Mapping Our Collective Resistance: Embodied Strategies for Holding Ground and Strengthening Equity in Academia

Amid intensifying political backlash and institutional retrenchment against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in higher education, women of color continue to bear disproportionate burdens of labor, hypervisibility, and structural erasure. This article examines how women of color mobilize embodied and collective strategies to confront institutional harm, reclaim space, and reimagine academic belonging on their own terms. Grounded in a participatory, arts-based workshop titled Mapping Our Collective Resistance, this study employs body mapping, counter-storytelling, and critical dialogue to investigate how oppression is carried in the body, and how practices of radical care and collective witnessing function as methods of refusal, resilience, and transformation. Drawing on the experiences of 42 participants, including faculty, staff, and doctoral students across multiple racialized identities, the analysis identifies four emergent themes: embodied exhaustion, boundary-setting as survival, collective grounding, and joy as resistance. This inquiry is situated within theoretical frameworks of intersectionality, critical race theory, liberatory praxis, and embodied pedagogy, centering the lived experiences of women of color as sites of epistemological and political power. Rather than reducing resistance to “best practices” or institutional compliance, we situate governance recommendations as harm-reduction while foregrounding embodied and collective praxis as the primary site of refusal and transformation. In doing so, we argue that somatic safety, affinity networks, and culturally grounded support systems must be institutionally embedded and not left to the margins or already overburdened individuals. Without intentional investment in academic spaces and practices, women of color will continue to exit academia under conditions institutionally misdiagnosed as personal burnout, rather than institutional neglect. This study concludes with a discussion of a “two-track praxis model” to advance a vision of equity rooted not in assimilation or accommodation, but in collective reclamation of body, voice, and space.