Walking Together in a Pandemic: Reflections on a Semester of Place, Decolonization, and Classroom Community
In this co-authored reflection by seven graduate students and one instructor, we revisit the “Apocalyptic Feminisms” graduate class taught in Fall 2020, at the height of the pandemic, in which students were asked to engage with interdisciplinary writing on the Anthropocene and to hone their own fem...
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Brock University
2024-12-01
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| Series: | Studies in Social Justice |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index.php/SSJ/article/view/4274 |
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| Summary: | In this co-authored reflection by seven graduate students and one instructor, we revisit the “Apocalyptic Feminisms” graduate class taught in Fall 2020, at the height of the pandemic, in which students were asked to engage with interdisciplinary writing on the Anthropocene and to hone their own feminist praxes through going on and documenting their walks. We reflect on the “Walk and Movement Reading Instagram Engagements” assignment, exploring what walking can offer to deepen theoretical, methodological, and praxis-based approaches to environmental and place-based learning. We do this by writing from a cascading voice approach, where each reflection stands on its own and together builds into a whole greater than its parts. Following on an introduction to the course and assignment, we begin with a conceptual outlining of the meanings of place, decolonization, and academic community. Next, each of the graduate student collaborators responds to the following prompt, “How did the walking project on IG [Instagram] influence how you thought about questions of place, decolonization, and classroom community during a pandemic?” Each co-author develops a robust engagement with this question drawing on their own pandemic Fall 2020 semester, their photographs from the course, and the insights and practices they developed in conversation with each other throughout the span of the semester. Together, this reflection offers thoughts on the feminist and place-based utilities of walking pedagogy as well as, through collaboration, challenges the very way in which academic scholarship is done at the site of the late capitalist academy and its topos of success, competition, and meritocracy.
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| ISSN: | 1911-4788 |