“Not Letting It Go: Anger, Empathy, and Interdisciplinarity as Trauma-Informed Approach” [Book Chapter] (original) (raw)
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Affectivity in the classroom A contribution to a feminist corpomaterial intersectional pedagogy
In this study I aim to contribute to the field of feminist corpomaterial intersectional pedagogies, which I understand as a part of the broader field of feminist postconstructionist pedagogies. Against the background of feminist postconstructionism I wish to overcome binary understandings of for example discourse/materiality, theory/practice, male/female and mind/body in pedagogies. To follow this through I have analysed how affects and emotions are present in a classroom by studying the possibility of taking a starting point in the body while rethinking the anti-oppressive and norm critical pedagogical idea of the self-reflective teacher. In order to challenge the idea of the teacher as a neutral, universal and rational knowledge producer, I have in this study analysed how one can affectively and emotionally situate teacher-bodies and participant-bodies in a classroom. The analysis was carried out on the basis of empirical material collected at a workshop on corporeality and norm critical pedagogy organised in a teacher-training program at a Swedish university. The workshop was conducted as intra-active-research and the material consists of my field diary, eight written interviews, one oral interview and my experiences from leading the workshop. I argue in this study that teacher-bodies affectively and emotionally could be situated as both following a corporeal schema, an expected plan for how a teacher-body should act and move, and also as stepping away from and disrupting this schema. Further on I argue that teacher-bodies could be situated as memory banks and as working from memory. I stress how important it is in pedagogic situations to be aware of the ways in which bodies in a room affect and are affected by each other, in other words; how bodies “do not end at the skin”. This affective and emotional situatedness shows how it is possible to overcome the idea of teachers and students as bodily neutral. I also argue that it might be important to integrate workshops on corporealities in teacher training. This could be one possible way to start to think on one’s affectively and emotionally situatedness as teacher, something I claim as required if one aspires for a feminist intersectional corpomaterial pedagogy. Keywords: Feminist postconstructionist perspectives, feminist intersectional corpomaterialism, pedagogies, didactics, methods, classrooms, assemblages, affects, emotions, intersectional critical pedagogy, anti-oppressive education, norm critical pedagogies.
International Journal of Multidisciplinary Perspectives in Higher Education, 2020
In this time of COVID-19, continued and relentless violence against Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, (BIPOC), organized resistance by many young people, and violent institutionalized attempts to suppress resistance, demonstrations and social change movements, what should educators be thinking about as we return to our college classrooms? In this short piece, we share our thinking and experience about our students' psycho-social needs and our belief that faculty must be focused both on students' and faculty's socio-political context and students' and faculty's emotional wellbeing as we think about teaching and learning for this moment.
Feminist Pedagogy Feminist Pedagogy Volume 3 Issue 1 bell hooks Article 8
Feminist Pedagogy, 2023
Central to hooks’ (1994) feminist pedagogy is engaged teaching and learning, a pathway that allows learner and teacher to actively question what is and what must be. This learning-teaching space examines the intersecting topics of gender, culture, and leadership by unlearning, learning, and relearning one’s understanding and experience of these three identities. Journaling, a process of finding one’s voice, and capturing one’s experience, proved to be a pathway for unlocking hooks’ “Engaged pedagogy [which] necessarily values student expression” (p. 20). This teaching activity illustrates how the engaged practice of journaling provides a learning space to question and reimagine society, power, and leadership through a cultural lens. The processes of questioning and reimaging are aligned with the key principles of feminist pedagogy (Webb et al., 2002). As a result, the emerging critical view and analysis of identity, beliefs, and socialization reflects how cultivating a questioning mind, while respecting one’s lived narrative, opens pathways of transformation for students.
Do Witness: Don't: A Woman's Word and Trauma as Pedagogy
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2006
This paper considers the implications of teaching narratives about trauma in a university setting. As researchers begin to teach narratives which are part of what is beginning to be called "trauma studies," it is necessary to think about how to teach narratives about atrocity. I argue that narratives like Elly Danica's Don't: A Woman's Word do not portray trauma in a confessional mode, but seek to enact secondary trauma within readers or viewers as part of an individual or social transformation. This enacting produces a specific type of silence. In this silence, the readers or viewers are called into being as witnesses in very special ways. The pedagogical challenge which teachers of testimonial narratives of trauma face is twofold. First, there is the challenge of silence as a necessary part of the response to trauma, and second, there is the ethical challenge of bearing witness to trauma in a classroom situation. I consider work by Dori Laub on trauma witnessing and challenge assumptions by Shoshana Felman about teaching to a crisis in order to see how students can become witnesses.
Journal of lesbian studies, 2016
What are the hesitations, dangers, and potentialities to inviting students to peruse my body? What possibilities arise from centering and leading with the body in the teaching/learning process? What risks and possibilities does this enactment pose to a Black lesbian educator? This auto/ethnography journeys through and reflects upon my experience enacting what I have coined "embodied vulnerability" as a pedagogical practice. Within this essay, I explore the interrelationship of race, gender, and embodiment (or, the performance of self). In addition, I reflect upon the pedagogical exercise-enacted over the last seven years-of asking students to see me and name what they see to illumine how social identities are read alongside context/location, as well as in relation to other assumed identities. Due to the historical and contemporary framing of Blackness and femininity-as paradoxical in popular culture and popular constructions of Blackness and queerness as antithesis-my quee...
Curriculum Inquiry
This essay draws on the concept of “difficult knowledge” to think with some of the interventions and arguments of affect theory and discusses the implications for curriculum and pedagogy in handling traumatic representations. The author makes an argument that affect theory enables the theorization of difficult knowledge as an intersection of language, desire, power, bodies, social structure, materiality, and trauma. To show the possibilities of this theorization of difficult knowledge, the essay puts in conversation Judith Butler's work on vulnerability, affect, and grievable lives with scholarship on difficult knowledge. The essay leans on Butler's work and affect theory to make a political and pedagogical intervention into the terrain of learning and acting in the face of difficult knowledge. This intervention offers a conceptual, curricular, and pedagogical way out of dilemmas of representation and it is rooted in a political project of social action that does not disavow...
2022 Meeting of CASAE. Conference of the Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education(CASAE), 2022
This paper presents a collective project with doing a ‘creative literature review’ about relationships, power, and care in feminist pedagogies, conducted with a feminist approach. Feminist pedagogies are based on reciprocity, shared responsibility, community building, individual voice, respect for diversity, and challenging fixed ways of doing or thinking (Webb, Allen & Walker, 2002). These principles are implemented through concrete and vital relationships involving ‘subjects of difference’ in material and symbolic spaces, where relationships and relationality are central to knowledge production. By working together in groups of peers, or in pairs, starting from our own experience and using cooperative and creative methods, we can investigate the social reality and flourish as adult subjects. These relationships are complex, never given for granted, challenging and always presenting asymmetries - themes of power and care - due to gender, age, class, social roles, profession, and previous learning.