2023 Pedagogy Conference: “Unruly Bodies”
March 2-4, 2023
We had an amazing time sharing virtual space with you at our second annual Pedagogy Conference. Many thanks to our presenters, moderators and organizers, ASL/Deaf interpreters, and everyone who joined us.
The conference was fully virtual, free to attend, and open to all. Presenters responded to our Unruly Bodies theme in dozens of ways: panels, teaching workshops, drag and poetry performances, film, live podcast sessions, sensory experiences, and more.
We engaged with topics like pleasure, liberation, disability, fatness, queerness, anger, joy, the senses, healing, respectability politics, labor, art, abolition, and Black, Brown, and Indigenous experiences, in settings from dance and theater to libraries to the media to educational institutions.
Many of the sessions were recorded. We will share clips of these sessions on our website/social media according to presenter preference and permissions.
Any donation you make will help keep programming like this free to all.
The BBQ+ Pedagogy Lab is grateful to the Hewlett Foundation for their support.
About our theme “Unruly Bodies”
In the footsteps of feminist, race, embodiment scholars, and disability scholars like Sami Schalk, Moya Bailey, and Amanda Levitt, we aimed to playfully explore what it is like to move through the world in marginalized bodies. Our bodies and minds have been through much during the past several years of public health crises, racial trauma, and attacks on the rights of queer and trans youth. Bodies deemed expendable by white supremacist patriarchy are conditioned to burn out or explode in academic spaces.
This conference sought to address the following emerging questions in our pedagogical landscape: How can Black, brown, disabled, fat, and queer bodies, consistently under threat, find pleasure and joy? How do we go about showing up in digital spaces, in classrooms, and in intellectual communities with our vulnerable and powerful bodies?
Conference schedule
Please note:
All times below are in U.S. Eastern time
Accessibility: All sessions will be auto-captioned. [ASL] = session includes American Sign Language interpretation.
Opening comments
BBQ+ fellow Verónica Mandujano welcomes you to this space.
-
Good morning — or good evening, depending on where you are and where the sun finds you!
My name is Verónica and I am a graduate student fellow with the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, and I have the pleasure of welcoming you all to our annual pedagogy conference.
This year’s theme is Unruly Bodies, and the sheer range of the topics to be covered and the vision for this year's theme would not have been possible without the excellence that is our very own Pedagogy Lab Director Dr. Caitlin Gunn.
A special thanks is in order for you, Dr. Gunn, for envisioning the digital space we are about to walk into, as well as Sarah, our librarian, and Zora, our Social Media and Design Lead. Thank you to the three of you, as well as anyone and everyone else who is contributing and participating as we co-create this experience over the next few days.
As a researcher on the role that pleasure plays during birth, not as luxury, but as a very real necessity — physiologically, emotionally, neurologically, hormonally, on and on — and as a birth worker, I have thought about the unruly body before. And I’ve started to speculate that perhaps the unruly body really only ever exists when there is a need to discipline a body, as well.
And I think about the ways that the settler state does that. And this thinking has come more alive and more to the forefront recently with the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 in the United States, which made abortion no longer a constitutional right, and instead left it up to each state to decide whether they would offer clinical abortion. And when this decision was made and our world changed, I – like many others with a uterus, or people who menstruate, or have menstruated – I just didn’t know how to grapple with that, and what it means moving forward.
I felt this shame, that I felt that was a collective processing and mourning and grief, and as a birth worker who intends to, at the minimum, support people in finding safety in their bodies, a part of me felt inadequate. And that inadequacy grew and grew, and it morphed into a rage. Because I believe that what we’re confronting with Roe v Wade, the overturn, is a state-orchestrated catastrophe more than it is the true absence of the possibility and viability of a future that includes autonomy over our wombs.
What I mean by that is I found myself enraged that I was asking for permission to do what my grandmothers and her grandmothers and her grandmothers have done for centuries, and that is to release an unwanted pregnancy by stimulating uterine contraction with plant medicine. But of course, that rage subsided, and I had a deep sadness, because I feel torn between what seemingly just one generation ago, my grandmother had access to, and had the dexterity and the relationship with plants to be able to stimulate this type of contraction intentionally to release an unwanted pregnancy. And a generation later, forced migrations and assimilation, I no longer have this capacity. I no longer have this resource. I haven’t inherited it in the way that I think that I should have, or could have. But I’m not alone in that. There are many of us who are trying to recover and recuperate and find new meaning in ancient practices that are at once also new. And I think that, if anything, what this conference indicates is a refusal to let go of what is rightly ours. The ability to tend to and support our bodies even if – and perhaps especially if – the state denies us that right.
