Resources by Yohana Junker

One exercise that has sustained me throughout these last three years of a global pandemic has been writing letters to my Beloveds. As a child who was always on the move, inhabiting la frontera, physically and intellectually, writing to friends in my home country was a way to remain grounded while sharing glimpses and shifts in my inner landscapes in embodied ways.  Epistolary practices have connected peoples across space, time, and geographic divides for millennia. So ancient and so distant, this tradition remains so close, so potent, and so alive. Several religious traditions are quite familiar with this form of expression. Think of the Apostle Paul, who wrote to many communities in response to specific urgencies. I believe such a poetic-prophetic exercise has helped generations of our kin to be reassured, connect to their roots, and move through many dangerous crossroads. As I write these words, I am reminded that it is election day in my home country of Brazil. I don’t take the right to vote for granted as it was an impossibility some six decades ago. Paulo Freire, from whom we have all learned a lot about education, shared reflections in his A Pedagogy of Hope (1992) on what it was like to be forced into sixteen years of painful exile following the 1964 coup d’état. Letter writing was essential to him during those treacherous years. A lot of what later became known as the core of his teaching philosophy and praxis was developed in dialogue with distant friends, communities, and home country, many of whom he communicated with via letters. In his Profesora Sim, Tia Nao: Cartas a Quem Ousa Ensinar (1993), Freire indicates in the very title of the book that he would be communicating with his audience through letters to those who dare to teach. I suspect that Freire chose such a mode of communication precisely because of the impact phrases such as “Dear Comrades, Dear Co-conspirators” may have on readers. These words have the power of disarming us, conjuring a type of openness to our sensorial and embodied experiences. More than academic, abstract, and conceptual knowledge, those who dare to teach know that accessible, clear, and heartfelt content is not necessarily simplistic or superficial. On the contrary, it is drenched with histories, as Freire put it. He often wrote about how one never arrives alone in any context, whether to exile, a classroom, or the reading of a letter. Our bodies are, indeed, drenched in history, carrying an overlay of feelings, desires, memories, cumulative knowings, worldviews, longings, saudades, frustrations, trauma, and tensions that live at the threshold of our texts and contexts. For Freire, writing letters while in exile was a way to preserve his identity while inventing new ways of living and being and loving in unknown, and often strange, countries. Letter writing became a way to educate his affections, as he put it, and of coping with the insurmountable challenges of his geopolitical condition while resisting the urge to succumb to naive optimism.  This fall semester, I have the immense pleasure of co-teaching an online class on spiritual formation with Dr. Aizaiah Yong at the Claremont School of Theology. As we began thinking of how to “Bless the Space Between Us,” between the weekly assignments, among the diverse time zones and geographic locations, an idea emerged of incorporating epistolary practices in what we named SpiritLetters. At the end of each week, we take turns writing a reflection on how our weeks have been, what kinds of spiritual practices have sustained us, and what types of literature, art forms, prayers, and blessings have given us nourishment as our lives unfold. These experiments with letter writing in the context of our teaching-learning community are intended to share a kind of presence that enacts, embodies, and evokes a sense of deep regard and warmth that only this medium can radiate. The Irish teacher and poet John O’Donohue is responsible for inspiring and inspiriting both our SpiritLetters and this blog post’s title. His book To Bless the Space Between Us (2008) offers readers insights, comfort, and company in our spiritual journeys. He reflects: The commercial edge of so-called “progress” has cut away a large region of human tissue and webbing that held us in communion with one another. We have fallen out of belonging. Consequently, when we stand before crucial thresholds in our lives, we have no rituals to protect, encourage, and guide us as we cross over into the unknown. For such crossings, we need to find new words. And these new words that slide from our minds to our hearts, spilling into the pages as SpiritLetters, are offered as blessings and invocations that hopefully can accompany teacher-learners in their academic journeys.  In what follows, Aizaiah Yong shares a bit of the impact SpiritLetters have had on him. As a teacher and scholar who is deeply influenced by the Christian contemplative tradition as understood by Raimon Panikkar and Julian of Norwich, it is important for me that the practice of intellectual learning be deeply tethered to the practice of embodied living. The practice of writing a weekly SpiritLetter to our learning community has supported the intention of harmonizing intellectual learning with embodied living in two important ways: (1) providing an opportunity to slow down and be more fully present to the insights and ruminations offered from within the class and (2) inviting a deeper and more profound integration of them in our global social witnessing, which is an important element necessary when tending to collective trauma. Through the practice of SpiritLetters, I have found that slowing down is less about the speed by which I perform a task, but rather the level of intensity in which I engage. In this sense, to slow down allows one (for me as the teacher-learner and co-facilitator) to be more fully aware of the precious and invaluable insights offered by each person in the class through a stance of curiosity and compassion. Here, I am disciplining myself to avoid prematurely entering into critical