Alexandra Allwei
Biographic Data
| ID | 105728 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexandra Allwei |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexandra |
| FAMILY NAME | Allwei |
| SIGNATURE | ALLWEI A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Michigan State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4216-798X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 17 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Confronting Institutional Complicity
This article explores the roles and contributions of US faculty in campus Palestine solidarity movements, focusing on the authors’ experiences as faculty organizing for divestment at Michigan State University. We connect these efforts with university students’ Palestine solidarity organizing and demands as well as other internationalist solidarity movements at Michigan State University beginning in the 1960s. We outline findings from a faculty-au…
I hate that I didn’t know this”
K9 carcerality and coloniality
Animals are common characters in children’s literature and media, often serving as proxies or allegories for humans. Authors and illustrators anthropomorphize animal characters, using cues to represent race, gender, or class. This paper examines how oppressive systems of settler coloniality, carcerality, species domination, and white supremacy shape representations of police dogs in children’s literature and media, impacting young people’s lived …
Addressing imperial evasion
Despite the pervasive impact of US imperialism, it is often ignored in US schools and teacher preparation programs.This paper introduces the concept of imperial evasion, which refers to the process of ignoring and denying imperialism and its effects.The authors argue that it is imperative that educators work to interrogate imperialist ideologies through curricula, and prepare future educators to disrupt such ideologies, policies, and practices in…
Conquistador–settler grammars
This article explores the coloniality of language from decolonial feminist and critical ecological linguistic frameworks, centering and building on the notion of conquistador–settler grammars. Through moments in our research in Chile, Guatemala, and the United States, we analyze the multiple ways conquistador–settler grammars are embedded in language (teacher) education and enact violence and erasure. In particular, through the cycles of critical…
Think Tanks as Stenographers of the State
I Think About It in Everything I Do Now”
The call is coming from the house’
We have a great monster in front of us’
I Feel Like I Belong, and I Know Why I Belong
This paper draws on qualitative interview data with student-residents and alumni of an undergraduate residential learning community at a large U.S. university. The authors bring together the frameworks of intersectionality and counterspace to explore how student-residents experienced the intersectional framework of the residential learning community. This paper outlines how the community served as an intersectional identity-affirming counterspace…
The right not to live in fear
Drawing on the experiences and demands of South Korean queer and climate youth activists and Maya Chuj youth organisers, this paper shows the limits and containment ideologies undergirding inter/national human rights frameworks. While positioned as a universal ideal for alleviating suffering, youth organisers’ experiences demonstrate how these frameworks are mobilised by neoliberal colonial nation-states as neoliberal colonial tools of containmen…
“Going for Broke”
Embodying James Baldwin’s call to “go for broke” in the face of the current “dangerous time” and ongoing “determined resistances,” this article argues for an intersectional social justice praxis for preparing and supporting teacher candidates and novice teachers to work with diverse students. We posit a sustained intersectional social justice framework for teaching, coaching, and mentoring that requires reckoning with the foundations of the field…
Where We Are Within That
This article centers two "zones of sovereignty" that Maya Chuj youth organizers and educators in Guatemala and the United States created from within and across nation-states and settler colonial projects. It highlights how these spaces supported Chuj young people and educators as they navigated and (re)imagined relationality and belonging across transnational and diaspora spaces in ways that refused and challenged settler colonial and imperialist…
Counter-Pedagogies of Cruelty across Abya Yala
This paper is a call for "counter-pedagogies of cruelty" and memory as counteractions to colonial technologies of violence, erasure, loss, and linear spatio-temporalities and notions of "progress." In this paper, the authors move across geographic locations in Abya Yala to expose and unpack overlapping and often unnamed colonialities, violences, and racialized border logics. Centering a series of moments from our work and engagements in the natio…
“Too Dangerous to Help”
Global, (trans)national, and local moments frame this article and highlight how white supremacy and modern/colonial processes and logics operate in and through Guatemala, the Chuj nation, and Chuj youth’s lives, organizing work, and educational spaces. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research with Chuj youth and educators, I argue that education, development, and Indigenous youth are at once targets of these racialized colonial logics and im…
Tracing the Arc
This article calls attention to the shifting conceptualizations of belonging and inclusion at universities in the U.S. through shifting framings of “educational disadvantage” and “diversity”. Historically these concepts have been used in various and shifting ways to think about the “Other” and to determine the lines of inclusion and exclusion to access to higher education spaces. This article uses a leading public university, the University of Wi…
Behind the photos and the tears
This critical article provides insights into how media frames influence our understandings of school reform in urban spaces by examining images of students during the 2013 school closings in Chicago. Using visual framing analysis and informed by framing theory and critiques of neoliberalism we seek to explore two questions: (1) What role do media images play in the framing of public education in urban spaces?; and (2) What do media images of stud…
Counter-Pedagogies of Cruelty across Abya Yala
This paper is a call for "counter-pedagogies of cruelty" and memory as counteractions to colonial technologies of violence, erasure, loss, and linear spatio-temporalities and notions of "progress." In this paper, the authors move across geographic locations in Abya Yala to expose and unpack overlapping and often unnamed colonialities, violences, and racialized border logics. Centering a series of moments from our work and engagements in the natio…
Behind the photos and the tears
This critical article provides insights into how media frames influence our understandings of school reform in urban spaces by examining images of students during the 2013 school closings in Chicago. Using visual framing analysis and informed by framing theory and critiques of neoliberalism we seek to explore two questions: (1) What role do media images play in the framing of public education in urban spaces?; and (2) What do media images of stud…
Tracing the Arc
