Collective Praxis Research Articles

Sufficient Magic: Queer Prison Comix as Liberation Praxis

ABSTRACT: Prison art has many functions, from representation to healing to rehabilitation, and it can make use of many different kinds of media, including comix. For prison abolitionists, prison art is most powerful when it is connected to larger struggles against the criminal punishment system, and comix offer unique affordances to abolitionist movements. From cells to movement blur to the gutter, comix enable artists to interrogate carcerality and gendered oppression simultaneously. Through close readings of comix and correspondence with artists and organizers, this article examines the world-making praxis of incarcerated trans artists who are creating and distributing original comix with the abolitionist organization ABO Comix. While most scholarship on prison art explores state-sanctioned programs, ABO Comix is independent from the prison system, producing alternative possibilities as well as unique challenges for artists and organizers. In comix by trans artist Krysta Morningstarr* as well as other artists, incarcerated LGBTQ artists use comix as a form of world-making, mutual aid, and collective praxis within and beyond the prison borders.

Youth and Community Work for Climate Justice: Towards an Ecocentric Ethics for Practice

ABSTRACT This paper traces an expanded ethical perspective for youth and community work (YCW) practice in response to the climate and biodiversity crises. Discussing ecological ethics, we problematise the liberal humanist emphasis on utilitarianism and reject it as inappropriate for YCW in these times. Instead, we argue for an ecocentric practice ethic which intrinsically values the non-human world. To advance an ecocentric ethical perspective for YCW we draw on decolonial and posthuman theory. Inspired by a Freirean dialogical approach, we apply these theoretical domains as lenses to problematise YCW practice, seeking a generative dialogue between perspectives. Through this, we identify three emergent tasks for ecocentric YCW: (a) thinking and acting beyond the individual; (b) cultivating reciprocal care and connection and (c) practicing critical pedagogies of place. This third element builds on YCW's social pedagogic tradition and provides a practical means to incorporate ecocentric ideas into practice. We conclude that, given the unprecedented implications of climate crises and biodiversity collapse, a YCW ethics that does not consider these implications for young people is insufficient for the context of practice today. Enacting an ecocentric YCW ethics requires ongoing collective praxis and dialogue between young people, practitioners, educators, managers and students.

From the factory model to the classroom-workshop: Learning from practice in the fields of health and education

ABSTRACT In this article, we engage in a dialogue about structural competencies based on the proposal of the classroom-workshop, aimed at educational and work environments in the fields of health and education. Our starting point is the notion that practical experiences do not merely represent a collection of specialised technical knowledge, as they are part of the complexity of the social game. Drawing from the theoretical frameworks of Pierce, Gadamer, Freire, and others, the proposal of the classroom-workshop recovers the power of collective praxis. Learning from and with others becomes central in the social game in order to collectively appropriate knowledge by making the autonomy of learning as horizontal as possible. By centering the relational world of learning and working, the classroom-workshop recovers the circular structure of understanding that enables a reflective appropriation of the territory – understood as the social space where life takes place – while de-instrumentalizing the reading of theoretical traditions and resignifiying the practice of writing. It establishes connections, links, and anchors that enable a dialogue between theory and practice, so often dissociated and fragmented.

The Virtual Geography of Afrodiasporic Womanist Love: Black Women Critical Educators Collectively Cultivating Solidarity and (En)countering Loneliness Online

In this multimodal article, we respond to the pervasive erasure of Black women’s knowledge-making practices and pedagogies in academic literature writ large while illustrating the use of creative methods for making meaning of community, connection, sociality, and solidarity, in virtual or online adult learner education spaces. We begin by narrating how our collective of U.S.-based Black women comparative and international education scholar-practitioners lovingly banded together for a Study Abroad Program. We theorize the diasporic Blackness undergirding our womanist love of one another as a spatial, relational, corporeal, and political force helpful for cultivating critical community and affective solidarity in our virtual geographic context. Then, using kitchen-table talk as a reflexive method of inquiry, we probe the particularities of that Afrodiasporic womanist love—the energy cohering our collective in an online environment—as noun and verb: a source of sustenance, a reprieve from loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a care-full comforting and healing practice. We locate our theorizing in the genealogy of Black feminist thought, and to interrogate how Afrodiasporic womanist love is shaped by and situated in time, space, and body(ies), we explore our geohistories and legacies. We conclude by reflecting on how, in addition to building solidarity, Afrodiasporic womanist love helped us form a supportive critical community online that provided sanctuary as we (re)conceptualized justice, freedom, and humanity in our individual and collective praxis vis-à-vis the intimacy, authenticity, and vulnerability demanded by this type of Black love.