analysis but instead choosing to contemplate first, allowing for their words, assignments, and questions to unfold within me. A process of slowing down invites a more embodied awareness of how the class is flowing and also informs a more holistic response, which in turn becomes the words written through the SpiritLetter. SpiritLetters ultimately then become a moment of mirroring back to the whole learning community what I am hearing and then asks those wisdoms to be more deeply integrated in the class journey’s forward. SpiritLetters offer a space to reflect back what is arising and to allow for a finer-tuned calibration that guides our collective responses as persons and communities. I consider this a contemplative and trauma-informed approach to teaching which Thomas Huebl describes as “resilience building as collective coherence.” Huebl writes, “Resilience building means that I am not just a cognitive participant of the communities I am part of, it is that I feel it. When we are aware of each other we create collective coherence. That is especially important when we go through disturbing times.”[*] As we continue to invite more diverse and geographically-distributed learning communities into our classrooms of higher education, I hope that we continue to practice emergent pedagogical approaches that allow us to slow down, be more fully aware of the relations that support us, and invite a deeper collective integration of the wisdom revealed. It is our hope that these reflections will invite you to inhabit these spaces of co-learning and co-teaching with an invitation to cultivate your own pedagogical practices of being and becoming, even in the face of multiple crises and impossibilities. May we remember to laugh, rest, regenerate, and seek tenderness so that we can continue to bless the spaces between us.   In togetherness, Aizaiah and Yohana       [*] https://thomashuebl.com/what-is-global-social-witnessing/

In Part I of this series on “Using Art to Activate Learning in the Classroom,” I discussed how the arts are powerful resources that can be used in the classroom to amplify and enhance our teaching-learning experiences. As social practices, the visual arts enable us to give language to how we are being in and with the world—for engaging meaning-in-the-making, to paraphrase Allan de Souza.[1] As witnesses to relationships, artworks expand our awareness of the complexities that give rise to our current contexts, thus opening up space to investigate, translate, decipher, reconfigure, and conjure new worlds. As educational tools, they allow for an “uncoercive rearrangement of our desires.”[2] Used in the classroom, the arts give rise to speculative imagination, integration of embodied, affective, and intellectual knowledge. I also explored some ways to introduce works of visual art into our pedagogical practices by discussing with teacher-learners the form, context, and content of the artwork. As we “enter” works of visual art, we will notice that they not only cross disciplines, allowing for connections, insights, and new meanings to emerge, but they also impact us sensorially. In other words, our intellectual, embodied, and emotional selves are activated as we engage with visual images. This is one of the reasons why using creative arts in the classroom is so generative: they let us dive into deep and integrative experiences, inclusive of nonverbal and preverbal ways of knowing, self-expression, participation, multi-sensorial connection, conscientização, personal and communal growth, and so much more. And to be able to absorb, discuss, and write about these experiences we need to practice sensing, probing, and staying with the images in order to reach such meanings with clarity and perceptiveness. In what follows, you will read a fellow teacher-learner’s response to Lorna Simpson’s Waterbearer. Eruke Ohwofasa is a PhD student in Comparative Theology and Philosophy at Claremont School of Theology and she wrote this reflection within the context of the class “Visual Arts, Spirit, and Place.” Here is how Simpson’s work reverberated for her—notice how her analysis of the work’s form gives rise to interpretation: Waterbearer by Lorna Simpson (1986), 5 gelatin silver prints in a frame, 15 plates engraved plastic, 24 ½ x 97 in (62.2 x 246.4cm) overall. Lorna Simpson’s piece displays the back view of a woman in front of a black background. She is wearing a white sleeveless dress baring the back of her neck that show the pronounced bones in her spine. The subject’s arms are bare and extended. In the left hand, she is holding a silver water pitcher level to her hip. In her right hand she is holding a plastic jug of water extended out at her shoulder’s height. Both vessels are tilted over, pouring out a stream of water. Underneath the photograph are bold, black capital letters against a white background. They formulate a message in three lines that reads: “SHE SAW HIM DISAPPEAR BY THE RIVER/THEY ASKED HER TO TELL WHAT HAPPENED/ ONLY TO DISCOUNT HER MEMORY.” The name of the work, Waterbearer, suggests that the central figure in this work is also a source of water. Like the two vessels, she too is a vessel of water. Here, the symbolism of water is multilayered. Properties often associated with water are lifegiving, soothing, and calm, yet water also possesses the power to move any element out of its way, even rearranging the earth if it so chooses. Waves, rain, waterfalls, and oceans contain water. Water cleanses, refreshes, hydrates, and provides elements for sustaining life. The subject in this artwork is captured pouring out water from different containers, simultaneously. Such containers are usually used to capture water to be used for consumption. Water from a plastic jug is poured into another vessel like a cup or a bowl. Water from a silver pitcher indicates an elegance or formal setting, where water may be poured into china or crystal glasses. The artist has decided to make the distinctions of the vessels very clear. We notice, however, that the water from each vessel is being poured onto the ground, invoking an interesting