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The Global South solidarities (GSS) Workshop emerged directly from a Fall 2024 graduate seminar titled “Archives, Rhetoricity of Technologies, & Anti-Oppressive Interventions,” where thirteen graduate students spent the semester developing projects rooted in memory justice and decolonial practice. Each student received a modest compensation of $100 in recognition of their contributions to the website. This two-day intensive session in December brought fourteen of us together—across the hybrid distances of winter break travel plans—to breathe life into those seminar projects, transforming individual research into something collective and shared. Some of us had already left town; others remained in Pullman. Those in person gathered around food, laptops open, troubleshooting together as the Zoom squares of faraway classmates beamed in. We spent the entire semester and four hours each workshop-day wrestling with essential questions: What does it truly mean to center Global South voices? How do we practice solidarity in ways that don’t replicate the very structures we critique? The work was serious, the questions were serious, the commitment was serious, and the way we gathered around this work and questions was human: frustration, fury, joy, laughter, hope.

Those two days were rigorous and demanding, but they were also filled with joy as the semester was. We opened our laptops and our lunches simultaneously, laughing between conversations about archives and resistance. The ‘zoomers’ watched us eat and we teased them relentlessly for missing out. But why would they give up on that! They too tempted us with the lunch they were having or the dish they were planning to make. The work mattered but the process reminded us that collective liberation isn’t just a concept to study. It’s something you practice in a room (or across a screen) with people who care about the same impossible, necessary questions.

Across the entire semester, our seminar had never been a typical graduate course. We gathered every Tuesday afternoon, and every Tuesday afternoon, someone brought food—snacks grabbed before rushing to class, a shared meal someone prepared, leftovers deliberately packed in excess because we all knew we’d be hungry by 2:55 pm (to 5:20 pm). We ate together before diving into readings about archives and got very very furious about genocides and settler colonialisms, and somewhere between the first bite and the first discussion, the classroom became a collaborative table that imagined collective liberation and nothing less than that. And there were difficult weeks, impossibly heavy weeks, as the intensified genocide against Palestinian people was unfolding in real time on our screens and we came to class wondering what the point was. What was the worth of discussing archival theory when children were dying the deadliest deaths? What was the point of academic sentences when our people were being killed? We sat with that question together, often without answers, and sometimes just sat in silence. But we kept showing up. We kept eating. We kept trying to find each other across the weight of it all.

Joy, we learned, wasn’t a distraction from the struggle. It was the thing the struggle was fighting for. We left those two days exhausted, yes, but also strangely hopeful, having built something together that none of us could have done alone.