CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — When Teresa Esperanza Fitzwilliam-Cortés ’18, M.Phil. ’20, J.D. ’23 arrived at the Harvard Graduate School of Education this fall, she was not looking for another credential.

She was looking for a shovel.

On a recent Wednesday morning, Fitzwilliam-Cortés could be found in Harvard Yard beside the Winnie-the-Pooh tree, where she was attempting to dig a small hole in preparation for what she describes as her life’s work.

“I realized I had spent almost twelve years in higher education without once actually excavating anything,” she said.

The exercise ended after approximately seven minutes when a university security officer approached and informed Fitzwilliam-Cortés that students were not permitted to dig holes in Harvard Yard.

She apologized immediately.

“It was actually a really important learning moment about land, authority and permission,” she said.

The hole was approximately four inches deep.

Fitzwilliam-Cortés later returned with a notebook to reflect on it.

“My dream has always been very simple,” she said over oat-milk coffee in Gutman Library. “I want to go to Chiapas, live in community, listen deeply, and dig latrines.”

The new Ed.M. will be Fitzwilliam-Cortés’s fourth graduate degree and, she believes, the first to give her the theoretical tools necessary to dig a hole in southern Mexico without reproducing colonial structures of knowledge.

“I could obviously just go,” she said.

She paused.

“But I think that would be incredibly problematic.”

Fitzwilliam-Cortés first became interested in sanitation justice during her second master’s degree, while taking a seminar titled Decentering Infrastructure: Postcolonial Approaches to the Toilet.

A spring-break trip to Oaxaca subsequently convinced her that her future lay farther south.

“I met people who had built things with their hands,” she recalled. “That was very powerful for me.”

Her interest deepened during law school, where she wrote a 93-page seminar paper examining whether the construction of a pit latrine by a Western volunteer could constitute “an epistemic claim over subterranean space.”

The paper received an A.

It did not contain a diagram of a latrine.

At HGSE, Fitzwilliam-Cortés plans to focus on educational leadership, participatory pedagogy and what she calls “rethinking the latrine as a site of reciprocal learning.”

Professor Eleanor Vance, her adviser, said the degree would help Fitzwilliam-Cortés move beyond outdated development models in which Western volunteers simply arrive in poor communities and start digging.

“Maya—sorry, Teresa—understands that before one excavates the earth, one must excavate one’s positionality,” Vance said.

Fitzwilliam-Cortés has already assembled an interdisciplinary reading list on sanitation, embodiment, indigenous epistemologies, participatory development and the politics of the shovel.

She has not yet purchased a shovel.

“I don’t want to fetishize the implement,” she explained.

Her classmates describe her commitment as unusual.

“A lot of us came here because we want to become superintendents, work in education policy or start nonprofits,” said fellow Ed.M. student Connor Weiss. “Teresa genuinely wants to dig toilets.”

Fitzwilliam-Cortés corrected him gently.

“Latrines.”

She hopes eventually to spend six months in Chiapas, although she stresses that even the phrase “spend six months in Chiapas” risks reproducing a temporal framework imposed upon communities whose relationship with time may differ from her own.

For administrative purposes, she is nevertheless planning January through June.

Afterward, Fitzwilliam-Cortés expects to return to Cambridge and apply for a doctorate examining what the experience taught her about herself.

She rejects suggestions that four graduate degrees might be excessive preparation for digging latrines.

“That assumes the objective is simply to produce a hole in the ground,” she said. “If that were the objective, obviously the people who live there already know how to do that.”

She grew quiet.

“That’s precisely why this work requires so much humility.”

Later that afternoon, Fitzwilliam-Cortés walked back through Harvard Yard and stopped beside the Winnie-the-Pooh tree.

The small indentation from that morning had already been filled in by university grounds staff.

She looked at it for some time.

“There’s something quite profound about that,” she said.

Asked what, she said she was not yet ready to impose an interpretation.

“I think I need to sit with it.”

She hopes to develop the idea further in her capstone.