response from the viewer: we may tense up as we assume that water is being “wasted.” The boldness of the letters indicates they are congruent with the image and function strategically to convey the artist’s intention. It is implied that the waterbearer is the “she” who witnessed the disappearance, the one asked to tell the story, and the same one who was discounted and ignored. The woman’s water can be interpreted as what she has seen, heard, experienced, and witnessed: her memory. These elements contain the properties of water as life and power. Learning her water is discounted conveys a sense of grief and loss. The naming, caption, and motion of the piece indicates that the woman deserves to be listened to. The brightness of her dress against a black and muted background draws the eye straight to her. The artist’s decision to hide her face can be read as a commentary on her invisibility; yet this pictorial configuration wants very much for the woman to be seen and more importantly, valued. Her strength is shown in her arms that carry the water. Her abundance is shown by the multitude of vessels displayed. Her generosity is shown by the multiple streams of water being poured out. Her water, memory, and value are dismissed, underutilized, and explicitly discounted. The water and the memory fall to the ground. The viewer, much like the words narrate, is left longing, contending with both the loss of her water, her memory, the disappearance, and the grief of one’s inability to value her story. She is the waterbearer. As Ohwofasa demonstrates in her writing, there are deep cross-threads that the image elicited to her. Her careful analysis confers visibility to a body that has been erased, discounted. By her looking, sensing, and writing, several layers of meaning have been unearthed to unsettle and reveal that which may be disregarded at first sight. As sites for world-making and choreographing new possibilities of being, the visual arts are capable of cultivating in us an orientation and openness toward that which we have othered, forgotten, disposed of, or lost. It is my hope that this two part-reflection on using art to activate learning has sparked a desire to co-weave imaginative webs within our teaching and learning practices.   [1] Allan de Souza, How Art Can Be Taught: A Handbook for Change (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 25, 28. [2] Gayatri C. Spivak as quoted in Allan de Souza’s How Art Can Be Taught, 60.

It is no secret that the arts are powerful tools that can be used in any classroom to challenge, liberate, expand, complicate, and even heal aspects of our educational practices. The visual arts, in particular, not only allow us to connect in deeper ways with the content and context of our studies but can also function as a portal to what is hidden in our deepest recesses in embodied, striking, and visceral ways. From rage to grief to wonder and joy, the arts help us access emotions and educate our affections while inspiring us to resist, denounce, agitate, connect, conjure, and generate tools for speculative imagination, for integration of embodied and intellectual knowledge for the healing of all our relations. As a site for world-making, art lends itself to dreaming, rehearsing, and choreographing new possibilities of being and acting in the world. Artists and works are poised with the capacity to enhance our understanding of how historical and cultural amalgamations circulate our bodies, shape our culture, and inform our experiences, while also offering opportunities to assess and integrate multimodal processes of learning. What follows is a series of suggestions on how to bring the arts into the classroom to activate and enrich multimodal learning. When I am presenting an artwork within the context of classes in art and religion, I like to begin by providing historical information based on my previous research of the work. I find the work’s curatorial files which, depending on the artist, are broadly available online. Many contemporary artists use their own websites as archives of works, exhibitions, ephemera, press clippings, etc., so be sure to check those as well. Then I consult chapters, articles, catalogues, and reference works which provide context for the creation and reception of that particular artwork.[i] I also provide the artist’s full name, the work’s title and date, the collection to which it now belongs, how it was acquired, and how the museum or gallery’s curatorial practices participate (or don’t) in “unlearning and changing the base of colonialism in the concepts of private property, Manifest Destiny,… Eurocentrism, Cartesian dualism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, positivism, sexism, racism, individualism, extraction, classism, violence, and control,” as Wanda Nanibush, the assistant curator of Canadian and Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, puts it. The goal is to deepen and expand the experience of engagement with the works—not so much to define, constrain, or limit the contours of interpretation. In other words, the contextual information we offer on any creative work should not limit the personal connections, emotional reverberations, and embodied experiences that teacher-learners may develop with the work. Beyond the artist’s and work’s contexts, I ask teacher-learners to describe in detail what they see and what they understand. For example, if I share a painting, I ask them to describe the color, contours, textures, contrast, movement, proportion, composition, medium, size, dimensions, and how the lines appear in relationship to one another. This step reveals to us how we have been conditioned to take in a lot of images hastily, spending a very short amount of time looking, identifying, and savoring what the works are doing, and how the textures, colors, and rhythms of the composition have been carefully arranged by artists to elicit responses in us. Only after exhausting our capacities for naming what is in front of us, do I ask teacher-learners to progress in the interpretation of “what is” to “what it might mean.” We often claim that artworks mean something without carefully tracing for our class participants where these meanings are visually located or where they originated within the work. The last question I engage with is the “so what?” that Gilda Williams proposes in How to Write About Contemporary Art.