Using autoethnography, I, a newly installed teacher union president, attempt to describe approaches I enacted to help preserve our urban public-school district from orchestrated collapse during my first year in office. Here, describing, reflecting, and critiquing my own approaches over the past year, I attempt to convey our efforts to push back against the deliberate destruction and eroding of our School District (CCSD). In this article, I share doubts I felt immediately after winning the election to become president, our Association?s approach in boosting student enrollment, rebranding our public schools to residents, and fighting back against our then-superintendent.

Frederick Douglass states that ?education and slavery were incompatible with each other? (Douglass, 1845). In the 2007 book entitled ?No Name in the Street?, James Baldwin relegates education to the Whiteness of indoctrination and the subjugation of Black bodies. This autoethnography focuses on the journey of a non-traditional first-year Ph.D. student in an education program that boasts access, success, and equity, along with social justice. Auto ethnographically, I address experiences that fostered dissonance, trauma, and subjugation. Using autoethnography as a method while expanding the Plantation theory, I share my conceptualized model highlighting the components of an academic plantation.

Working from feminist poststructural orientations towards discourse, subjectivity and power, this ethnographic inquiry took a particular event in Japan as an entry point to explore intersections of teachers? interpreted ?experiences? and how their understandings of their professional identities, if at all, spill into their understandings of ?curriculum? based on conceptualizations of ?curriculum? as discourse. This inquiry is an attempt to trouble how I understood ?data? and chose to represent these ?data? throughout in response to the ?crisis in representation? as I explored and challenged the limits of transparent notions of ?experience? and ?self? as it relates to notions of "curriculum."