The Egalitarian Principle of “Qist” as Lived Ethic: Towards a Liberational Tafsir

The Qur’anic term and principle of “qist”—generally defined as fairness, equity, and giving each his/her due share—occurs twenty-two times and forms a particular intentional discourse against social and economic privilege and against power in its various dimensions. These occurrences, their contexts, and fields of meaning demonstrate its distinctive place within the Qur’anic moral worldview, at the nexus between private virtue ethics and collective praxis. Qist is presented not merely as an abstract ideal, but as a specific, concrete social and economic goal for the marginalized and disempowered of any community. Especially in the domains of gender relations, poverty conditions, and authorial power, the divine injunction for applying equality in lived contexts becomes a call for liberation from “zulm” (injustice) and “taghut” (false deities). Can the examination of this concept and its affiliates form the basis for a scriptural theorization on an Islamic theology of social and economic justice, of resistance to tyranny and unjust constructions of privilege and superiority? Towards an answer to this inquiry, one can argue that qist directs attention to the practical ways of applying the overarching, comprehensive value of shari’ah, al-‘adl (justice), as well as to its defining features of collectivity and distributiveness.

To Represent or Not to Represent: Choice or Excuse?

ABSTRACT This reflection considers the nuances of white theatre teacher/practitioners confronting race and racism in educational drama and theatre spaces. The author invites her white peers to reflect on theory and individual and collective praxis given discrete and shared identity markers. The author shares lessons learned through a variety of experiences, including as a guest at an arts-based youth programme focused on Indigenous identity reclamation.

Learning Experience Design as Collective Praxis: Two Design Cases from Higher Education

This paper explores the pivotal role of learning experience designers in fostering collective praxis through two design cases, embracing critical pedagogy. In the “Centering Justice” program, they facilitate collaboration among faculty, students, and instructional technologists, for an inclusive and socially just teaching framework. Navigating power dynamics, they promote awareness of privilege and oppression, and encourage dialogue and reflexivity. In the online course on intimate partner violence, they orchestrate interdisciplinary collaboration, ensuring authentic and empathetic content through participatory design. These case studies highlight the central role of learning experience designer in managing stakeholders, power dynamics, and fostering transformative education.

PARTNERING THROUGH IT: CONFRONTING THE INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES FACING DUAL-CAREER ACADEMIC COUPLES

Purpose: Meeting the needs of dual-career academic couples can be an important step in recruiting and retaining university faculty and researchers. The goal of this essay is to review the existing scholarship on dual-career hires and offer concrete recommendations for university administrators. Background/Motivation: Attending to dual-career needs is especially relevant to efforts at diversifying the academic workforce, as multiple studies have indicated that faculty appointments are a major contributor to the so-called leaky pipeline causing attrition of women and scholars of color, particularly in biomedical and STEM fields. We take it as a feminist imperative to confront institutional discrimination against dual-career scholars and to intervene in the service of collective praxis. Intended Audience: Scholars and administrators interested in understanding and overcoming institutional barriers to achieving diverse, inclusive, and family-friendly academic workplaces. Contribution: This essay synthesizes the recent literature on dual-career hires and offers recommendations for university administrators. Positionality: We approach this issue as a senior academic couple that has navigated dual-career job searches for close to twenty years and has held faculty positions together at three different academic institutions. We are a white, hetero dual-career academic couple interested in developing resources for individuals striving to activate change at their universities.