I know that, for myself, the future that I envision, uterine autonomy is very very real. And it resides in the intelligence of plants, equally as much as it does in the capacity that we have to rematriate. And full rematriation resides in the return of land to its Indigenous stewards, and Indigenous communities, all of which I believe hinge on our willingness to be unruly in the face of state attempts to discipline us and to control our bodies and our ability to attend to them.
So for this I think that plants offer means to familiarize ourselves with their willingness to be who they are, because plants, in my opinion, only ever know how to be themselves.
And how abundant are they for modeling that for us – I’m so grateful for their guidance as well as the original technologies and remedios and medicines that come from our relationship to them, and the faith that we have in their intelligence. I also believe that that offers a reminder of what we have permission to be. I also believe that the modalities, the concepts, the practices and praxis that are going to be presented in this conference also offer us that reminder.
And so, while the reality of our recent losses to the Federal right to clinical abortion leave a breach between where we are and the work that we must do, I feel reminded that no one will be saving us. And I also feel reminded that yeah, that definitely indicates that we have the capacity to do it for ourselves, and much like plants remind us that we need not be granted permission for something that nature made available, something that our ancestors developed extensively and held the wisdom to utilize and to circulate, I feel that we are finding that we are capable of being the ones to grant ourselves full permission to explore our bodies as the unruly sites for transformation that they are.
And I'm excited that in the digital rooms of the conference that await us, panelists and facilitators are offering spaces to acknowledge the fullness of our bodies – the bodies that we inhabit, the bodies that we love – and that we have the right to learn collectively and to play with movement, to experience joy, and to center that as well as pleasure as we do so.
And of course, with the spaces that we tend to create where we are celebrating and looking forwards towards the visions for the future that we hold, we also make space – I'm so grateful that this conference will as well – to not shy away from the reckoning with the weight that we carry as we discover what pursuing our healing means, and looks like for each of us.
So, there will be discussions that center intergenerational trauma, the politics of fatness, honoring anger, fear, failure, and grief, as well as the open invitation to show up for what you feel called for, to take what works, and to leave the rest as well as the belief that we have the capacity to bear the emotions and to hold space for the processing that is necessary for this kind of work and play.
So I thank you for joining us. I'm excited at the possibility of learning from you and with you, and that that may possibly extend beyond this conference, as well.
Thank you so much for being here. See you all soon.
Thursday, March 2
10:00–10:55 am | Dykes! in the Beit Midrash: Living Texts, Bodies in Pleasure
Ari L. Monts, they/them
Workshop
This workshop will introduce attendees to some of the pedagogical methodology of SVARA, a Traditionally Radical Yeshiva (a learning institution dedicated to traditional Jewish texts) and will be an opportunity to vision what education could become if each student's embodied ownership of the material is at the pedagogical center of a learning experiences.
Through the seemingly simple act of slowly reading a text out loud, this workshop (playfully) wonders about the potential of the classroom as a space where our bodies, in their specific and unique unruliness, help forge what Ashon Crawley or Jack Halberstam might refer to as an otherwise way forward in spaces of learning. What happens to disciplines when the body won't be separated from the mind? And what happens when the body is really into it? When it feels good and wants to keep feeling that way?
11:00–11:55 am | Putting the SELF Back Into Disembodied Pedagogy
Jess Mitchell
Conversation
Education is fundamentally a relational activity. We come together and create a community. When that community is built to deny the 'selves' that are in the room and instead prefers to standardize and scale, we degrade the very intent of education: a relational activity of exploration, discovery and wonder. Let's take a journey through what education could be.
12:00–12:55 pm | Pedagogy Otherwise: Deconstructing Gender Studies Curriculums
Rita Sousa, she/her
Presentation
"Pedagogy otherwise: Deconstructing gender studies curriculums" started as a provocation to face the discomfort in gender studies pedagogy and is becoming a life project to underline the urgency of introducing new epistemologies in Western academic pedagogy that is caught up in the persistent legacy of Eurocentric and anthropocentric views implicit in the standpoints of knowledge producers and receivers.