[ii] What are the echoes for the context of our class? How does it invite us to look at our subject and discussions differently? How does it open up a space for the poetic to guide and allow us to access our deepest, sometimes hidden, recesses? Works of art are powerful in connecting us to our emotions, in helping us understand what it means to be human, to be whole, to be here. As theological educators who are laying out the blueprints for sacred, embodied, planetary change, we must remember to have the arts in our toolboxes. The arts are never far away from what matters most in life. Artistic productions participate in decolonial efforts—are capable of doing what Macarena Gómez-Barris names as “the erosion of the extractive gaze” while “affirming the diversity that resides within the matrix of coloniality.”[iii] As antidotes to Empire, visual arts are sites of subversion that promote imagining and shaping into being other emergent worlds. They also require from us, as Indigenous Brazilian thinker Ailton Krenak puts it, an acknowledgement that we are co-responsible for maintaining our capacity and responsibility to keep the dreams of our ancestors alive.[iv] As apertures into worlds of the not yet, artworks also welcome wonder, openness, diversity, reciprocity. Allowing a careful looking, engaging, and sensing what the works are activating emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually in us is generative way to amplify learning in our classrooms. Part II of this series will provide practical examples of engagement with artworks. Available April 27, 2022.   [i] A helpful resource for helping in the design of the experience with works of art is Teaching at the Museum: Interpretation as Experience by Rikak Burnham and Elliott Kai-Kee, published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2014. [ii] Gilda Williams, How to Write About Contemporary Art (New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2014). [iii] Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 133. [iv]Ailton Krenak, Ideias pra Adiar o fim do Mundo (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2019), 47.

In Por Uma Educação Romantica (Papirus, 2003), Rubem Alves speaks about how he found his way to poetry. He describes how woundedness he experienced in life made him understand that literature, poetry, music, storytelling, and the visual arts were not only nutrients for violated and hungry bodies but also joy for anguished souls. He writes: “Science is fire and pans, indispensable kitchenware. But poetics is chicken and okra, delectable food for those who love this dish.” As an educator, storyteller, and world-maker, he was a compulsive fruidor de vita—he conjured new life into being. We have reached the end of a fourth semester touched by an ongoing pandemic that has brought so much loss and grief. Our families, our communities, and our learning spaces are filled with bodies that are carrying an overlay of stories, experiences, and memories that feel like webs spun out of un-rootedness, pain, and trauma. And I have been asking myself how to begin to undo the trauma that we have all metabolized. How can we redesign our classroom encounters, rituals, spiritual practices, and ways of knowing? How can we experiment with other ways of being, invent other vocabularies and grammars, other corporeal practices for grounding, creativity, and connection? I believe Rubem Alves would invite us to pay attention to the spaces where poetic inventions emerge—spaces of art making that are ripe with the potential to smuggle life, joy, and creativity back into these many landscapes of death. What kind of potent conjuring could happen if we cleaned our brushes, wiped our camera lenses, heated our welding tools, recovered our songs, dusted our instruments, located our yarn, filled our confined spaces with pulsating bodies that are not afraid to reinvent erotic grammars of playfulness and ritual, to heal these wounds? Art, as a way of feeling, knowing, and healing allows us to access what is hidden within our most intimate recesses. What our busy minds want to forget, our embodied artistic practices tend to re-member. From rage to grief to wonder, the arts help us touch, sense, and name our emotions and educate our affections while inspiring us to resist, denounce, agitate, heal, connect, and generate tools for speculative imagination, for integration of embodied, emotional, and intellectual knowledge. When we immerse ourselves in acts of creation, we have access to the visceral, the somatic life of the body: its reflections, limits, intuition, answers, desires, and needs. Through artistic languages, we can begin to weave the invisible back into the perceptible. Art also has the power to evoke, to create other possible worlds. And because of art’s power to provoke, we are able to sit with the trouble, to lean into instability, to practice unlearning, and to affirm our inherent capacity to be at once problematic and prophetic. In a way, and as Alves proposes, the arts remind us of the life that is buried beneath the weight of our responsibilities, our angst, and our pain. Sometimes, Alves affirms, life has to lay dormant for years, buried within our sepulchers… Sometimes life only has a chance after death. So, in the midst of the death that surrounds our days, weeks, and months, and the millions of lives lost to COVID-19, I share with you the work of an artist whose work has activated my classroom, reanimating and mobilizing teacher-learners to create otherwise, even in the face of impossibility. vanessa german describes herself as “a citizen artist who centers the exploration of human technologies that respond to the ongoing catastrophes of structural racism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, resource extraction, and misogynoir.” german’s work