Co-creating Knowledge for Anti-racist and Transnational Solidarity through Radical Practices
of Care, Hope, and Humane Urbanisms

Faranak Miraftab, College of Fine and Applied Arts; Ken Salo, College of Fine and Applied Arts; Helen Neville, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Magdalena Novoa, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Victor Font, College of Media; Teresa Barnes, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Atyeh Ashtari University of Memphis; Ricardo Nascimento UNILABE, Brazil; Efadul Huq, Smith College; Sarah Bassett, Arizona State University; Koni Benson, University of Western Cape; Greg Ruiters, University of Western Cape; Clarissa Freitas, Federal University of Ceara; Jose Ricardo Vargas de Faria, Federal University of Paraná; Giselle Tanaka, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Community Members: Rob Robinson, Partners for Dignity and Rights; Dawn Blackman, Randolph Street Community Garden; James Kilgore, First Followers; Ann Rasmus, University of YMCA.

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Our project will create non-hierarchical learning spaces for our long-time collaborators, working across campus-community and social-spatial divides, to share social justice pedagogies and digital media methods as pathways for realizing antiracist, transnational solidarities we wish to forge across global color lines. We build on decades-long relations of trust that faculty members at UIUC have nurtured with academics and community groups in the US, South Africa, and Brazil to share knowledge about everyday practices of care and reciprocity that marginalized urban communities use to struggle beyond dominant divisive lines of race, gender, class, ethnicity and nationality. We refer to such ideals as humane urbanism, where life, not profit, is centered. Using traditional action research along with emerging digital humanities methodologies, we host digital stories online through a multilingual multimedia website to gather direct narratives and counter-narratives of urban activists, and uncover how concealed daily practices of radical care and reciprocity in marginalized communities nurture hope and activate imagination of an alternative just future. The goal of this project facilitating knowledge co-production among academics and community-based organizers is to learn possible paths and pragmatic strategies toward shared ideals of transnational justice.