Knowledge as Commons and Hoarding

Sor Juana wrote letters, poems, and treatises partly to share her thinking broadly; yet knowledge in her world was hoarded by the church and aristocracy, inaccessible to most. Knowledge as commons and hoarding explores how access to learning is distributed along intersectional lines. Historically, education has been gatekept by race, class, gender, disability status, and colonial power. The intersectional practice asks: Who teaches? Whose knowledge counts? How is wisdom shared or withheld? The framework examines both how marginalized people are excluded from knowledge production and how marginalized communities often practice knowledge-sharing as resistance—through oral traditions, mutual aid, mentorship, and collective learning. It also examines how some privileged people hoard knowledge to maintain power. In practice, this means building institutions and practices that treat knowledge as a commons, centering those historically excluded from learning, and recognizing multiple forms of knowing beyond academic legitimacy.