1:00–2:25 pm | Unruly Dreams in Ruly Spaces: A Library Liberation Conversation
Nicollette Davis, DeAnn Brame, Marco Seiferle-Valencia, Jess Saldaña, Mondo Vaden
Panel (conversation)
[ASL]
Libraries in the U.S. were founded as ruly institutions, determined to organize information and assimilate users within white supremacist structures. In recent decades, librarianship has slowly begun to grapple with its foundations, but its colonial architecture means that most library spaces and systems are still racist, ableist, heteronormative, and fatphobic. Library workers and patrons in bodies deemed unruly are invisibilized, overworked, underserved, and policed. Capitalism siphons funding from public spaces and restricts resource sharing and access. At the same time, prevailing fantasies around libraries of all kinds insist that they’re unifying, equalizing institutions, sacred temples of knowledge, open to all.
Situating ourselves within these tensions and our different library contexts, we ask, what would a library actually designed by and for unruly bodies look like and feel like? We recognize the very real liberatory possibilities that exist in present and future library spaces, sharing our blueprints for new realities, and our experiences working and protecting ourselves within the current system while striving for something beyond it. We consider the library as a microcosm, one that holds implications for all ruly educational spaces.
2:30–3:25 pm | soft-full-flesh: How Anti-Fatness Practices and Beliefs Affect the Dancing Body
Alexandra Tiscareno, she/they
Presentation
This session will discuss how Anti-Fatness practices and beliefs affect the dancing body. By looking at the mistreatment and discrimination against bigger bodies within the dance field, this session aims to address how bigger bodies are being left out of the conversation about inclusion in dance spaces. Ultimately, alienating those who do not have a conventional Western body type, thus hindering the advancement of inclusivity within dance. In taking a phenomenological, somatics, and social justice approach, I dare ask the questions: How can I begin to change the narrative that bigger-bodied dancers cannot dance? Does “thin culture” affect all bodies within the space, not just bigger/fat bodies? And, Why is it important to have body representation within these Western dance spaces?
3:30–4:25 pm | Disability Studies and Pedagogy
Panel
[ASL]
Centering Disabled Bodyminds in Pedagogy | Capria Berry, they/them (2022 Pedagogy Fellow)
This session will focus on disabled bodyminds in the classroom space. What does it mean to center and adapt principles of a disability justice framework in an academic setting? Being inclusive of disabled folks in our teaching and learning opens up a variety of possibilities to heighten course engagement for all. Attendees will leave this session with practical tools and frameworks for co-creating an educational space that boldly welcomes disabled people.
What Does a Crip Education Look Like? | Akanksha Mehta
This session brings together movement, breath, rest, conversations, silence to collectively imagine what crip community-based education could be. I am a fat, disabled, queer, woman of colour educator and organiser who understands deeply the violence of the university towards certain students and workers and its enmeshing in systems of racial capitalism, colonial violence, gentrification, abled supremacy, and state surveillance. And yet, together with my students, I create communities of subversion and survival that rely on interdependence, on dismantling, on crip pedagogies, and on working against and beyond the university. In this session, I'd like to work with the participants to narrate, recollect, archive, dream, imagine, and create the complicated, joyful, tense, and liberating ways in which we crip our education. Bringing together body and breath based approaches, crip methods and pedagogies, fat liberation and queer decolonial frameworks, I draw on my experiences and those of the participants to work towards abolition of our oppressive educational systems and the building of radical liberatory crip community based education.
4:30–4:55 pm | Finding Joy to Spite Oppression: A Creative Proposal
Mondo Vaden, he/they
Presentation
[ASL]
For DeafBlackTrans Intersectional Librarian and drag king Mondo Vaden/Mondo Millions, finding joy has been a hard won battle. With the many challenges against drag storytimes and performance, and pushback against his DEIA efforts and self advocacy, finding joy in an unruly body has helped him to spite oppression, reach his career goals, and find ways to make space for everyone to be included in education, libraries, and the performance fields. Work/life balance in libraries and education could be easier if we had more space and support to figure out what brings us joy, more options to connect with ourselves and others, and ultimately combat burnout.