Cultivating collective praxis for scholarly transformation and racial justice: The Critical Race Theory collective’s introduction to the special issue

This special issue launches from the challenges of white supremacy within Library and Information Studies (LIS) and the demonizing of Critical Race Theory (CRT) within American and British societies. To address these challenges through a commitment to practice as well as theory, a special editorial team for this publication was formed to tackle head on how racialised knowledge justice issues can also manifest in scholarly publishing spheres. This team is the Critical Race Theory collective (CRTc): an international community of scholars, practitioners and activists working at the intersections of race, libraries, archives, information and education. This extended introduction is split into two parts that describe respectively the process and the product of the special issue. Part One charts the national contexts of CRTc praxis in the US and the UK, and outlines the community-building, restorative and pedagogical principles and lessons that have (in)formed the CRTc editorial and developmental process. Part Two outlines the papers that constitute the product of the special issue: contributions from American and British authors from interdisciplinary backgrounds who apply CRT frameworks to LIS discourse and practice. Together, these two parts demonstrate the scholar-activist underpinnings of CRTc to address, challenge, resist, interrupt, and ideally reverse the pushback against all forms of culturally conscious justice, especially racial justice.

Integrating Critical, Engaged, and Abolitionist Pedagogies to Advance Antiracist Social Work Education

The intersecting coronavirus, racism, and economic pandemics electrified U.S. social work organizations into creating long overdue antiracism initiatives. This necessary shift includes the Council on Social Work Education specifying that curriculums must consist of frameworks and practices that eliminate racism. Social work educators will need to incorporate antiracism into their teaching. We argue that critical, engaged, and abolitionist pedagogies contain frameworks and practices that align with antiracism. One of our fundamental assumptions is that liberation, which is a collective state of freedom from racism and other intersecting structures of domination, is the end goal of antiracism. We integrate concepts developed by critical pedagogy scholars, Black feminists, and abolitionist activists with our experiences to share ten lessons we learned through decades of collective praxis as social justice educators committed to liberation.

Memory of the Present

Memory of the Present Elana Gomel (bio) Carter F. Hanson. Memory and Utopian Agency in Utopian/Dystopian Literature: Memory of the Future. Routledge, 2020. xvii + 199 pp. $160 hc. Utopia is about the future; memory is about the past. This seems so self-evident that the notion that memory can play a constitutive role in utopia appears far-fetched. If utopia is a vision of an ideal future, then it has to reject the less than ideal past. In many utopian texts, historical and individual memory is treated as a danger that must be regulated, contained, or expunged. Dystopia, utopia's dark twin, is generally hostile to memory, as in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), where the repression of historical memory is necessary to maintain the oppressive regime of Ingsoc. But can utopia and memory be reconciled? In this interesting book, Carter F. Hanson makes a case that they can. If I am not entirely persuaded by his argument, I still believe it opens up a new field of inquiry. Citing cognitive research, Hanson argues that memory is intrinsic to anticipation: "the conscious imagining or subconscious wish-dreaming of a better future must also draw on memories of our pasts" (xv). Thus, he posits that "memory is fundamental to and constitutive of utopianism, and that within the more specific domain of literary utopias, memory and forgetting often function as vital and complex components of a text's utopian impulse" (xvi). Of course, arguing that memory is constitutive of utopianism is not the same thing as showing that memory is an issue in literary utopias. Hanson's book does an admirable job of the latter, situating literary utopias in the context of the "memory wars" of modernity, in which individual and collective memories are contested by emerging ideologies. The claim that memory is necessary for utopia is more problematic, however, running into the thorny thicket of definitions and historical periodization. The book is wide ranging in its scope, covering texts from Thomas More's Utopia (1516) to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Lois Lowry's The Giver (1993), M.T. Anderson's Feed (2002), and Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013). Not only are these texts written in different countries and in different historical periods, but they also embody incompatible views of what constitutes a perfect society. Bellamy's industrial and regimented socialism would be seen as a nightmare in Piercy's pastoral communitarianism; Le Guin's "ambiguous utopia" is saved by science, which dooms humanity in Atwood. [End Page 160] Moreover, half of the texts Hanson discusses are dystopias, presenting a future society that is considerably worse than the present. It seems that at least implicitly he adopts the view of Krishan Kumar, who argues in Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (1987) that the two genres are structurally the same, and that dystopias offer a critique of the utopian vision based on an anti-utopian ideology. Later in the book, however, Hanson distinguishes between utopia and the utopian impulse, which is an open-ended desire for something different from the present state of the world. The problem is that all the novels he discusses are utopias and dystopias in the formal sense: texts that represent a blueprint for the future rooted in a specific ideology. The book is somewhat uneasily poised between utopia and utopianism, just as it is uneasily poised between memory as a psychological faculty and memory as a collective praxis. To adapt Donald Spence's distinction between narrative and historical truth, the book deals with memory as cultural narrative, while conflating it with the cognitive ability to retain information about the historical past. In his discussion of Thomas More's Utopia, Hanson acknowledges that social perfection requires suppression or regulation of cultural memory: "Utopia largely dispenses with history and thus with the contingencies of memory" (19). This juxtaposition of history and utopia is a frequent claim in conservative critiques of the utopian project, as in Emil Cioran's History and Utopia (1960). Indeed, Nineteen Eighty...

