Unapologetically Claiming the Significance of Joy in Higher Education

This article advances a Chicana Feminist, constructivist, and intersectional account of joy as a critical—yet persistently underrecognized—pathway for transforming U.S. higher education. We situate contemporary racialized faculty labor within colonial and neoliberal university regimes that privilege Eurocentric epistemologies, intensify surveillance and standardization, and reproduce racialized organizational logics that constrain legitimacy, belonging, and advancement for racialized scholars. Drawing on scholarship on racialized organizations, racialized emotions, and Chicana Feminist epistemologies—as well as our positionalities as Latinas in the academy—we argue that joy functions as both an epistemic refusal and a decolonial method. We theorize and propose the significance of joy as a mechanism of rejecting fragmented and disembodied rationality so as to reorient knowledge production toward humanistic, embodied, and community-rooted inquiry. It has, we argue, the potential to open pathways for institutional transformation. Accordingly, we theorize joy not as an apolitical affect or a private emotional state, but as an embodied and relational praxis. We conclude by proposing a reimagined academic culture that centers joy as a shared, structural commitment—one that affirms the dignity and agency of racialized faculty and enables universities to pursue their humanistic missions with rigor, equity, and care.