Of Loss and Light: Teaching in the Time of Grief (original) (raw)
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New Directions in Feminist Pedagogy (Roundtable)
“Cultural Relativity: A New Pedagogical Approach to Inclusive Education” , 2022
University at Buffalo SUNY 56313 UB NeMLA-Convention Program 2022.indd 3 56313 UB NeMLA-Convention Program 2022.indd 3 2/25/22 4:54 PM 2/25/22 4:54 PM Welcome to the rd Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association! The theme of our 2022 Convention is "Care," and here are appropriately some of the terms and phrases you will come across in the titles and subtitles of our panels, roundtables, and seminars: Interdependence, Empathy, Vulnerability, Wellbeing, DisAbility and Care, Romantic Caring, Care in Queer Communities, Uses and Misuses of Care, Mindfulness, Technologies of Care, Maternal Care, Eco-ethical Care. When I first saw the program, it made me realize how, through the lens of academia, NeMLA gives us a small glimpse into the world of cultures and the kind of caring practices our times demand. This year's sessions and events are showing us that while we have a lot of issues to solve in our (post)humanity, our care practices continue to represent a deep-seated search for and belief in provision, aid, and support: How can we re-imagine global identities, and global citizenship following a pandemic? How do we navigate trauma? How do we bear witness in a decolonial way? How do we account for invisible labor, gender violence, and victimhood in forgotten genocides? How do we make room for queer ecology when reading past literatures? How do we represent nonhumanity in the Anthropocene? How do we re-imagine our immediate future? There could not be a better year to welcome and celebrate our keynote speakers, renowned American philosopher Judith Butler, whose work centers on care and questions of interdependency in an urgent and beautiful way, as well as Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli, whose writing focuses most poetically and innovatively on migration and trauma in her book Lost Children's Archive. Our area Special Event speakers and our member sessions are also testimony to the continued centrality of the humanities to our lives as we are asked to meet and overcome the challenges of our times. Finally, many thanks are due to our sponsors, as well as the board members, administrators, and graduate students whose work behind the scenes carries on throughout the year to allow us to enjoy our much-awaited convention. Our Executive Board members Joseph Valente, Modhumita Roy, Brandi So, and Carine Mardorossian have continually gone beyond the call of duty. Our Board of Directors has shown vision and commitment to their areas and deserves full credit for the content of the convention program.
Feminist Postdigital Inquiry in the Ruins of Pandemic Universities
Postdigital Science and Education
During Covid-19, higher education made an unprecedented entry into the domestic sphere. However, not all students welcomed the emergency delivery of online courses. Consequently, some learners have been developing resistant practices to technology-driven learning, including being on mute and turning off cameras, but these silences, gaps and evasions are difficult to grasp through normative perspectives. Meanwhile, big tech continues to profit significantly from its encroachment on pedagogy. Conversely, we need alternate conceptions of learners' varying responses to technologies. To develop a novel perspective, the study considers the Middle East's traditional mashrabiyya windows, which are carved through an elaborate wooden latticework screen of geometric patterns and designed to deflect rather than let in the light. This mashrabiyya structure is applied as a theoretical metaphor to consider Arab women learners' technological veiled affordances of filters, avatars and not replying. The mashrabiyya feminist postdigital framework develops unique inquiry into learners' subtle practices; the authors' self-reflexivity; and analysis of a (silent) email exchange and a Twitter avatar. Theorising suggests silences, invisibilities and disconnection are not necessarily a deficit but refractive responses enabling students and educators to stay below the radar.
A pedagogy of mourning: tarrying with/in tragedy, terror, and tension
2009
In this text I offer a narrative reflection, as a teacher-traveler, on my live(d) experiences in a sometimes (always already) violent world. Preoccupied with the possibilities of the work of mourning, in the first two movements I draw on stories of my time teaching in China at the dawn of this millennium to tell tales of tragedy, terror, and tension that provoked strange pedagogical moments. I reflect on the difficulties and passions of live(d) pedagogies that crack open curri/culum to tarry with/in these provocative, generative spaces as places for mourning and connection, ambivalence and ambiguity. During the 3rd movement I join Butler's questioning of 'what counts as a grievable life' as I attempt a textual encounter with an (un)grievable 'other'. I ask: How might recognition of lives/deaths through the act of inscription and collective mourning be related to understanding human connection? In a pedagogical refrain, I draw Derrida into my conversation with fem...
Hope as a Performative Affect: Feminist Struggles Against Death and Violence, 2017
Exploring the limits of language when one needs to translate hope between the local and the transnational, this paper focuses on a silent feminist protest that took place in memory of an Italian performance artist who was found raped and dead in Istanbul, Turkey in 2008. My analysis stems from research material collected during eighteen months of fieldwork and engages with post-structuralist theories and feminist and queer studies in order to argue against recent theories that locate affect outside language, representation and discourse. By highlighting the performative components of political language in its tight relation to affective dispositions, I argue that the activist women’s silent protest was not speechless, but instead echoed the long history of the feminist movement fighting against male violence and sexual harassment, as well as the feminists’ (lost) hopes for changes and social transformation.