Educating Perfinkers: How Cognitive Tools Support Affective Engagement in Teacher Education

Our intention is to share our lived experiences as educators of educators employing Imaginative Education (IE) pedagogy. We aim to illuminate IE’s influence on our students’, and our own, affective alertness, and to leave readers feeling the possibility of this pedagogy for teaching and learning. Inspired by the literary and research praxis of métissage (Chambers et al., 2012; Hasebe-Ludt et al., 2009; Hasebe-Ludt et al., 2010), we offer this polyphonic text as a weaving together of our discrete and collective voices as imaginative teacher educators. Our writing reflects a relational process, one that invites us as writers and colleagues to better understand each other and our practices as IE educators (Hasebe-Ludt et al., 2009). It also allows us to share with other practitioners our struggles, questions, and triumphs as we make sense of our individual and collective praxis: how IE’s theory informs our practice, and how our practice informs our understanding of IE’s theory. This text, like IE’s philosophy, invites heterogeneous possibilities.

The Jurisgenerativity of a Liquid Praxis

Abstract liquid blackness founder Alessandra Raengo talks with filmmaker and installation artist John Akomfrah about the emergence of the trope of liquidity in his work, in the context of the reversibility between aesthetics, practice, and praxis exhibited since his output with the Black Audio Film Collective, and about the intellectual errantry of his practice ever since. Together they explore liquidity as a feature of double consciousness, a way to comprehend the dispersion of the polyrhythmic, and a key to approach the aesthetic philosophy of collective praxis.

A Right to the City? Harm Reduction as Urban Community Development and Social Inclusion

In cities across Latin America, community-based harm reduction and drug policy activists are ushering in a new, broader understanding of harm reduction for drug use, which they place within a banner of a “right to the city.” This new frame of understanding drug use transcends the traditional harm reduction focus on blood-borne infection and discrete medical interventions to one that better encompasses the complexities of their urban geographies, political economic drivers, and drug and health policies. Importantly, this emergent frame reflects their collective praxis to make and hold a claim to the neighborhoods in which they reside by building their own collective political and social power. The groups leading this approach ground themselves in strategies of resistance and social cohesion that try to address the consequences of the war on drugs and to contest the claims of the state to police and organize urban poor neighborhoods. In doing so, this approach calls forth a new harm reduction designed to meet the needs of those communities most impacted by the war on drugs in urban spaces and to safeguard and enhance their health, rights, power, and survival.

