ABSTRACT
The central equity practice explored in this chapter is a collaborative worldbuilding capstone assignment in a community college research writing classroom, which emerges from a mutually reinforcing framework of principles and concepts from anthropological, philosophical, feminist, legal, and progressive educational theories. In practice, this assignment is the culmination of the students' individual autoethnographic work followed by collaborative ethnographic research into “exile” communities. Ultimately, this chapter argues that in designing and implementing the collaborative worldbuilding capstone assignment, it has been possible to help students refine their preexisting abilities to find meaning in and transfer knowledge from their college writing and life experiences. Furthermore, the aforementioned encourages empathic collaborations in ways that help students envision academic inquiry and real-world problem-solving as connected to each other as well as to the possibility and pleasure of solving real-world problems cooperatively and empathically. Consequently, this kind of collaborative and sustained equity practice has the potential to engender epistemic justice, an enduring species of justice in which students actively create, curate, and utilize knowledge of themselves, each other, and the communities in which they live to inquire into, propose, and enact social and systemic change.
