The Unruly Bodies Playkit
Welcome to the 2023 Unruly Bodies Pedagogy Conference playkit from the Pedagogy Lab!
BBQ+ playkits are mashups of toolkits and playlists — think resource guides meet mystery boxes. The content below has been curated from the resources that presenters authored or referenced at the conference.
Is your suggestion or work missing from this list? Want to add something? Let us know!
Unruly reads
The books below were recommended by our conference presenters. Thank you to Alex Christmas, Jazelynn Goudy, Davianna Griffin, Rajeev Anand Kushwah, Joe Baez, André Terrell Jackson, Caleb Luna, Alex Tiscareno, Nicollette Davis, DeAnn Brame, Marco Seiferle-Valencia, Jess Saldaña, and Mondo Vaden for your suggestions!
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings (2019)
Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da’Shaun L. Harris (2021)
The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam (2011)
Bad Fat Black Girl: Notes From a Trap Feminist by Sesali Bowen (2021)
The Crunk Feminist Collection, edited by Brittney Cooper, Susana Morris, and Robin Boylorn (2017)
The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor (2018)
My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem (2017)
The Black Dancing Body: A Geography From Coon to Cool by Brenda Dixon Gottschild (2003)
Dance Pedagogy for a Diverse World: Culturally Relevant Teaching in Theory, Research, and Practice by Nyama McCarthy-Brown (2017)
The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India by Ajantha Subramanian (2019)
Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory, edited by Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight (2021)
Learning To Be Human Together: Humanizing Learning (e-book/digital project)
Co-designed by students, faculty and staff at OCAD University, Mohawk College, Brock University, Trent University, Nipissing University, University of Windsor, University of Toronto-Mississauga
“This resource explores the importance of, and processes for, humanizing education. We start by exploring what humanizing teaching and learning means: to acknowledge that our relationships are foundational to the work that we do. It aims to make learning inclusive with connection, access, and meaning-making at its core.”
Shared by Jess Mitchell (presenter, Putting the SELF back into disembodied pedagogy)
An Attempt to Disrupt Education, Part 1 and Part 2 (articles)
Jess Mitchell (presenter, Putting the SELF back into disembodied pedagogy), Age of Awareness (Medium), Dec. 2020
“… One student said, ‘you’re the instructor, Jess Mitchell.’ I asked how he knew… Silence. He shrugged. Then he said, ‘well, you’re at the front of the room.’”
”I am inspired by so many in the OpenEd community: Jesse Stommel, Jasmine Roberts-Crews, Robin DeRosa, Maha Bali, Mia Zamora, Alfie Kohn, and all those who question the ways we educate, the spaces we educate within, and everything else about this.” – Jess
Access Intimacy: The Missing Link (article)
Mia Mingus, Leaving Evidence (blog), 2011
Discussed by Akanksha Mehta (presenter, What does a Crip Education look like?)
“Access intimacy is that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else ‘gets’ your access needs. The kind of eerie comfort that your disabled self feels with someone on a purely access level.”
“If I’m Shinin’, Everybody Gonna Shine”: Centering Black Fat Women and Femmes Within Body and Fat Positivity. (article)
Mary Senyonga and Caleb Luna (panelist, Bellies Out!). Fat Studies 10.3 (2021): 268-282.
“Out of the shared genealogy of Black feminism and fat activism, we assert the possibility to generate a Black-centered fat liberation that is not dependent on opposition to whiteness or focused on majoritarian aspirations, but one that rests on, as queer of color theorist José Esteban Muñoz asks, ‘an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.’”
Unruly pedagogy online
No Fats, No Femmes
Directed by Fatima Jamal
Documentary intro: “An experimental performance piece using Mark Aguhar’s ‘Litanies To My Heavenly Brown Body.’”
Discussed by André Terrell Jackson, Caleb Luna, and Joe Baez (panelists, Bellies Out!)
Austin Police Department Decruitment Initiative
Directed by Sam Lavigne
“APD Decruitment is a public service campaign that aims to prevent potential recruits from joining the Austin [Texas] Police Department, and to convince existing police officers to quit their jobs.”
Discussed by Andie Flores (panelist, Producing (in) Unruly Spaces)
Finding Joy to Spite Oppression Talk Resources (Google Doc)
Resources on joy, librarianship, and intersectionality from Mondo Vaden (presenter, Finding Joy to Spite Oppression)
Critical + Liberatory Library Resources (Google Doc)
Articles, books, aligned organizations, and toolkits on unruly bodies and libraries from Nicollette Davis, DeAnn Brame, Marco Seiferle-Valencia, Jess Saldaña, Mondo Vaden, and Sarah Clinton-McCausland (panelists, Unruly Dreams in Ruly Spaces: A Library Liberation Conversation)
Sounds of Mexico City (audio story)
The Pudding, 2022
“Hola y bienvenido. This is an audio/visual story exploring the sounds of Mexico City’s streets.”
Discussed by Ginny Barnes and Georgianna Negron-Long (presenters, The Wondrous World of the Sensations)
Happiness Break: How to Ground Yourself with Yuria Celidwen (guided audio)
Greater Good Magazine at UC Berkeley, 2022
“Connect to yourself and the land you stand on in under 10 minutes with this grounding practice led by Indigenous scholar Dr. Yuria Celidwen.”
Discussed by Ginny Barnes and Georgianna Negron-Long (presenters, The Wondrous World of the Sensations)
Disability COVID Chronicles (stories + archive)
NYC Center for Disability Studies, 2020–present
“The NYU Center for Disability Studies is documenting the experiences of disabled and chronically ill people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Disabled people, especially people of color and those living in nursing homes or other congregate housing, have been at greatest risk of infection and death from COVID-19. Our team is preparing an edited volume based on two years (and counting) of research and living in New York City in a state of pandemic.
“In collaboration with community members, we are also building a publicly-accessible archive to preserve memories, stories, artworks, and other materials in a range of accessible formats. We are preserving conversations on social media, records of digital public meetings, and photographs of street art and actions that are otherwise ephemeral. Our goal is to chronicle not only vulnerabilities, but creative initiatives for survival under these new conditions that are structured by old inequalities.”
The Unruly Bodies conference mixtape
Add to the playkit
Want us to share something you created or discussed at the conference? See your name missing from a recommendation?
Or want to make this playkit bigger and better? We would love to add more resources on any unruly bodies-related topic, including disability studies and accessibility, illness, public health, trans and queer experience, fatness studies, non-U.S. experiences, somatic pedagogies and techniques, mindfulness, online learning and embodiment, and student experiences of stress, trauma, and precarity.
Submit your ideas here!