Notes
The Liberatory Legacy of bell hooks: Pedagogies and Praxes that Heal and Disrupt
As educators, writers, and humanists whose work has been deeply informed by bell hooks’s writing, we envisioned this special issue as a way to create space for conversations around her liberatory pedagogical legacy. More specifically, we were interested in how collaborative, community-centered, and multimodal engagements with technology—as informed by hooks’s work—could transform teaching and learning and create new shared spaces for education.
We were especially excited about the particular kinds of engagements with hooks’s work that a platform like The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy afforded. Recognizing, as hooks did, that knowledge takes many different shapes and forms, the journal has long been committed to supporting both conventional articles as well as creative, multimodal, and experimental scholarship. In addition, JITP practices editing not as gatekeeping, but as a form of mentorship: a way to guide and support authors, as well as each other, throughout the publishing process. With these ideas and practices in mind, we saw this special issue as a way to foreground research on hooks and digital pedagogy and to highlight experimental and multimodal scholarship that might be excluded from other venues.
bell hooks remains one of the most influential Black feminist scholars, intellectuals, and educators of the twentieth century. The author of more than 30 books on subjects from teaching to love to popular culture, she is best remembered for her feminist theories that were grounded in Black women’s historical experiences. Her death in 2021, at the age of 69, prompted scholars across the humanities and a range of disciplines, such as pedagogy, English, geography, architecture, Black studies, and gender studies, to reflect on her liberatory legacy within their work. Among educators, she is perhaps most renowned for her books Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994) and Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003). These books emphasize the importance of establishing community with students, self-recovery, and teaching that prepares learners to navigate and change the world.
This special issue draws on hooks’s radical, inclusive, disruptive, and recuperative legacy to explore the use of digital technology in teaching, educational organizing, and anti-oppressive praxes within, alongside, and beyond academia. We ask: What kinds of embodied and communal interactions are enabled by teaching with technology? How can we reconcile the inherent contradictions in a learning community where technology functions as a tool for social justice and for surveillance capitalism?
What Brings Us to This Work
Each of us comes to this issue from years of work and encounters with the profound and illuminating legacies of Black feminist scholarship, and, specifically, hooks’s transformational theories and texts.
The reflexive perspective with which hooks approached her iterative practice of observing and shaping classroom communities is foundational to Nikki Fragala Barnes’s pedagogical theory and practice. In Teaching to Transgress, hooks declares, “I saw in theory then a location for healing” (hooks 1994, 59). Grounding her generations of readers, she continues, “I found a place of sanctuary in ‘theorizing,’ in making sense out of what was happening. I found a place where I could imagine possible futures, a place where life could be lived differently” (hooks 1994, 61). hooks draws us in with this assertion: “When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. Indeed, what such experience makes more evident is the bond between the two—that ultimately reciprocal process wherein one enables the other” (hooks 1994, 61). This is to say that theory itself and the process of theorizing can be active liberatory practices—a convergent Venn diagram where academic work can also be/come mutual liberation. hooks’s work harmonizes with similar themes present in the work of Indigenous scholars emphasizing communal ways of knowing, offering restorative systems of liberation and care for our education environments. While proposing this issue and collaborating with this editorial team, Barnes again delighted in the co-creation of a project explicitly emphasizing hooks’s work as a generative, creative path of healing and transformational practice.
When Summer first encountered hooks’s Teaching to Transgress, she was elated to find a framework that articulated her own pedagogical values and beliefs. As a teacher who insisted on creating a warm, communal space to facilitate the sharing of ideas, she was particularly drawn to hooks’s elucidation of the meaning and role of excitement in the higher education classroom. As the use of digital technologies exploded during the global pandemic in ways that both enable and complicate building community and excitement in the classroom, she is especially grateful for the work of scholars thinking through and modeling how hooks’s proven methodologies can continue to guide our pedagogical practices.
Co-editing Issue 23 was a chance to honor bell hooks for Asma. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Teaching to Transgress, All About Love, and Wounds of Passion contributed to her educatio and pedagogy, helped shape the perspectives about life that Asma continues to share with students, family, friends, and colleagues. It was also a chance to engage this issue’s case studies, methods, and creative work as informed by bell hooks’s relevance to digital pedagogy. They each urge the reader to consider how different aspects of our society can benefit from the insights and approaches our authors suggest for teaching and learning with interactive technology.
Bringing our whole selves into the classroom also implies healing from ruptures brought about by institutionalized ways of knowing; ways that often separate us from communities we have come to know the world with. For Kush, this relationship with self and its ongoing recovery from academic status quo were among their first learnings from hooks’s Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black and Teaching to Transgress. These lessons continue to guide Kush in structuring classroom engagements around unpacking academic biographies, naming and addressing the contradictions between technological self and society, and analyzing power. Kush’s interest in co-editing the special issue came from this location and praxis of self-recovery in community, foregrounding the work of hooks on education and class.
Danica was eager to work on this special issue in order to honor one of the monumental figures who taught her how to teach and gave her a model for the kind of scholar she wanted to be. Danica was especially inspired by hooks’s insistence that teaching is a form of meaningful intellectual and creative work—a way of thinking, theorizing, and dreaming up a better world with our students. Many of Danica’s classroom practices—co-authored community guidelines, student-led lessons, and flexible, collaborative agendas—would not exist were it not for her dog-eared (and much-beloved) copy of Teaching to Transgress.
