Acompañamiento at the Kitchen Table

(photo: 2014, October 17, Honduras, by Stephen Pavey, Hope In Focus) I joined a small delegation in solidarity with OFRANEH (National Fraternal Black Org of Honduras) and the Garifuna people of Honduras who are still defending their ancestral homelands and livelihoods against the imminent threats of climate change, violence, and ongoing human rights abuses. We met with leaders of various allied organizations almost always around the kitchen table.

My dear friend and colleague, Dr. Mariela Nuñez-Janes, asked me to write a response to her 2023 Presidential address to the Council of the Anthropology of Education entitled, "Embracing Activism in the Anthropology of Education." I have so much respect and love for her as I've witnessed her courage within the academic community to side with the oppressed within the education system facing the never-ending violence and threats to her own career and community. You can read her presidential address alongside my response and another response by friend Dan Heiman in the recently published (Feb 25, 2025) volume of Anthropology and Education Quarterly.

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15481492

For those of you who subscribe to my Hope In Focus newsletter / journal, you will be able to read what I shared below. What I've shared in support of Mariela's call to embrace activism in the anthropology of education, as the call for the practice of acompañamiento around the Kitchen Table and further the call to risk an act of love, is the same moral call needed in every sphere of life.

“Washing our hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful” (Freire 1985).