5:00–6:00 pm | Break
6:00–6:55 pm | Thick Like Me
Alex Christmas, she/her; Jazelynn Goudy; Davianna Griffin
Workshop
In this workshop we will share how to acknowledge, celebrate, prepare, and mentor thicker dancers in our care. We problematize the assumed connection between health and body size to advocate for dancers’ holistic well-being, dismantling the fatphobic orientation of dance training. We continue to reflect on our socialization that perpetuates the oppression of thick Black women in dance and beyond, and we invite participants to share tools and strategies to support Black women professionally and pedagogically. We provide and analyze contemporary examples of thick Black women to empower big Black women to enjoy dance.
7:00–8:30 pm | I Don't Want To Sing “Poor Unfortunate Souls”: Advocating and Embracing Fat Bodies in Educational Theatre Spaces
Jess Pearson-Bleyer, she/her
Workshop
The theatre can be unwelcoming, exclusionary, and at times hostile to fat bodies. This is particularly true of music theatre spaces. When performers in larger bodies do participate in theatrical training and production, they often feel bound by a small handful of types, roles, and modes of being deemed “appropriate” for their bodies. As the professional theatre makes tentative positive steps towards inclusion of “Unruly” bodies – such as Ali Stroker in the 2018 Broadway revival of Oklahoma; Jade Jones and Evan Ruggiero in Olney Theatre’s Beauty and the Beast – education and training institutions continue to uphold an outdated and dangerous approach to bodies, weight, movement, and self-image.
How do we, as educators, practitioners, and advocates make theatre spaces safe for and welcoming for students and actors who have been told, often to their faces, that their bodies are wrong for theatre? How do we protect students in costuming and dance spaces that may be uncomfortable? How do we work to decolonize the casting process and help directors and choreographers move away from “look” and “type” in assigning roles? In this discussion session, led by Jessica Pearson-Bleyer (Tufts University), we will address these questions with the aim of creating better awareness in the classroom, rehearsal space, and educational theatre community.
Friday, March 3
Please note adjusted start time – first session is now at 11:00 am ET
Calissa Brown is unable to join us this morning for Reclaiming Blackness and Girlhood Through an Educational and Multimedia Lens.
Please enjoy Calissa's beautiful slides here.
11:00–11:55 am | Fearing the Fat Egyptian Woman: Satirical Cartoons and the Production of the Modern Ideal (1920-1940) and Gender and Carcerality in Contemporary Egypt
Sara Seweid-DeAngelis, she/her (2022 Pedagogy Fellow); Soha Bayoumi
Presentation
Fearing the Fat Egyptian Woman: Satirical Cartoons and the Production of the Modern Ideal (1920-1940): In the interwar era, fatness and fat women provoked angst and titillation within the Egyptian cartoonscape. Published in popular magazines that circulated on a regular basis, these cartoons were part of a larger visual rhetoric that allowed for the proliferation of nationalist ideology. This chapter asks: how was corpulence discursively and visually depicted in the illustrated magazine? Through a close examination of satirical and political cartoons and sketches in Al Fukaha (1926-1933), Ākhir sāʼah (1934-1969), and Al Muṣawwar (1925-1956), this paper argues that concerns about fatness was inherently a civilizational project that anchored modernity onto women’s bodies. Fatness was associated with civilizational stagnancy, undesirability, and emasculation. Furthermore, as the figure of the modern Egyptian woman - raced white - became the incarnation of what was nationally desirable, this chapter argues that the fear of fatness was a racialized discourse about race and its trajectory in the modernizing Egyptian nation.
Gender and Carcerality in Contemporary Egypt examines the bimodal role of carcerality in Egyptian women’s lives: one on hand, it serves as a mediating logic to discipline unruly bodies of queer women in Egypt, while simultaneously reinforcing a masculinist form of governance that “avenges” victims of gendered-violence and femicide. Within this framework, Egyptian women’s subjectivities and identities only become legible through various forms of gendered and sexual violence, and are shaped by and through various forms of carcerality.