ranges from sculptures to performances, rituals, processions, installation, photography, and much more. As a way of sentir-pensar of the world, german’s work seeks to “repair and reshape disrupted human systems, spaces, and connections.” Her practice also engenders new models for being and becoming in the world that incorporate healing, creativity, tenderness, and collectivity to address our society’s most pernicious violences. In the work entitled Blue Walk, curated by Wa Na Wari, german staged what she named “” In the context of this pandemic and the interlocking systems of oppression, german’s performance invited participants to acknowledge “the holiness of the Black body on the living planet as a healing channel of release and power.” Performers touched, sensed, shared, and metabolized experiences of rage, grief, tenderness, laughter, and the need to rest. This particular pilgrimage was staged in September, during the Time-based Art Festival organized by the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. Participants were invited to walk “in the power of the Blues. Moving in the power of Water, Creativity, and Dimensional Wholeness. The Ritual is the Goodbye Song and The Lifting Up Song. We learn this in a short period of togetherness pre-ritual. These songs are about listening, giving permission to the voice and the body, and taking up space and sky.”                                   vanessa german’s potent performance enfleshes art as a way of feeling, knowing, and healing. Through storytelling, mixed media, assemblage of bodies, and textile, german mediates ritual and collective acts of togetherness to reclaim the right of Black people to share in power, spirituality, and presence. Non-Black participants are invited to witness, to be mindfully present, and to confront the ways in which we internalize and externalize anti-Blackness in our relations and lives. Collectively witnessing the work of artists such as german opens up a “capacity to relate deeply and respectfully across differences,” while maintaining a “receptivity to the unknown,” to borrow Laura Pérez’s language (Eros and Ideologies [Duke University Press, 2019] xx). Inherently polyvalent, these works have a tremendous power to connect, reverberate, and reveal what is hidden within our interiority. As sites for world-making and choreographing new possibilities of being, feeling, knowing, and healing, the visual arts can cultivate in us an orientation and openness toward wonder, mystery, and that which we have othered, forgotten, disposed of, or violenced.  This pandemic, the ensuing uprisings, and the incapacity of governments to decently respond to the urgencies of our times have impacted us in ways that we cannot fully grasp at the moment. By inviting these works of art into our classrooms, learning communities, and academic spaces, I believe we can conjure new possibilities of life that allows us to sense and comprehend the world differently—even in the face of impossibility, interruption, and derealization. Works like Blue Walk are, indeed, nutrients for violated and hungry bodies as well as joy for suffering souls.   *Photos by Tojo Andrianarivo. vanessa german, Blue Walk, curated by Wa Na Wari, September 2021, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art.

During the past year, two of my favorite Brazilian writers and educators, Luiz Antonio Simas and Luiz Rufino collaborated on yet another book: Encantamento: Sobre a Política da Vida (Incantation: On the Politics of Life).  One of the central affirmations of their work (which follows their previous co-authored publications: A Pedagogy of the Crossroads, An Arrow Through Time, and The Enchanted Science of Macumbas) is that the opposite of life isn’t death—it is desencantamento, or an inability to surrender to a process of incantation. As a verb, incantare evokes our capacity to fuse song and word in an effort to raise our spirits, to spark magic in our imaginations, to invite divine presence. Our capacity to incantate spaces of learning does precisely what theologian Rubem Alves invites us to do:  name and invoke the not-yet worlds, so as to break the spells of right-here worlds that continue to abandon, oppress, exclude, and sever from ourselves and our communities of belonging. Incantation as a poetic of resistance allows us to escape, disobey, and ambush the traps set through the colonial matrix of power so that bodies can dare to see, create, invent, and integrate new possibilities freedom, belonging, and liberation through creativity and imagination. Incantation, Simas and Rufino affirm, nests our capacity to move through time, to experience a passage between forms and worlds, to change our points of reference through a politic of life that is rooted in an imprinting of the everyday as rites of reading and writing different poetic routes capable of setting traps to our collective loss of hope and vivacity.[i]  In this sense, incantation is an exercise in emergence and survivance that lives and breathes beyond the terrorizing effects of coloniality. It’s the commitment to movement, occupation, visibility, insertion, and participation. It’s the creative force that travels through crossroads of knowledge-making, confronting hierarchizations produced by ontological, epistemological, and semiotic violences. Art, as I understand it, has a tremendous power to forge incantatory pathways of resistance because of its capacity to dis-educate us from disciplinary molding. It reverberates and discloses to us that which is hidden in our interior recesses in embodied, striking, and visceral ways. It can help us re-educate our affections, as Paulo Freire puts it, or work a kind of magic in our souls, as bell hooks states.  It also inspires us to name the world as we see it, and to find a poetic tongue when the language we know fails us. It helps us resist, heal, connect, conjure, and tend to all our relations. As generative clearings, the arts are sites for world-making, for dreaming, rehearsing, and choreographing new possibilities of being and intervening in the world. When we immerse ourselves in acts of artmaking, we have the opportunity to access the visceral, the somatic life of the body, its reflexes, limits, intuition, responses, desires, needs, and its alchemies.  