I. Opening: Five Years of Liberate Your Research (LYR)

It feels like just yesterday when I set up my laptop in the corner of my bedroom during the pandemic and held my first Liberate Your Research workshop. I had spent decades documenting the struggles underrepresented scholars face in moving their projects forward in the face of academic gatekeeping, hyper-scrutiny, tokenism, and devaluing. I wanted to create a space for putting urgent, bold, and invaluable projects into the world….the very projects that so often get stifled, shut down, or sidelined.

The rise of online workshops during the pandemic opened the door to try something different: an alternative academic space, outside the boundaries of departments and institutions, where we could move our projects forward together. Those early workshops were more free-flowing, almost experimental. I invited people in directly rather than through institutions, and that freedom let participants teach me what they most needed. Their needs shaped the curriculum that eventually became the backbone of Liberate Your Research.

At first, I imagined the focus would remain squarely on writing…. finishing dissertations, tenure books, and other career-defining projects, but as participants began sharing their struggles, something more profound emerged. Writing challenges couldn’t be separated from the psychic and emotional toll of academic violence: imposter syndrome, self-doubt, anger, and profound isolation.

The alchemy of the workshops came in naming those struggles together. The moment participants realized, I’m not alone in this, self-blame gave way to structural critique, clarity returned, and space opened for grounded, unapologetic writing.

As I reflect on the past five years, one question guides me: What have these years of collective writing and resistance taught us, now that state violence overshadows our daily lives and threatens our ability to think, speak, and write?

II. The Enduring Ruptures in Higher Ed

These days, we hear constant talk of a “crisis in higher education.” But whether you experience it as such depends on how you are positioned within the university. The enduring ruptures of systemic violence have shaped the experiences of scholars of color since the very beginning.  Indeed, institutions of higher learning have benefited from enslavement, the seizure of Native lands, and the criminalization of scholars of color by gatekeepers, pressure groups, and government authorities.

Focusing on the attacks of the present administration alone risks centering only those fields now under fire, such as the sciences losing funding, while erasing the longstanding closures and defunding of race, gender, language, and cultural studies. Crisis has always been unevenly distributed.

Which brings me to the lesson at the heart of this blog: if a crisis is ongoing, we don’t need to strive for new strategies. We need to double down on the ones we’ve already developed.

The tools that emerged in the early days of Liberate Your Research – shaped by participants themselves – remain some of the most powerful ways I know to sustain both scholarship and resistance. Here are three of the strategies that matter most right now.

III. The Framework: Three Interconnected Strategies

The first strategy that emerged in Liberate Your Research is what I call regrounding. At first, I thought of this as simply making space for the emotional struggles that underlie writing blocks (imposter syndrome, self-doubt, the impact of non-belonging) but over time, I’ve come to see regrounding as something more layered. It isn’t just “working through emotions.” It’s a political practice of refusing to ignore the toll that academic and state violence takes on our capacity to write, think, and create.

In LYR, what surfaces again and again is that writing blocks rarely come from the writing itself. They come from the exhaustion of carrying isolation, from the constant questioning of whether one’s work will be taken seriously, from the feeling of being unmoored in spaces that refuse belonging. These struggles are compounded by the pressures outside the university walls – deportation threats, bans on healthcare, the devastation in Palestine, climate grief, and militarized policing. All of this filters into the act of writing, shaping what feels possible to put on the page.

Regrounding is the practice of pausing to see what we are carrying before we try to force words onto the page. It asks: Where is my attention going? What thoughts am I rehearsing? Am I writing from a place of fear or self-defeat? By taking stock, we create the spaciousness to shift how we show up and anchor ourselves differently inside the struggles.

When we ignore this work and push through in a state of demoralization, our writing bears the imprint of that harm. But when we reground, new thoughts and emotions begin to emerge. Possibilities open. What began as a writing tool has become, in this moment, a survival strategy, a way to keep our voices present and our projects moving even while the weight of compounded crises bears down.

The second strategy that emerged in Liberate Your Research is affirming gut-level ideas unapologetically, outside of academic gatekeeping. This practice matters because so many of us are writing in environments that feel increasingly precarious, where entire fields of study are delegitimized, and our presence is constantly questioned. It is not easy to develop creative ideas when the structures around us are designed to shut them down.

In my workshops, I’ve seen what happens when scholars step away from writing “for the gatekeepers” and instead affirm what matters to them at the gut level. The shift can be startling. Someone who came in saying they were writing about gentrification among Black communities left recognizing they were really documenting genocide. Another who began by framing their project as self-expression left, declaring that they were writing about the role of public art in ending fascism. These transformations are not accidents. They happen when scholars claim the ideas that feel most urgent to them, without apology or self-censorship.

