The 21st century poses its own challenges to education to which imaginative and liberative pedagogy must respond. Examining how marginalized identity empowers teaching as tool of resistance, exploring how political and health crises around Covid-19 diversify the tools of pedagogy, and honoring how the decades old question of womanism’s influence on the existential question of thriving in the classroom comes to bear, these papers explore how pedagogy is as much a personal practice as it is an interpersonal one - an intersectional commitment as much as it is a political one.
This research examines the persistent threats of racism and sexism in higher education, particularly as they impact Asian immigrant women scholars in the U.S. The Trump era and its resurgence have intensified structural inequalities, reinforcing xenophobic and misogynistic narratives that marginalize women of color and immigrant faculty. Our positionality—as women in male-dominated spaces, as racial minorities in predominantly White academic fields, and as immigrants negotiating transnational identities—complicates our legitimacy in scholarly spaces.
By centering our lived experiences, we challenge the ontological negation that reduces our expertise to our identities and reframe our presence as a performative force of disruption and resistance. This research interrogates systemic barriers, intersectional stereotypes, and pedagogical constraints, offering critical insights into how academic spaces can be transformed to embrace vulnerability, equity, and solidarity.
This paper explores a trauma-informed critical pedagogy as an adaptive challenge in online theological education. The digital component is not primarily concerned with the latest technology and learning tools; rather this approach centers on how the learning experience resonates in learners’ bodies in all modalities, especially raced and gendered bodies who bear the disproportionate impacts of this syndemic reality, implicated in multiple, overlapping pandemics. I begin by establishing a foundation of intersectional critical pedagogy using the work of Paulo Freire and bell hooks. I then explore the pandemic positives that have been identified in K-12 and higher education research that can be applied to online theological education. To conclude, I reflect on how I incorporated this pedagogical approach to two hybrid-synchronous courses with women-identifying teaching partners. The resulting learning experiences were empowering for instructors and students alike as they centered context and community.
The need for the curation of a womanist playground in classrooms is great; it can aid in teaching, being, learning, and existing across difference through inviting persons to critically remember and reflect, deliberately question, creatively and collaboratively imagine, and live into emancipatory hope. This critical consciousness stems from and is deepened by womanist thought’s invitation to embrace self, engage in culture and community, embody God’s love, and to enkindle the world. In this session we will explore and engage in womanist modes of play and strategize how academics can practice and experience more wholeness, solidarity, resistance and embodied liberation, in the classroom, through curating a womanist playground.