12:00–1:25 pm | Fear, Failure, and Joyful Academics
Caitlin Rosario Kelly, she/her (2022 Pedagogy Fellow)
Workshop
What do fear and failure have to do with creating joyful, liberatory communities within higher education? How can educators hold discomfort, both theirs and others'? Experiencing difficult feedback from students and holding discomfort can exacerbate feelings of imposter syndrome, imperfection, and failure. I think, though, that those experiences can be a portal into deeper learning and just relationship.
In this workshop, we'll embrace failure to envision how we can honor those experiences all to invite joy, individually and collectively. I will also lead a 10-minute meditation on holding failure and fear.
1:30–2:55 pm | Producing (in) Unruly Spaces
Mac Irvine (2022 Pedagogy Fellow), Andie Flores, Aira Juliet, Sam Mayer
Panel (conversation)
[ASL]
Austin, Texas’s outsider arts, political, and performance scenes are so synonymous with its reputation that its unofficial logo, “Keep Austin Weird,” is touted by businesses, city officials, tourists, and recent transplants. While the white, weed-smoking, two-step aesthetic of the 20th century endures (now with a hearty serving of athleisure and alt milk iced lattes), the affordable housing stock, accessible venue space, and homegrown arts infrastructure that once made the city a bastion of Black, Brown, and queer art and performance has been significantly compromised. Nonetheless, the arts community in Austin remains vibrant and attuned to the issues facing the cities arts and Black, Brown, and queer residents. In conversation with performance studies scholar, curator, and educator, Mac Irvine, Austin area artists Andie Flores, Aira Juliet, and Sam Mayer share recent work, discuss the material considerations of creating and producing in neoliberal Austin, and consider unruly aesthetics as critical intervention.
3:00–3:55 pm | Dance, Identity, and Healing
Panel
Dance as a Healing Tool | Alondra Puentes Gallegos, she/her
In this session, I will describe my experience as an Indigenous artist living in the settler colony of the united states and how the fine arts, specifically dance, has served as a tool to heal and process trauma by advocating for Indigenous womxn by shedding light on the MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) movement. Utilizing scholarly sources on the subject matter, I will recount briefly the history of the MMIW movement and the importance this political movement has made on Indigenous communities. I will then share part of my grandmother’s story of surviving abuse along with my own which will transition to my choreography and how I have found healing through dance. This session will conclude with a dance film component to visually showcase my choreographic process of the subject matter.
Undoubtedly Me: A Close Look Into My Identity | Lexis Greer, she/they
In this session, I will describe my experiences finding my identity within my two ethnicities and cultures as a Black and Mexican-American individual. I separate this topic into three sections divided between family dynamics, societal pressures, and how I embody my identity through my art form of dance. I take my research and compile it into an embodied choreographic process shown in a five-minute viewing of my recent dance film, Intersection.
4:00–4:55 pm | The Wondrous World of the Sensations
Ginny Barnes, they/she/he & Georgianna Negron-Long, she/her
Workshop
Libraries provide a public space that meets people where they are. This session will present a case study of passive programming at a four-year public university aimed at connecting students with themselves.
The Wondrous World of the Sensations exhibit consisted of seven installations in open spaces of the Fresno State Library that invited students to pause and connect with their senses. A collaboration between the Library and Student Health and Counseling Center, the exhibit was hosted in honor of stress awareness month for the final four weeks of the academic semester, a time at which students experience the most stress and often neglect to tend to their mental health.
While single-day, synchronous events focused on providing stress relief can be effective, they ask more of students. Engagement takes time, labor, motivation, sometimes money, and often vulnerability. The Sensations exhibit is an example of passive programming.
Student success initiatives must look at the whole person. This presentation will conclude with a brainstorm discussion on how we can design wellness into our educational spaces and a grounding exercise in our senses.
5:00–5:55 pm | “Utterly Tzimtzumulous”: A Performance and Discussion of Visions of Divine's Love: A Drag Theopoetic
Max Yeshaye Brumberg-Kraus, they/them
Presentation
[ASL]
Visions of Divine's Love is a collection of poetry that began, as much great art does, with a joke: what if the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich’s book Revelations of Divine Love was in fact her vision of the 20th century drag queen, Divine? Performing a kind of "literary drag," Max Yeshaye Brumberg-Kraus writes from the perspective of cloistered academic and film buff Dr. Julia Johnson–a reimagined Julian– as well as one poem from her unnamed teaching assistant. As a queer woman in a conflated 14th and 21st century, Johnson’s vision is television, her Christs are Dreamlanders, and her revelations are sparked by the spectacular rites of the cult movie. Through the theoria of cinematic engagement, Johnson uncovers secrets about herself, her sexuality, what it means to see and be seen, what is divine, and, indeed, what is love?
