gonzalez, Cultural Activisms
My Cultural activisms
In summer 2023, I led a Reimagining Whiteness Community Study as part of an M.A. program in depth psychology with a specialization in community, liberation, Indigenous and ecological psychologies. The research is a story about 26 co-researchers from the U.S. and Europe who came together to change the conversation about whiteness from the usual anti-modernity perspective of seeing and uprooting whiteness to a counter-modernity perspective of composting whiteness and reimagining what’s planted next. They convened through focus groups, interviews, and an autoethnography-inspired decolonial pilgrimage to North Macedonia. Together they shared stories, identified emergent themes, and/or co-designed podcast episodes to share their findings with the public.
This research reflected the curiosities of where I was at on my anti-racism journey at the time: what is being planted and growing and emerging in those small clearings of land within our heads, hearts, bodies, souls, relationships, and systems where whiteness has been uprooted and composted? What is growing in the place of whiteness? What are the pluriversal actualities already taking root?
Insights and stories from this study inspired season 1 of the Reimagining Worlds Podcast. Season 1 is called Reimagining Worlds Without Whiteness.
As a current doctoral candidate in depth psychology, with a specialization in community, liberation, Indigenous, and ecological studies, my doctoral research focuses on reawakening ancestral roots as anti-racist practice. Stay tuned for my published dissertation! Anticipated December 2026.