Editorial Process
Our practice of working in community with each other as issue editors, as a larger collective for the Journal, and with our contributors has been one of great reciprocity throughout this year. We crafted the call for submissions as a collaborative team and encouraged each other as we managed editorial tasks. We supported each other along with our wise and innovative scholars who sent their work. We shifted schedules; we built communication protocols and revised them; and we furthered peer-learning and mentorship. Conversations mediated via email and other digital platforms were generous and centered on inquiry and support. We asked more of each other. And we forgave missteps and mistakes. The experience of lived scholarship in community continues to be transformational—and we remain equally grateful to JITP copy editors and stagers, and Managing Editor Patrick DeDauw, for their care and patience as we worked together on this special issue. The issue begins with a heartfelt tribute and dedication of the issue to Ángel David Nieves, former JITP Editorial Collective member by Amanda Licastro.
What’s Inside
In the article, “The Error, the Glitch, and the Margin: Sites of Radical Possibility,” Jasmine Banks brings together the individual works of bell hooks on the margin and Legacy Russell on glitch feminism to inquire into the liberatory possibilities of Black digital literacy as engaged pedagogy. Specifically, by thinking with the experiences of a self-led undergraduate-level course titled “Psychology of the Black Digital Experience,” Banks offers a detailed analysis of classroom learning committed to the critique and reclaiming of expectations, norms, and values associated with the use of everyday digital platforms.
In her article, “The Black Feminist Pedagogical Origins of Open Education,” Jasmine Roberts-Crews makes a critical intervention into how open education is conceptualized, arguing that its fundamental connection to Black feminist pedagogy is too often overlooked. After tracing the connections between the two pedagogies, Roberts-Crews reveals how a failure to correct this oversight—or erasure—hinders open education’s potential as a liberatory tool.
“Transgressive Course Design: Collaborative, Student-Engaged, Online, and Open” by Ashlyne O’Neil and Frankie Cachon places digital pedagogy and course design, as informed by hooks, in conversation with the antiracist struggle for justice. Through their course model, the authors explain how their design, completed alongside their students and colleagues, and a holistic critical pedagogy may disrupt the oppressive structures that are at work in Western education and society. O’Neil and Cachon explore technologies that not only support educational outcomes but discuss the structural effects of their uses for justice.
Andrea Kim’s “Media Art-Ritual as Feminist Praxis: Diasporic Worldmaking in A Place of Care” invites readers to reimagine the potential of social virtual reality (social VR) in transgressive pedagogy. By examining the role of her media artwork piece, A Place of Care, in recentering Asian-American women’s voices and bodies, Kim demonstrates how social VR can act as a powerful tool for healing from violence in both the virtual and physical worlds.
Alison Cook-Sather and Alice Lesnick’s “Engaged Voices, Engaged Beings: Exploring Tensions, Transgressions, and Risks in Using Co-Created, Shared Google Docs to Build Classroom Community and to Co-Author” is an homage to bell hooks and the engaged voice. The authors discuss how the tensions which engage the body in tech-mediated learning experiences have origins in practices within less apparently tech-mediated modes of learning, and suggest the engaged voice is a framework through which understanding and healing is possible.
This issue also contains two Views from the Field: shorter reflections grounded in praxis. In the first, Ar Ducao presents an annotated storyboard for a 2.5-minute animated trailer of “The Great Tit is a Bird, Season 1” project. Ducao’s quoting of passages from Teaching to Transgress and the juxtaposition of these selections with illustrated scene notes and script constitutes a compelling pedagogical tool for anticolonial, transfeminist, and transnational digital storytelling. The piece is in equal parts personal and political, and about transgressions connected to STEM education and what Ducao describes as “technical cultures” at large. In the second View from the Field, “Creating Space for Critical Participation Practices with the Google Suite,” Morgan Moore, Alice Fox, and Cora Olson explore how Google’s trio of Docs, Spreadsheets, and Presentations can be used to foster what they (inspired by hooks) call “critical participation.” This piece includes the perspective of a professor who developed a creative and collaborative assignment sequence as well as reflections on the implementation of that sequence from the graduate teaching assistant and one of the undergraduate students in the class.
Continuing Action
Even the scholars whose work is not included in this completed issue contributed to our collective work, shaping our aspirations for this issue and all it might accomplish. There are still spaces for work to be done—for hybrid scholarship, for edited collections, for talks and presentations to shift into articles that further extend their audience. We recognize the work that may be unacknowledged if this issue were positioned as “the state of things.” What our position is, more accurately, is one table in a very large room where we are working to move the tables closer. We are thankful for the work ours is in conversation with—past, present, and future.
We edited this issue with intention and a call to action; that of naming oppressions with, and as amplified by, interactive technology and pedagogy. The task of naming and working on oppressions, including online and digital classroom oppressions, follows an important reminder from bell hooks, who asks, “how can we organize to challenge and change a system that cannot be named?” (2004, 25). That each of the featured contributions offers us a language to study everyday engagements with technology either as activism, for critical storytelling, or toward self-reflective use of corporate-capitalist tools in education is but one translation of this intention. We hope that these critiques collectively travel with you, and us, even as the task of building a new vocabulary of transgression through local and transnational politics is emergent, blurry, and always already in need of revisions amidst ongoing colonization.
Onward. Together.
Nikki, Summer, Asma, Kush, Danica
JITP Issue 23 Editors
References
hooks, bell. 1989. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press.
———. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. London: Routledge.
———. 2003. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Routledge.
———. 2004. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Atria Books.
About the Editors
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