Writing between 2017 and 2021, Brumberg-Kraus reimagined Julian’s sixteen shewings (or visions) into sixteen ekphrastic poems, playing with themes from Julian's work while responding to scenes from John Waters’ film Pink Flamingos (1972). Initially written primarily for performance, the literal and figurative shape of the poems has changed. In 2021-22, Brumberg-Kraus brought their friend Dr. Jennifer Awes-Freeman, an artist, theologian, and medieval art historian to create visual responses to the poems. In turn, Brumberg-Kraus revised, rewrote, and reshaped the poems in response to Awes-Freeman's art, into a book that is art and poetry to be published by AC Books in 2023 or 2024. This presentation will include performances of several poems, looking at the images and the written poems, and discussion of the work and how it fits into Brumberg-Kraus's broader work on the body, drag, and queer history.
6:00–7:30 pm | Black Queer Classroom Anarchy !!!
Taylor Waits, she/they
Workshop
Calling all classroom anarchists!! Are you tired of the traditional methods of instruction in higher education? Stuck on how to shake up institutional instructional materials like syllabi, assignments, and scaled projects? Come practice, workshop, and converse about Black queer pedagogy, student - centered models, and joy centered instruction frameworks. Bring past syllabi, assignments, project materials or other texts to work with!
Saturday, March 4
10:00–10:55 am | Queer South Asian Pedagogy and Performance
Panel
Situating the Queer South Asian Diasporic Body: Where Poetry, Image, Music, and Slogan Combine | Ranjani Murali, they/them
Ranjani Murali (they/them), a community college professor and author of two books of poetry, presents a twenty-minute poetry reading where they overlay their poems over and against a sampling of Bollywood, Tamil cinema, and Carnatic music. Slogans/chants/visuals embedded in pan-Indian popular culture and discourse will also be used. This is one way to situate their pedagogy of radical empathy as a poetry professor in the classroom—by placing their voice, or their partially embodied self in front of their students, and bringing a sense of who they are as a South Asian immigrant and genderqueer individual. This type of reading may used by instructors as an introduction and well as a lesson; students may be asked, subsequently, to present their own “hybrid introduction narrative/ reading” (as their first project in the class) using similar methods, including incorporating visual art or sampling music that has shaped their journey as writers and humans.
Queering the Campus: The Importance of Queer Pedagogical Practices in Education in India | Rajeev Anand Kushwah, they/them
This session will reflect upon the discourse around the presence of queer bodies in campus spaces by arguing for queer pedagogical approaches to education in India using feminist ethics of embodied care. Queering the campus involves resisting the status quo of heteronormative campus spaces; pushing for adopting a queer understanding of language and pedagogy; incorporating self-care as an act of political warfare; approaching knowledge through ‘anti-disciplinary’ ways marking queer failure as a promise of life; and incorporating narratives of marginality in classrooms that reflects the needs, concerns of minorities through an embodied notion of care that focuses on ‘seeing and acknowledging’ the presence of unruly bodies.
11:00–11:55 am | A Technology-Aided Method for Healing our Relational Ecosystem
Olga Estrada, they/she & Isaiah D. Murray, he/him
Workshop
[ASL]
Olga A. Estrada (they/she), olga.estrada@utsa.edu, University of Texas San Antonio, Ph.D. Student, Department of Culture, Literacy, and Language
Isaiah D. Murray (He/Him), idm22@cornell.edu, Jacobs Technion-Cornell Tech, Dual Master of Science Degrees, Concentration in Urban Tech
The way we see, understand and interact with one another shapes our relational ecology and society at large. LGBTQIA+ BIPOC persons have suffered social alienation, loss, and grief across time and space. Intergenerational trauma resides in our bodies and psyches; we have been left with the trouble of undoing fear and pain. Reaching self-actualization is a process we have lent to institutions that govern our livelihoods — a process that we need to reclaim. Overcoming this hurt requires us to acknowledge our wounds and trust ourselves and one another to heal. From there, we are better equipped to confront the treacherous current reality that touts individualism, disembodiment, and the raid of self. Finding relief and peace requires us to rethink our relationships with each other and our institutions.