Educação popular: instrumento de formação, luta e resistência no projeto educativo do MST

A educação popular é um importante instrumento formador e de luta, que institui processos determinantes para a formação e consolidação da história da educação brasileira. O direito e o acesso à educação pública, gratuita, laica e de qualidade têm raízes nas lutas reivindicatórias das classes populares, que combatem concepções liberais nos diferentes períodos da história. Alternativas de resistência são construídas coletivamente, utilizando estratégias de mobilização nas comunidades para realizar o trabalho de base. Este artigo visa compartilhar ideias das práxis social e coletiva de educação do Movimento Sem Terra (MST). Trata-se de uma experiência de resistência, luta e organização política em defesa da Educação do Campo: professores educadores resistem para significar o campo como lugar de vida, de produção de saberes e conhecimento. A defesa das políticas públicas, em especial da educação pública, gratuita, laica e de qualidade, em conformidade com o princípio de que educação não é mercadoria, luta histórica da classe trabalhadora, é um lema que precisa estar ativo. Requer-se a organização da categoria dos trabalhadores da educação na perspectiva de uma práxis coletiva e de organização social para articulação e construção de outro projeto educacional.

Adrift in a Borderland: Experimenting with Participatory and Embodied Methodologies as a Collective of Asylum seekers, Refugees, Civic Activists and Academic Scholars

This article examines our on-going attempts to operationalise a critical qualitative research approach – drifting, which we have adopted from the feminist collective Precarias a la deriva, – in order to conduct research with people who have arrived in Finland as asylum seekers and refugees, as well as with the civic activists who work by their side. Our research focuses on the everyday bordering practices that exclude asylum seekers and refugees, and the activities of de-bordering. The article claims that drifting combines the advantages of mobile research methods with the critical and collective praxis of activist research, which allows the upsurge of non-hegemonic knowledge. Drifting holds great promise for exploring everyday borders and their consequences, which usually remain hidden to the majority of native residents. In drifting, the injustices that occur at borders within countries in Europe are not only exposed for research and the wider public, but they are also challenged with research-based interventions.

Praxis of Care: A Path to Harmony

A harmonious state of things is often perceived idyllic. It is devoid of cacophony, hostility, and dissension. It denotes peace, accord, and a relationship characterized by a lack of conflict. True harmony goes much deeper than absence of conflict or condemnation for the lack of peace. This paper presents the challenges to harmony using the theory of care ethics. It will unveil the possibilities of care, even if it was initially lodged at home and family. Using an expansive view, this paper claims that harmony is not farfetched if nations bring to the table the ethics of care. Hinged on care ethics are the principles of collective praxis, peace, and solidarity which enrich human potentials and makes interconnections, and solidarity possible. Thus, the paper will employ philosophical and theological analysis that addresses the following: 1) Care ethics as an ethical concept with myriad variants, yet praxis-driven; 2) Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ as an appeal to foster care for all; 3) A theological reinterpretation of “rada”, and 4) Care ethics as an injunction to revalue care as a social good. Incorporating Pope Francis’ message in Laudato Si’, this paper hopes to underscore promoting a culture of caring through collective dialogue.
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The End of the English Department: Decolonizing Futures

