Intellectual Lineage as Reparative Practice

We know Sor Juana because some people chose to preserve and center her work. Many equally brilliant women disappeared—their writings lost, their ideas credited to men, their intellectual contributions erased. Intellectual lineage as reparative practice means choosing to study, cite, teach, and build on the work of thinkers at intersecting margins. It means asking: whose intellectual traditions am I inheriting? Whose work made my thinking possible? Whom have I been trained to ignore? This is not merely inclusive—it's reparative and reorienting. It disrupts whose knowledge counts as foundational. Intersectionally, it means: tracing Black feminist theory, Indigenous knowledge systems, disability justice thought, working-class intellectual traditions, colonized thinkers' archives. It requires work—much is deliberately suppressed, scattered, or inaccessible. In practice, this means: building research practices that center margin-based knowledge, creating curriculum that privileges these lineages, using institutional resources to preserve and amplify marginalized intellectual work, mentoring people to find their intellectual ancestors, and recognizing that this work of recovery and amplification is itself intellectual and political labor worthy of recognition and compensation.