As two first-generation, Queer, Chicanx/Afrofuturist educators who teach and learn from the margins, affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and under a repressive, anti-erotic, white supremacist, cis- heteropatriarchal government and institutions, we were required to affirm our embodied knowledge and ingenuity to reinvent healing and brave spaces through technology.
This workshop will share pedagogical resources and concepts that learners can use for reflecting on their relationship landscape, accounting for emotional proximity, pain, and pleasure. Our personal tool allows learners to storytell how their connections to people, institutions, and socio-cultural environments impact their path to healing and a sense of well-being. Equipping learners with this capacity allows them to name the dynamics of their relationships, thinking about social identity, power, and privilege. Moreover, this helps learners identify which of their relationships are disempowering. With this new awareness, learners can focus on incremental actions to build a healthier relationship ecosystem in the classroom and the social world. Teaching individuals to identify the seemingly unshakeable oppression of white, hetero-patriarchal, ableist-capitalism in their relationships, they can reframe and reinvent their community networks, aided by technology, and grounded in pleasure, healing, and the preservation of LGBTQIA+ BIPOC people.
12:00–12:55 pm | Interrogating Institutions
Panel
[ASL]
Learning How To Be Unapologetically Brown | Cassaundra Guzman, she/her
Enter this session ready to engage in a conversation with like-minded individuals about ways Black & Brown bodies can fight against assimilation in higher education. This discourse will be in conversation with powerful works from bell hooks, Cherrie Moraga, and Paulo Freire. Now more than ever is the perfect time to complicate these systems of power.
Picket Line Education: Reflections on Withdrawing Your Labour | Akanksha Mehta
I am a disabled fat queer woman of colour academic at a university in London where a number of staff faced the threat of redundancy last year. To fight against management and for working conditions, we were on strike for 37 days in 22 weeks. This industrial action, the longest thus far, was not new. Since 2018, academics in the UK have undertaken strike action numerous times (including this semester). During these periods of strike action, I have taken a lead role in creating spaces for collective and communal learning and teaching at the picket line. Organising 'teach outs' with students and building alternative spaces of education - where we learn more than what we perhaps learn in classrooms - has been a joyous experience, a nourishing moment of solidarity. However, this very process has also taught me some important and tough lessons about gendered and racialised labour, about the treatment of students as consumers, about the frictions and tensions with a trade union of academic staff, and about the very need to abolish the university. In this session, I would like to discuss what it means to hold picket Pedagogies and to stand together with students in struggle and reimagine education for all.
Abolitionist Imagination and the Neoliberal University | Desmond Francis Goss, they/them
In this presentation, I delineate and operationalize abolitionist pedagogy in four serial parts. First, I describe its ideological framework. Second, I argue its necessity for creating and sustaining liberationist communities. Third, I interrogate institutional and discursive suppression of its deployment. Last, I explore its approaches to radical advancement through inciting students’ abolitionist imagination."
1:00–2:25 pm | “Bellies Out!” – On Fat People in Popular Culture
Joe Baez, she/her (2022 Pedagogy Fellow); André Terrell Jackson; Caleb Luna
Panel (conversation)
[ASL]
“Bellies Out!” is a limited-time speaker series in which Joe Baez speaks with fat activists, academics, and artists about all things fat. At the end of their recorded interview this summer, panelist André Terrell Jackson demanded “justice for the fat queens on RuPaul’s Drag Race!” Following André's lead, this live recording of “Bellies Out!” will focus on the state of fat people in popular culture. In this conversation, Joe, André, and Dr. Caleb Luna discuss the success, pitfalls, and tensions in fat people’s representation in the media today in the realms of television, music, film, fashion, and social media. How has fat people’s visibility in popular culture changed for better and for worse? Who do people consider key, fat public figures today? How does fat people’s visibility in popular culture compromise fat liberation and/or offer new avenues to freedom?