When we encourage and invite students to in-corporate artmaking processes as they engage readings, discussions, and bodies of knowledge, we participate in this politic of incantation. A student’s performance and ritual entitled “Disposable Beauty” still stands as one of the most profound and generative projects to which I have been witness.   As a final integrative assignment, the performance consisted of placing delicate flower arrangements throughout locations in her neighborhood that were marked by abuse, violence, and abandonment. Such poetic gestures in vulnerable spaces in the city sought to raise awareness of our transience, interdependence, and negligence in the face of injustice. The flower assemblages were made out of blossoms and foliage that flower shops would throw away at the end of the day. This poetic gesture both incantated and resisted the (i)logic of degradation, disposability, oppression, and inequity by orienting herself and participants in acts of creative wonder. Through her invocation of not-yet worlds, she extended a gesture of care, of regard, of re-worlding, refusing to be desencantada with the world around her. At the end of these performances, she invited folks to partake in tea ceremonies that were rooted in offering the gift of reciprocity, spiritual care, regard, and a warm cup of tea. As a poetic of incantation, her artistic gestures imbued spaces of desolation, disposability, and abandonment with love, presence, and beauty through a practice that integrated the semester’s resources, readings, discussions and questions with her own wisdom, creativity, and spiritual sensibilities. I return to this experience often to remind myself to continuously ask how many of the assignments outlined in my syllabi impede or foster poetic and incantatory experimentations. Notes [i] See Luiz Antonio Simas and Luiz Rufino, Encantamento: Sobre Política de Vida (Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Morula Editorial, 2020). Photo Credit: Miguel Garcia Saaved - stock.Adobe.com

As the fall semester draws to a close, I reflect on how our classrooms continue to absorb the dense impact of exhaustion, grief, and so many unknowns. The isolation and physical distancing brought by COVID-19 during the first months of 2020 have remained a reality for much longer than any of us could have anticipated. We have hardly been able to metabolize our grief, frustration, fatigue, and the toll the lack of contact and sensation has had on our bodies. Along with COVID-19, we have continued to somatize the woundedness of profound inequalities in our communities, as I have written elsewhere. From election cycles in the Américas, to ongoing anti-Black racism and violence, white supremacy, settler/extractive colonialism, racial capitalism, and cishet patriarchy, we continue to survive systems of exploitation, dominance, and oppressions of all tenors. In light of this historical moment, my colleague at the Pacific School of Religion, Dr. Aizaiah Yong, and I chose to codesign a syllabus that engaged formation through the lens of spirituality and leadership, in an attempt to deepen our lives individually and collectively. It intentionally centered the work of Black, Indigenous, and other scholars of color. We created a compendium aimed at sustaining our vitality, rootedness, and creativity during this period of remote learning where we surveyed practices and scholarship from varied religious traditions, geopolitical contexts, and artistic modalities. Throughout the last four months, our virtual classroom became a collaborative learning environment where coconspirators “identif[ied] and valorize[d] that which often does not even appear as knowledge in the light of the dominant epistemologies,” as de Sousa Santos puts it.[1] By privileging experiential epistemologies, we attempted to interrupt the dominant politics of knowledge and made every effort to enflesh sensorial experiences, understanding that they are fundamental in the shaping of knowledge and students’ formation. Corporeal ways of knowing presuppose contact, sensation, concrete, emergent, and living bodies, in all their capacity for suffering and healing, copresence and distance, for knowing-with rather than knowing-about. The semester’s various activities ranged widely: we created centering and closing moments where we could collectively breathe, built sacred spaces, performed an archeology of our joys, recollected our ancestral connections, our ecostories, ecomemories, understood land as formation, as pedagogy, thought about emergent strategies for transformation, engaged with how we metabolize anger, and how to develop a keener experience of tenderness.[2] Students were invited to imaginatively cocreate workshops, artworks, reflections, engage one another via a “spiritual formation virtual café” suggested by one student, raise difficult questions via online forums, and come up with field guides for spiritual formation with spiritual practices, reflections, centering moments, devotionals, rituals, meditations, art-making, embodied work, and much more. And yet all of these strategies seemed somewhat insufficient in our attempt to foster bonds of copresence, sensation, and contact that body-with-body classrooms offer. How could we respond to the urgencies, the sense of isolation, fragmentation, and the intensities of the present moment through remote learning? How could we open up the nexus of space-place-time to embodiment? How could we be responsive to Lama Rod Owens’ call to embodiment as a returning home to our bodies, in this moment and context, opening up some kind of spaciousness that could allow us to respond to both the woundedness and the joys of the now?[3] How could we cultivate embodiment in a virtual setting with a deep understanding “that disembodiment is the primary strategy through which oppression is maintained,” because we become desensitized to the conditions around us, to our emotions, to our sense of vitality, to that which deeply moves us and puts us back in touch with ourselves, our joys, pleasures, hopes, and dreams?