This article calls attention to the shifting conceptualizations of belonging and inclusion at universities in the U.S. through shifting framings of “educational disadvantage” and “diversity”. Historically these concepts have been used in various and shifting ways to think about the “Other” and to determine the lines of inclusion and exclusion to access to higher education spaces. This article uses a leading public university, the University of Wi…
Think Tanks as Stenographers of the State
The call is coming from the house’
We have a great monster in front of us’
I Feel Like I Belong, and I Know Why I Belong
This paper draws on qualitative interview data with student-residents and alumni of an undergraduate residential learning community at a large U.S. university. The authors bring together the frameworks of intersectionality and counterspace to explore how student-residents experienced the intersectional framework of the residential learning community. This paper outlines how the community served as an intersectional identity-affirming counterspace…
Where We Are Within That
This article centers two "zones of sovereignty" that Maya Chuj youth organizers and educators in Guatemala and the United States created from within and across nation-states and settler colonial projects. It highlights how these spaces supported Chuj young people and educators as they navigated and (re)imagined relationality and belonging across transnational and diaspora spaces in ways that refused and challenged settler colonial and imperialist…
Tracing the Arc
This article calls attention to the shifting conceptualizations of belonging and inclusion at universities in the U.S. through shifting framings of “educational disadvantage” and “diversity”. Historically these concepts have been used in various and shifting ways to think about the “Other” and to determine the lines of inclusion and exclusion to access to higher education spaces. This article uses a leading public university, the University of Wi…
Behind the photos and the tears
This critical article provides insights into how media frames influence our understandings of school reform in urban spaces by examining images of students during the 2013 school closings in Chicago. Using visual framing analysis and informed by framing theory and critiques of neoliberalism we seek to explore two questions: (1) What role do media images play in the framing of public education in urban spaces?; and (2) What do media images of stud…
“Too Dangerous to Help”
Global, (trans)national, and local moments frame this article and highlight how white supremacy and modern/colonial processes and logics operate in and through Guatemala, the Chuj nation, and Chuj youth’s lives, organizing work, and educational spaces. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research with Chuj youth and educators, I argue that education, development, and Indigenous youth are at once targets of these racialized colonial logics and im…
Counter-Pedagogies of Cruelty across Abya Yala
This paper is a call for "counter-pedagogies of cruelty" and memory as counteractions to colonial technologies of violence, erasure, loss, and linear spatio-temporalities and notions of "progress." In this paper, the authors move across geographic locations in Abya Yala to expose and unpack overlapping and often unnamed colonialities, violences, and racialized border logics. Centering a series of moments from our work and engagements in the natio…
“Going for Broke”
Embodying James Baldwin’s call to “go for broke” in the face of the current “dangerous time” and ongoing “determined resistances,” this article argues for an intersectional social justice praxis for preparing and supporting teacher candidates and novice teachers to work with diverse students. We posit a sustained intersectional social justice framework for teaching, coaching, and mentoring that requires reckoning with the foundations of the field…
Where We Are Within That
This article centers two "zones of sovereignty" that Maya Chuj youth organizers and educators in Guatemala and the United States created from within and across nation-states and settler colonial projects. It highlights how these spaces supported Chuj young people and educators as they navigated and (re)imagined relationality and belonging across transnational and diaspora spaces in ways that refused and challenged settler colonial and imperialist…
K9 carcerality and coloniality
Animals are common characters in children’s literature and media, often serving as proxies or allegories for humans. Authors and illustrators anthropomorphize animal characters, using cues to represent race, gender, or class. This paper examines how oppressive systems of settler coloniality, carcerality, species domination, and white supremacy shape representations of police dogs in children’s literature and media, impacting young people’s lived …
Addressing imperial evasion
Despite the pervasive impact of US imperialism, it is often ignored in US schools and teacher preparation programs.This paper introduces the concept of imperial evasion, which refers to the process of ignoring and denying imperialism and its effects.The authors argue that it is imperative that educators work to interrogate imperialist ideologies through curricula, and prepare future educators to disrupt such ideologies, policies, and practices in…
Conquistador–settler grammars
This article explores the coloniality of language from decolonial feminist and critical ecological linguistic frameworks, centering and building on the notion of conquistador–settler grammars. Through moments in our research in Chile, Guatemala, and the United States, we analyze the multiple ways conquistador–settler grammars are embedded in language (teacher) education and enact violence and erasure. In particular, through the cycles of critical…
Think Tanks as Stenographers of the State
I Think About It in Everything I Do Now”
The call is coming from the house’
We have a great monster in front of us’
I Feel Like I Belong, and I Know Why I Belong
This paper draws on qualitative interview data with student-residents and alumni of an undergraduate residential learning community at a large U.S. university. The authors bring together the frameworks of intersectionality and counterspace to explore how student-residents experienced the intersectional framework of the residential learning community. This paper outlines how the community served as an intersectional identity-affirming counterspace…
The right not to live in fear
Drawing on the experiences and demands of South Korean queer and climate youth activists and Maya Chuj youth organisers, this paper shows the limits and containment ideologies undergirding inter/national human rights frameworks. While positioned as a universal ideal for alleviating suffering, youth organisers’ experiences demonstrate how these frameworks are mobilised by neoliberal colonial nation-states as neoliberal colonial tools of containmen…
Confronting Institutional Complicity
This article explores the roles and contributions of US faculty in campus Palestine solidarity movements, focusing on the authors’ experiences as faculty organizing for divestment at Michigan State University. We connect these efforts with university students’ Palestine solidarity organizing and demands as well as other internationalist solidarity movements at Michigan State University beginning in the 1960s. We outline findings from a faculty-au…
I hate that I didn’t know this”
Political science (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Critical Race Theory in Education (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Colonialism (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Pedagogy (5 works) · Social science (5 works)