The End of the English Department: Decolonizing Futures Ronald Cummings (bio) Call this apocalyptic propaganda if you must:The World Ended in the Spring of 2006.But how much you are willing to accept this storydepends on how far your minds can stretch. Kei Miller A Light Song of Light The epigraph which opens this brief discussion is taken from a poem by the Jamaican writer Kei Miller. The poem begins with a declaration of the end of the world, which Miller locates in 2006. Although he is not specific in identifying any single apocalyptic event, he references a confluence of happenings: “America, Iraq, Korea; / the pressing of buttons; the detonation of bombs / from one pole to the next; the grand explosion / of people” (32). He declares “what we most feared / would happen has happened.” If 2006, in Miller’s narrative, marks one end of the world, it proves interesting now to look back on that time from a fearful and unsettled present. We can find another accounting of that time and of the detonation of lives daily in Dionne Brand’s book Inventory, published in that fateful year, 2006. She closes that volume with an important declaration about [End Page 1] the need for truth telling in times of crisis: “I have nothing soothing to tell you, / that’s not my job” (100). My own attempts here to reflect on what I am calling the end of the English department is similarly saying soothing things in these troubled times. It is a call to attend urgently to the fraught and precarious present in relation to the work we do as scholars within universities and in literature departments. But to understand the end of the English department as an event, or a singular moment, is also to miss the point. Rather, this work is joining a call, one variously echoed, revisited, and reframed in the essays in the discussion forum by Nadine Attewell, Sonnet L’Abbé, and Aubrey Hanson, where they each urge us to think collectively about and, even more importantly, to meaningfully and purposely engage in the decolonization of the study of literature. They ask us to think seriously about the terms on which we continue to do literary studies as well as about the institutional contexts that enable and, even more tellingly, constrain decolonizing work. While they each extend a keen invitation to dialogue and deeper thinking about our individual and collective praxis, in my own reflections here I want to further suggest that what might be at stake in ongoing calls for decolonization is perhaps also an end of the English department. At the very least, we are being asked to think seriously about the restructuring of our discipline, its function, purpose, and interventions. In our current moment of Black and Indigenous political insurgency, with calls to decolonize the curriculum and diversity initiatives within the university, what does it mean to continue to do work under the sign of English studies? What new formations and possibilities might our current moment of institutional precarity and change, including the panic of the pandemic, allow us to imagine? Whither the future of the English department? In Miller’s poem, referenced above, what he calls the end of the world is not a finite end of things. It is the end of a particular formation of things. Much like Francis Fukuyama’s haunting notion of the “end of history,” which attends to the end of a particular structuring of the geo-political world (the historic organization of political and economic life and futures through the ideological divide of communism and capitalism), Miller’s “end of the world” is importantly and strategically rendered as a potential opening to “parallel universes” (32). He offers an invitation to think about “the one thousand lives we lived simultaneously / and which could only be glimpsed through magic / mirrors or déjà vu” (32). This is also a rejection of linear formulations of histories. Particularly in his attention to déjà vu, as structuring affect, Miller asks us to sense and remember how the world, as one might know and feel it and as it has been ordered, has ended several [End Page 2...

LAW AND B/ORDER

Insofar as border policing and wall construction symbolize the reassertion of nation-state sovereignty, the fact that they exacerbate the problems they seek to contain makes them complicit in undermining the very sovereignty they seek to assert. Rather than lament the loss of nation-state sovereignty, however, this essay takes this loss as an opportunity to reconceptualize the concept of sovereignty itself, and does so in relation to the current resurgence of “sanctuary” in the US political field. Far from functioning simply as a challenge to nation-state sovereignty, sanctuary can serve as a site from which to think and enact the creative power of collective praxis; a kind of generic sovereignty.

Renewable energy transition under multiple colonialisms: passive revolution, fascism redux and utopian praxes

ABSTRACTThis essay outlines intermedia theory’s contribution to the emerging multiple colonialisms framework and argues that a socio-ecological reproduction feminist approach to the multiple colonialisms problematic is critically necessary for thinking through the contradictions of renewable energy transition. A multiple colonialisms framework needs to be a kind of utopian theorizing, I argue, just as any feminist renewable energy transition seeking to realize energy democracy and energy justice must create a utopian collective praxis that regenerates common-being and reproduces common wealth. Drawing on research on a network of petroleum-free subaltern feminist agricultural cooperatives in Medak, India, and on the creativity of their media practices, this article examines the social contradictions of energy democracy and just transition politics in a conjuncture defined by green passive revolution and fascism redux. The essay proposes the concepts of ‘subaltern counter-environments’ and ‘molecular media’ to decolonize energy democracy and just transition discourse and to articulate the importance of an autonomous domain of subaltern politics for a degrowth strategy of regenerative delinking through and against the state. Molecular media created by the Feminist Energy Futures research collaboration at the University of Alberta seek to regenerate the bias of time in our contemporary intermedia ecology where the bias of spectacularized and colonized space is otherwise dominant so that regenerative delinking strategies can endure social contradictions they embody through subaltern counter-environments they can create.