This year, the Institute for Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies is thrilled to announce our strong representation at the WGS South Conference, featuring one faculty panel and two engaging graduate student panels.
Faculty Panel:
"Covid and Collective Trauma: Pedagogical Practices of Care in a Global Pandemic”
Daniel Coleman, “Neurodivergence, Mental Illness, and the Debilitation of Late Capitalism: Challenges to Teaching and Learning in These Times”
Julie Kubala, “Conflicts of Care: Teaching for Justice in Pandemic Times”
Rosita Scerbo, “Trauma-Informed Teaching and Digital Humanities Tools: Nurturing Resilient Classroom Communities Post-Pandemic”
Constance Bailey, “Hot Sauce in My Bag Swag: the Role of Performance and Authenticity in Building Classroom Communities”
In the wake of the global pandemic, educational landscapes have undergone unprecedented challenges, necessitating a reevaluation of pedagogical approaches to address the diverse needs of students and faculty in a crisis world. Covid-19 has provided a space for a renewed interest in the role that trauma and care practices play in the classroom. While the pandemic has enabled a wider recognition of “crisis-ordinariness” (Lauren Berlant), the strategies for addressing trauma in the classroom may reinscribe individual interventions to structural problems. Many of us struggle, for instance, with the ongoing ways in which the need for an institutional response may be shunted to individual faculty, especially those who occupy marginalized gender and/or race subjectivities and are always-already exploited by the university as caretakers. Moments of crisis provide opportunities for increasing neoliberal interventions, largely through continuing to see individuals as responsible for and to the mounting precarity of neoliberal policy. It is precisely in these times when we should think through how we can intervene in such policies. During pandemic times, students recognize themselves within circuits of capacity/debility in which the traditional capacious promise of the degree is continually eroded while, at the same time, skyrocketing student debt further entangles them in the promise of higher education. In other words, the challenge here is to construct pedagogical interventions into the affective impact of the neoliberal erosion of the university as a space where students hope to attain some degree of stability (financial and otherwise).
In the panel, we will explore these questions in more detail in order to think through both the ongoing impact of university shifts in response to the pandemic as well as possible effective interventions. Now that the pandemic has been, to some extent, "normalized," what do practices of care in the classroom look like? The call for care can reinvigorate a focus on the interpersonal at the expense of the systemic; how can care extend beyond the interpersonal to encompass classroom communities? Most of our students had their educational trajectories interrupted by this pandemic, which contributes to students' sense of learned helplessness and challenges students' sense of agency over their educations. These challenges can be particularly exacerbated for neurodivergent students and those who struggle with mental illness. How do we think about what care looks like given these realities? What collective practices have we found most useful? What care strategies have we found to contribute, unwittingly, to increasing some of these challenges? How can faculty navigate the additional pressure of caretaking and navigate our various identities in ways that allow us to continue to show up for our students? This panel explores these questions as well as possible strategies of intervention. For example, digital humanities tools can provide a strategic framework for cultivating resilient and supportive classroom communities. By examining the intersection of trauma-informed practices and digital tools, educator cans develop strategies to foster a sense of belonging, empowerment, and resilience among students in the aftermath of the pandemic. Through exploring such concerns, the panel will explore what it means to account for the educational impact of the collective trauma of the pandemic on our students, us as faculty, and the university overall.
Graduate Panels:
One panel, entitled "Queer/Black Women’s’ Southern Ecological Stewardship as Praxes of Care" features Zaree Ross, Ayana De la Cruz (BA student in Africana Studies), and Anterior Leverett (MA student in Africana Studies). This panel will feature three Black feminist scholars thinking about what it means to consider the Black and, in some cases, Black and queer women’s relationship to herbalism, gardening, or farming as a larger conversation about spiritual/ecological repair in lineages of the formerly enslaved. Drawing on archival work, case studies, interviews, and family histories, this panel asks: how can the careful consideration of queer/Black women’s relationship to land and Nature help to highlight the ecological unmooring brought about by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade? How can we conceive of the herbal, sowing, and harvest practices of queer/Black women during and after enslavement as practices of deep care for self and others? How might we conceive of these care practices as signaling a New World and Black diasporic recuperation of severed relationships to land, ecology, and home?
Another panel, entitled "Care-full Readings in Critical Sexuality Studies" features Christopher Vanbeukering, Joanay Tann, Kearney Quillen, and Nazih Raychouni. The panel situates very different but temporally co-existent emergences in critical sexuality studies by reading contemporary phenomena in areas of research inquiry. Sites of interest of this panel include the present state of asexuality in terms of definition, current gender deviations and community formations among Black lesbians, the contemporary emergence of neofascist “trad wives”, and the importance of implementing comprehensive sex education (CSE) in school curriculums. This panel seeks to exercise great care in how we read various examples of critical sexualities as generating and enacting worlds (for better and for worse) in the contemporary environment.