10 days in Toronto...

I am sitting at the Toronto International Airport gathering my thoughts on the last 10 days in Toronto. I attended two conferences: the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies  conference (AAACS) organised by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and AERA. 

What are my thoughts so far:

AERA was amazing this. Big as usual, but somehow I was better at choosing sessions. Rather than by  streams or SIGs I mainly went by names of people I wanted to hear speak. I didn't do any key notes, but lots of sessions by the people I follow. This seemed to have worked well. I focused on critical media literacy, decolonisation, whiteness, emotions/empathy, post-qualitative inquiry and narrative research.

I really got back into feminist affect theorists - vowed to read Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant again. Discovered Sara Ahmed's Phenomenology on Whiteness, which I need to read and re-read. Went to a fantastic session on Dis-Orienting Whiteness, by Victoria G Restler, drawing from Ahmed and Berlant which I could connect to. This was a beautiful example of working with text - reading and re-reading an article. Printing pages out. Sticking them to the wall. Messing the order up. Arranging them on the floor. Highlighting, writing in the margins, drawing over.

This presentation also helped me expand my thinking on my allyship paper - giving me a theoretical language to talk about what we are trying to do in the dialogue group - re-orientating our gaze from experiences of people of colour to our own whiteness and the discomfort it generates. One of the presentation cited George Yancy and his concept of an un-sutured wound - a wound that should not heal, that should stay open, to keep feeling stuck. In the same session they spoke about the stickiness and unfolding of an unending onionskin of whiteness - the layers and layers of racism we have to peel off our skins and bodies, which again relates so well to my last post on the unconscious racism we carry in us and which rears its ugly head over and over again, taking us by complete surprise. And it also made it so obvious why I dont trust myself at the moment as white ally - how I withdraw from spaces where I should be a white ally. This re-orientation of the gaze was also called for by Erin Dyke from Oklahoma State University who citing Eve Tuck, called for a gaze onto systems and institutions rather than indigenous subjects. I loved her talk as well - her insistence on naming the deep ambivalence that we white people find ourselves in when working in decolonial spaces, or for a decolonial project. She refered in her talk to the book 'White folks' by Timothy Lensmire, which sounds like another useful one to read. Her final words which I really like were: 'The process of being anti racist is to understand the infinity of traces of who we are. How are we made up by our institutions? How are we made up into being white?' All of these authors called for action - an action-oriented solidarity, as Michalinos Zembylas called it, in his talk on 'Reinventing Critical Pedagogy as Decolonizing Pedagogy'.

In terms of postqualitative inquiry I really enjoyed talks from younger academics, and academics of power, who foreground a more political view of PQI and also address some of the tensions and discomforts one has with PQI. Asilia Franklin-Phipps from CUNY is one such example of how to use PQI in a very political way. In her presentation she spoke about how to teach mainly white learners about race and racism. She spoke from a position of pain and love and gave some really good advice on how to go about it. Keeping it meaningful, teaching with events, allowing for places of resting and recovering, and practicing closing distances, over and over again, ceding authority, the three R's of a 'decolonial' rigor: rejection, refusal, and re-imagining and most importantly accounting for emotions, and subjectivities.

I love her paper 'Resistance and invention: becoming academic, remaining other', where she shows how one can both confirm and resist to academic pressures. I had lots of discussion with my US colleagues on the very limited expectations of a tenure-track academic - the focus on US collaboration, single authorship, narrow disciplinary foci. Asilia shows how collaboration can be an act of resistance to such neo-liberal discourses, becoming-nomad, in Braidotti's words.

This links to another session I went to, with big names such as Patti Lather, Maggy Maclure and Deborah Britzman. I loved this session - women's accounts on becoming bad girls in academia, about speaking out and challenging normative systems. Patti spoke about her own life becoming more and more radical at calling out racism, heteronormativity, neoliberalism in higher education. Lisa Weems spoke about doing biography in the time of the anthropocene - how do we decentre the subject? focus on the relationality between the biographer and person she writes about, accept that biography is constantly moving? Maggy Maclure brought the concept of witches into the discussion - who she describes as transformative rather than transgressive, identifying the ills of individuals while looking for societal causes, seeing what is not yet conscious to the society.

I attended sessions on Stephanie Springgay and Sarah Truman's Walking Methodologies, which is lovely, as we are just reading their book. Here the link to indigenous knowledge and practices has become so important. I was really amazed about how accessible indigenous knowledges and pedagogies are here in Canada, how much has already found their way into curricula at universities. One presentation spoke of walking tours organised in Toronto by First Nation people and the necessity to prepare themselves and take care of themselves against potential violent questions / comments during these walks. But also the importance of seeing all of this as non-innocent, reminding us that there is no innocence in any of us.

I attended lots of presentations on co-design - mainly with indigenous communities but also learners / students. The importance of involving all, of treading lightly, carefully, responsibly, and also the glaring wrongness if co-design is not considered. There was a lovely session on indigenous pedagogy, sharing lots of links to resources, such as this knowledge tree or these repository of creation stories.  In this session the presenter also talked about how to share IK online in an ethical way (she wrote a book on digital bundles, a reference to the more-than-human agency of spiritual artefacts).