[4] How would we subvert the logic of isolation and “presentify” zoom rooms so that a confluence of encounters, contact, and embodied sensation could transpire? How could we create a classroom experience based on a poetics of presence and intimacy as the artist Elisa Arruda invites us to create? By turning to creative practices and the arts, we were able to weave, potentialize, and ignite a process of contact and sensation. Each week, students received what we called Spiritual Formation Care Packages (SFCP), which were designed based on the readings for that week. They became a series of centering and creative exercises that invited us to meditate, embody, and create for about one full hour per week. The intention of these exercises was to provide support and an opportunity for creative embodiment, integrating what students learned in class with their own lived experiences, creative processes, spiritual traditions, and research. The SFCP ritualized and generated containers allowing students to tap into the power of their spiritualities and creative vigor. Inspired by my own art practices and the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, the packages afforded us an opportunity to sense how our skin, viscera, and psychosomatic bodies carry knowledge that—in moments of pain, dis-ease, conflict, and unknowingness—yield us the capacity to see, touch, and create in expansive and incendiary ways. Art, as Anzaldúa puts it, is the “locus of resistance, of rupture, implosion, explosion, and of putting together the fragments.”[5] It allows us to become anchored in our bodies, to “shock ourselves into new ways of perceiving the world,” to “feel our way without blinders,” to “touch more people,” to evoke the personal and social realities through blood, pus, and sweat. Our creative practices afford us the opportunity to access, re-member, and revive “what most links us with life.”[6] Art practices, as shown in the work of Elisa Arruda, embolden us to reclaim our processes of formation, fully embodying our shadows and desires for presence, joy, pleasure, restoration, expansion, contraction, proximity, sensation, and connection. [su_image_carousel source="media: 244745,244746,244747,244748,244749,244750,244751,244752,244753" limit="100" slides_style="photo" crop="none" align="left" max_width="2000" captions="yes"] About the Artist: Elisa Arruda is a visual artist who was born and raised in Belem do Pará, in the Amazonian region of Brazil. Currently living in São Paulo, Arruda investigates the poetics of intimacy, moving quite freely through several mediums. She pays particular attention to the realms of the domestic and the public as well as the tensions sheltered in dynamics of strength + fragility, endings + beginnings, intimacy + alienation, loss + growth, proximity + confinement. Notes [1] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 2. [2] For more on this, please refer to Eros and Ideologies by Laura E. Pérez, Voices from the Ancestors edited by Lara Medina and Martha Gonzales, Land as Pedagogy by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Ecowomanism by Melanie L. Harris, The Way of Tenderness by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, and Love and Rage by Lama Rod Owen. [3] Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2020), 119-120. [4] Rod Owens, Love and Rage, 121. [5] Gloria Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, AnaLouise Keating, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 177. [6] Anzaldúa, “Speaking in Tongues: A Writer to Third World Women Writers,” 34.

One of the reckonings I have had to make five months into a global pandemic is that the grounds upon which our classrooms stand continue to feel unstable, confusing, and ever shifting. Educators across the country are once again welcoming into learning spaces amalgamations of stories, experiences, memories—and trauma. Teachers and learners are resuming virtual classes with bodies that have experienced too much, too fast, and are likely to be overwhelmed even before the beginning of a new academic year. So how might the design of our classes and pedagogies grapple with and take into account the profound and collective shifts, disempowerment, and emotional and physical challenges that COVID-19 has imposed on us? How might we design experiences of presence and regard using a practice I call “a pedagogy of affection”? In an effort to answer these questions, I have been taking a closer look at classroom interactions between March and May of 2020. Looking back at my notes, I notice an important pattern: a more open naming of how our heightened instability aroused feelings of helplessness, anxiety, worry, withdrawal, grief, preoccupation. Students also asked for (and were granted) extensions on assignments, opportunities to process their response to the pandemic via check-ins, campus ministry, zoom happy hours, chapel services, and so on. Our conversations expanded beyond so-called disciplinary boundaries to include questions like “How is your breathing today?” and “What kind of insecurity are you dealing with in this moment? Did you have enough to eat? Did you have a restful sleep?” and even “How is your undivided unit of bodyspiritplacetime?” as Patrisia Gonzalez put it. Some of us may have asked our students how their bodies were metabolizing fear and anxiety, housing and food insecurities, whether they had a computer to work from, a stable enough shelter. We may have encouraged them to occupy institutional spaces to speak and write about how they were envisioning us showing up for them in the most meaningful and regard-filled ways. One of my student-teachers, Jacob Perez, asked in one of our institutional meetings whether we would be willing to stretch our “understanding of pedagogy beyond what happens when a zoom link goes live.” Having co-created together a special reading course on “Queering and Decolonizing Pedagogies,” Perez invited reflection on the power of implicit pedagogies, affirming that they “occur in the contexts and contours of how we come to the classroom.”