This transformation cannot be reduced to simply ‘silencing the inner critic’ that popular writing advice often talks about. In fact, I hesitate to use that phrase at all, because what I am describing is not just inner. It is what I call the structural critic, the voice produced by repeated messages of exclusion and scrutiny. It is the concern that one’s work will be dismissed as unscholarly, too radical, or threatening, and the knowledge that such dismissal could have real consequences for job security or career advancement.

Thinkers like Fanon and Baldwin named this dynamic long ago: the way white structures create shame and self-blame, and how liberation depends on forging new identities outside the white gaze. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney describe the university as a carceral space that polices intellectual thought. And as Patricia Hill Collins reminds us, Black feminist epistemology is rooted in collective experiences and worldviews sustained through history, epistemologies too often dismissed in a system that insists only individuals create knowledge. These insights form the lineage that LYR builds upon.

Affirming gut-level ideas unapologetically gives us a way to reconnect to that lineage. It allows us to remember the knowledge we carry from our communities, our ancestors, our collective histories….knowledge that gatekeepers may try to erase. In Liberate Your Research, we practice this through writing prompts that invite scholars to start not with a polished argument, but with passion: What problem do you most want to see changed? What ways of understanding your field feel wrong or incomplete, and what alternative do you want to offer?

In today’s climate, when campuses themselves are complicit in silencing and state violence, we need spaces where we can say what we believe without asking permission. Affirming gut-level ideas is one way we refuse erasure and reclaim spaciousness for idea-making. It allows our writing to be guided not by fear of rejection, but by clarity about what matters most.

Once we affirm our gut-level ideas, another challenge emerges: what do we do when our insights are wide-ranging and complex, touching on many structures of power at once? For scholars of color, this isn’t a flaw in approach; it’s the reality of writing about race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, community, colonial violence, and environment all at once. Interconnections are our starting point. The problem is that academic systems often dismiss this as “too much”….as if we need to simplify in order to be legible.

This is where the third strategy comes in: Naming Frameworks and Interventions.

In Liberate Your Research, I encourage participants to create what I call an umbrella concept: a framework that holds together their overlapping insights. Think of it as naming your own umbrella, one that is large enough to shelter the many connections your work is making. This practice doesn’t narrow the scope of your project. Instead, it opens a pathway for explaining complex ideas in your own terms.

Here’s why the umbrella matters:

• It allows us to write even while our ideas feel expansive, because we no longer need to apologize for the connections we’re making.
• It shifts the question from “Is my project too messy?” to “How do I name what I see in a way that lets me carry it forward?”
• It creates coherence without sacrificing complexity.

And naming itself is never neutral. Naming can erase, reframe, or delegitimize. Colonizers and fascists have always known this, which is why they rename and misname as a tool of domination. But naming can also be an act of resistance. Choosing your own name for your framework, one that is meaningful, contextually appropriate, and anchored in your project, resists erasure and asserts your presence.

Naming doesn’t just describe; it shapes how ideas are understood, remembered, and acted upon. Naming the ways you are framing or understanding your work strengthens it and protects its intellectual life inside systems that seek to fragment, flatten, or silence it.

In my LYR workshops, I’ve seen how this umbrella strategy transforms writing. Scholars who once felt overwhelmed by too many strands of thought begin to recognize the power of naming as a tool, one that makes a shelter to hold and organize all of their ideas and that can, at any point, be mobilized to build alternative futures.

Collective Survival and Five Years of Resistance

From the beginning, Liberate Your Research has taught me that writing cannot be reduced to isolated practice. Traditional models that keep us sitting alone at the desk, performing for gatekeepers only, replicate the very academic violence we are trying to resist. What makes LYR different is that it creates a collective space where scholars of color can imagine, clarify, and sustain their ideas together.

Five years in, I see more clearly than ever that this collective dimension is not optional. It’s what makes survival possible because we are surviving academia inside a landscape of deportations, trans healthcare bans, climate catastrophe, genocide, and state repression. The strategies of Liberate Your Research matter now because they help us withstand and work through both.

That is what this anniversary teaches me. The same practices that allowed us to write and thrive despite academic violence in 2020 are the ones that sustain us through the compounded crises of 2026.  Regrounding, affirming gut-level ideas, and naming frameworks are not just writing tools; they are strategies of perseverance, practices of resistance, and collective refusals of erasure.

Five years in, we know this much: writing is not just about productivity. Writing is how we keep faith with our ideas, our histories, and each other. And in times like these, that is not only scholarship, it is resistance.