There were a number of presentation who re-enacted Whiteness and white supremacy, while claiming to challenge the status quo. And often this was linked to a lack of co-design, lack of dialogue and an intention to flatten hierarchies. But even if co-design was used, depending on who was part of the project/leading the project, you could see the fault lines, which were picked up by discussants such as Eve Tuck on the panel on co-designing with indigenous youth. Who are we making vulnerable with out research ? Are Haraway, Barad and Massumi the right authors to cite when talking about co-designing for decoloniality?

I listened to a session on empathy - which I found fascinating. In particular the one by Grace Chen - the cruelty of empathy in teacher education. She used Berlant's notion of cruel optimism, as something one desires but then turns against oneself, a form of self-defeating desire, to talk about cruel empathy. She lists three: imagination, identification and impartiality as three forms of empathy that turn against the oppressed, re-establishing rather than challenging power hierarchies. This is similar to what we see in anti-racist work and what people would call passive empathy, or false empathy. She reaffirmed that we need to see empathy as an ongoing practice - a relationship rather than an emotion. Empathy is not something that just happens to us, it needs ongoing work.

But I also attended sessions that showed me what I dont want to do. In one session in particular it became very clear to me, what kind of posthuman research I cant be involved in. This was a session on inhabiting the tensions and potentials of decentering the human in anti colonial educational research, and presentations focused on the more-than human, animals, places, children books. And for me there is just no sense of urgency in those kinds of research - it doesnt draw me in affectively. I can understand why some might find this important - but it's not for me. The one presentation I found fascinating in this panel was by Michelle Salazar Perez, who drawing on Chicana feminism, spoke about spiritual activism. That was new to me and I thought that might be an interesting avenue to explore for our interracial work. She spoke about the power of healing, of engaging in inquiry to engage with rather than against the other. Very hopeful. And authentic. One thing I thought, listening to all these presentations on posthumanism and new materialism, was that rather than talking about working across difference, we should frame it as working with difference - which removes the polarity / dichotomy of difference and is more affirmative of difference.

That was my day of posthumanism. Straight after this session I went to one on posthuman ethnography. And while most of it went over my head, completely, De Freitas gave a really interesting talk about the history of posthuman ethnography. She brought in Latour and Actor-Network-Theory, which was new to me and was interesting because the evening before when I tried to explain posthumanism to somebody else, she mentioned it sounded like ANT.

My own contribution to the conference was part of a round table. I contributed a chapter to a book on Hidden and Suppressed Narratives: A Feminist, Intersectional Look at Women's Experiences in Academia. This is an amazing book covering women's narratives across race, age, culture, disciplines, geographical locations. The round table worked so well for the sharing of these very personal and affective stories. And to be in one session with one my academic heroes, Cheryl Matias, was just amazing. I spoke about my own struggles in understanding my role as white woman in South African Higher Education and my increasingly fraught relationship with the term 'ally' - my increasing distrust in my own capability being an ally. Sharon Radd spoke about coming to terms with her 'superwoman' expectations on a camping trip, while Stephanie Jones read her hauntingly beautiful account of weaving together the past, the present and future labour of women of colour in academia. Cheryl Matias then spoke about her own journey in becoming a highly vocal and loud anti-racist activist, how she moved through Duncan-Andrade's typologies of hokey hope, mythical and critical hope. She introduced me to the term motherscholar, which I will definitely follow up on! (One of the many sessions I missed in this packed programme was her discussion of her book 'Feeling white: whiteness, emotionality and education', which sounds so relevant to our work).

Over many of this sessions, my interest in narratives was reinforced. I was introduced to new forms of narrative inquiry, such as duo-ethnography - which could be a useful methodology for our papers, which are often based on continuous dialogue. Also currere, as a form of ethnography, which looks at the past, present but also envisions the futures, sounds like a useful method for us.

One of the papers that I thought spoke to the course we are currently designing, was on 'Radical Teaching Assistants' - and how TAs can support and enrich the criticality of a course, by bringing in their own stories and how essential they are for meaningful curriculum development through their ongoing feed back to the lecturer.

I went to a session on global discourses on citizenship - though it could be useful for the course on critical compassionate citizenship we would like to develop. It was a panel of well known race scholars, Zeus Leonardo, Gloria Ladson-Billing, Eve Tuck (which I also have become quite a fan of). I found Eve Tuck's contribution most interesting - asking what citizenship and whose citizenship...and how different it would be if new comers entering Canada would be welcomed by /gained belonging from First Nation people rather by settlers. And what would citizenship mean for First People? The importance of creation stories to link to you to your land, the relation to land that defines you (settles have colonisation rather than creation stories). 

I didnt go to many technology-based sessions, although I listening to stuff on social media and critical media literacy. But I made good contacts with people engaged in learning analytics research who could be possible partners in future projects. But this year my focus was on theory more than practice. Trying to see how people use theory to make sense of experience.

On top of all this (some days sessions went on from 8.00 in the morning to 8.00 in the evening) I walked through Toronto, up and down and from east to west. What a joy to just be walking, exploring a city by foot. It was cold but not unbearingly cold. I enjoyed it. And sometimes when the sun came out, it actually was mild. On my many walks I discovered museums, galleries, second hand book shops, coffee shops and lots and lots of graffiti. I also reconnected with friends from near and far, which was really really nice. 10 days well spent I would say.