[ii] In finding ways to navigate the spring of 2020, we began to ask how we could hold space for breath and feeling and truth telling; how we could mutually co-create spaces of presence, regard, and care, responding to the many urgencies named above. Some of us began to write love-lectures, began starting classes with breathing and stretching exercises or a more robust check-in where we could talk about anger, vulnerabilities, dissociations, isolation, the ongoing inability to concentrate, police brutality, anti-Blackness, grief. Some of us reconsidered dead-lines, exams, grades. Zebulon Hurst, for example, poeticized his longings through a publication co-authored with Perez, as well as this poetic piece, even before the uprisings began:“i wonder when my Black life will matter beyond a sign in the window/ i wonder when i will go home / i wonder where is home / i wonder if my aunties are safe i mean / i know they aren’t but / i wonder if anyone beyond the bonds of my genetic material cares about that. / i wonder if you love me the way you say you do.” This pandemic, the ensuing uprisings, the incapacity of governments to decently respond to the population’s most pressing needs interrupted our lives in unimaginable ways. We haven’t really recovered or adequately processed much of what happened in the first semester of 2020. And with that, a question haunts me: How are we to begin a new academic year integrating the overlay of stories and traumas that circulate in our bodies, histories, and memories? How are we to think about pedagogies of affection and presence with integrity instead of reinforcing pedagogies of cruelty and trauma response in minoritized students in higher education? A set of pedagogical choices that are trauma-informed may prove helpful in designing our fall courses as the global pandemic has barely subsided, our communities continue to be in danger, and as we brace ourselves for this year’s election cycle. A trauma-informed approach would not only affirm that suffering, pain, and distress is present among us but would also seek to actively mitigate or foresee potential challenges. In Pedagogy of the Heart, Paulo Freire reflected on his experience of trauma: a forced exile after the violent Brazilian coup d’état, which took place in 1964. His warning that trauma is not simply something to be lived through—but rather, is something to be felt, to be acknowledged, and to be suffered—is fundamental for our times.[iv] He also warned about the dangers of creating disjointed communities during times of crises where members interact with one another through a “functional” system and a set of transactional interactions. For Freire, the only way forward is one that implicates us in each other’s well-being, with presence, integrity, solidarity, emotional roots, and communion. In order to develop such bonds of affection, presence, and regard, we would have to apprehend the “tragedy of ruptures” while acknowledging our collective crises, all while maintaining a lively political-pedagogical response-ability and epistemological curiosity. With Freire’s pedagogical charge in mind, a fellow co-conspirator and faculty colleague at the Pacific School of Religion—Dr. Aizaiah Yong—and I designed a course on spiritual formation that is mindful of such pedagogies of the heart via embodied, spiritual, and artistic practices. One goal of the course is to co-construct with students a “covenant of presence and regard” through synchronous and asynchronous exercises such as contemplative practices, writing prompts, artmaking, and a “Spiritual Care Package.” The required “readings,” aside from a curated multivocal range of scholars, are experimental and will include poetry, podcasts, documentaries, and the visual arts, delineating an anatomy of learning that leans more into instability and unlearning than inflexibility and certitude, as Clelia Rodríguez puts it.[v] Our hope is that these pedagogical choices will continue to affirm an educational journey that not only resists “the worst muck of racialized, ableist heterocapital” settler-colonialism, as Alexis Pauline Gumbs names it, but that is aware of our heartaches, our indignation, our agonies, and our political rage, with all our capacity to be at once “problematic and prophetic.”[vi] As the academic year of 2020-21 draws near, I hope we can continue to commit to pedagogies of affection, presence, and regard that gather the dismembered pieces of our bodies, stories, cultures, and existences so we can continue to imagine and create with a tremendous capacity to intimate this world differently. Notes [i] Patrisia Gonzales, Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2012), xix [ii] Jacob Perez (he/his) is a Master of Theological Studies student at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley and a Co-Chair of the Latinx Religions and Spiritualties Unit for the American Academy of Religion Western Region. Jacob also serves on the Board of Directors for the AARWR as the Student Representative of Northern California. He can be reached at jperez@ses.psr.edu. [iii] Zebulon B. Hurst (he/them) is a Master of Divinity student at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. His work weaves together queer intimacies, pleasurepain, somatics, and poetics. Their continued research explores manifestations of fissure, domination, and self-sublimation. Hurst authored a chapter in the 2017 volume edited by Anthony J. Nocella, II, and Erik Jeurgensmeyer, Fighting Academic Repression and Neoliberal Education: Resistance, Reclaiming, Organizing, and Black Lives Matter in Education (New York: Peter Lang). He can be reached at zhurst@ses.psr.edu. [iv] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Heart (New York: Continuum, 1997), 67. [v] Clelia Rodríguez, Decolonizing Academia: Poverty, Oppression, and Pain (Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2018), 1-2. [vi] Alexis Pauline Gumbs in Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020), 2.