2:30–3:25 pm | Surveillance of Fat Bodies: A Christian Theological Reflection
Arvin Gouw, he/him
Surveillance and human well-being are intricately linked in contemporary life, making it crucial to consider this aspect of social experience in shaping our personal identity. The CDC has five programs in place to monitor body weight in the US, defining surveillance as repeated surveys aimed at tracking changes in public health over time. Despite the positive intentions of the CDC, it's necessary to be aware of the negative aspects of surveillance as well.
Christian Fuchs views surveillance as a tool used for control and domination, as part of a larger pattern of exploitation. The informatization of our bodies through the collection of data leads to a reduction of our identity to a single Body Mass Index (BMI) number. In light of this, there is a need to re-define our embodied self and personal identity to protect us from such norms.
As a scientist and a Christian theologian, I propose two approaches: a scientific approach and a theological approach. The first approach focuses microscopically on the physiological body, delving deeper into the metabolomic information of our body beyond a single BMI number. Scientific research in metabolomics has shown that different types of lipids are associated with different conditions, both healthy and unhealthy, making it impossible to generalize fat as a single entity. The second approach proposes a more critical and reflective view of the embodied self, recognizing that neither material appearance nor data doubles can accurately define us.
From a Christian theological perspective, Eric Stoddart argues that God's gaze and surveillance invites reflection on Christ's solidarity with victims of unjust and abusive surveillance. This divine gaze and surveillance would complement but also critique contemporary medical surveillance on fat bodies. By zooming in on the microscopic subtypes of fat and zooming out to the divine surveillance of our selves, we can gain a more holistic view of our bodies and personal identity.
3:30–4:00 pm | Virtual Happy Hour
Welcome to Club Renaissance: for those of us who didn't score Beyoncé tickets. BYOB/snacks and hang out in the Zoom room while DJ Dr. Gunn spins Renaissance and only Renaissance!
4:00–4:55 pm | Survivor Somatics: The Body as a Place of Residence, Reckoning, and Restoration
Tochukwu Awachie, they/them
Workshop
[ASL]
Our bodies are our place of residence, the most intimate relationship we can have while on this earth. Yet that relationship is more often fraught than not for those of us whose bodies are unsupported or actively harmed by our environments and experiences.
This embodiment workshop will explore cultural/systemic, social/institutional, and psycho-biological/intrapersonal levels of influence on the ways we, as survivors and scholars, inhabit and engage with our bodies.
Paths of inquiry include: How do we bring our bodies with us, courageously and safely, into spaces that would rather pretend they don’t exist? How do we remain present within and kind to our bodies when navigating systems that threaten them? How do we pursue pleasure and liberation for bodies that have become foreign or fearful?
As a group, we will work through somatic strategies to invite our bodies to join us every moment, reconcile with the parts of our body that have become estranged, and recognize and prioritize the languages our bodies use to communicate with us. Attendees will be welcome to share any reservations or reactions to doing this work and request accommodations as needed.
5:00–5:55 pm | Origins: Intergenerational Trauma and Its Effects on My Lived Body
Lexis Greer, she/they
Presentation
In this session, I investigate the relationship between my identity as a mixed-race person and my heritage. Diving deep into my family’s lineage and the intergenerational trauma that has rippled throughout my family. I utilize an anthropological and phenomenological approach by obtaining ancestral information through text, word of mouth, and historical context. Researching both my maternal and paternal grandparents' racial and sexual trauma by taking a closer look at the origins and causes of such harm. Gathering scholarly sources to further examine why specific events impacted my views of myself as a child and how that has influenced where I am now.
6:00–8:00 pm | Honoring Our Anger by the Anger Project
Haas, they/them/their
Workshop
Anger is often pathologized, racialized, gendered, and deemed “unspiritual” and “lowly.” However, anger is one of our most revealing and powerful emotions. It tells us something is wrong and it gives us energy to move forward. Suppressing brings resurgence. Avoiding brings anxiety and fear. What happens when we engage?
This session will include off-camera time for writing and embodiment exercises as well as time for participants to share personal stories. No experience of any kind is necessary to participate. Please come prepared with writing materials and wear warm/cool (depending on your needs), loose, comfortable clothing. Feel free to bring art/play materials, such as toys, crayons, colored pencils, clay. You may want them.
Safety, anonymity and privacy are paramount to this work. Session will not be recorded.
To learn more about this project, visit: https://www.haasart.org/angerproject