Creating space amidst violence

We live in times of compounding crises and ongoing violences. While perhaps not the most violent of times, depending on one’s positionality, context, and circumstances, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic along with the dramatic ecological and environmental changes occurring across the globe have in many ways compounded ongoing racial, economic, gender, and colonial violence. In their recently published exchange of letters, Black Canadian author and scholar Robyn Maynard and Nishnaabeg cultural worker and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2022) invite each other—and us as readers—to contemplate what it means to build relationships across differences amidst such violence. In Maynard’s words, “As we are confronted with the crisis of the earth’s viability, then, amidst so many crises, I am writing you so we can think together about what it means for us to build livable lives together in the wreckage” (Maynard & Simpson, 2022, p. 28). The letters between these two influential thinkers inspire us to imagine what it might mean to encounter each other, even if momentarily, to create spaces for joy, generosity, and mutual recognition and uplift which might serve not just as a respite, but as a countermovement against ongoing violence.

The kind of exchange that Maynard and Simpson (2022) exemplify as necessary for constituting a liveable present and imagining a future is antithetical to the hierarchical structuring of educational institutions like schools. Maynard and Simpson encounter each other as equals, not in the sense that they are the same or share the same experiences, but rather that they stand on equal footing across differences. This encounter acknowledges these differences and recognizes them as a source of strength that animates the possibilities for a future. In stark contrast, educational processes across colonial and racist institutions like schools are organized by a specific hierarchization of social and cultural differences that produces violence. And yet, as the authors in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry illustrate, these hierarchies and violences are not overdetermined. Instead, as educators, we can seek to create liminal moments when schooling structures can be momentarily suspended and opportunities for encounters amongst equals, through which we recognize each other across and within differences, are possible. The ways authors in this issue approach curriculum and pedagogy offer opportunities to wrestle with the contradictions we live within by opening ourselves up to the liminal spaces of our present situation. As James Seale-Collazo (2023) suggests in the article that opens this issue, these liminal moments can lead to what Victor Turner (1964/1967, 1969) first termed communitas.

Communitas occurs when we acknowledge each other’s inherent worth rather than encounter each other first through the roles or statuses that social structures assign us in various contexts. While Turner initially focused on the role of rites of passage to create liminal moments of what he called “anti-structure” to create a sense of communitas, Edith Turner (2012) later extended this analysis to consider other kinds of moments in which liminality and anti-structure could be experienced, such as carnivals, disasters, and even musical events. As Victor and Edith Turner have suggested, these fleeting moments when structural positioning is suspended and we experience a sense of shared collective joy may be hard to anticipate or even understand. Yet, they offer us a glimpse of what might be possible even as conflict and violence increase. In this so-called “post-COVID” moment, as schools and other educational projects are compelled to “move on” and to ignore the economic, political, social, and environmental catastrophes that metastasized during the pandemic, these crises nonetheless continue to have a devastating impact on communities.

Along with the start of the pandemic in 2020, we witnessed many boiling points, from the rise of the “Black Spring” (Kelley, 2022) to the mounting revelations of genocide in Canadian residential schools through the “discovery” of mass graves. While these boiling points triggered reckonings of public consciousness, we continue to wrestle with acknowledging the productivity of the liminal spaces to envision futurity as we contend with the devastation of past and present acts of violence. From the violence of gentrification and displacement to the violence of colonialism and the denial of rights to the violence of book banning and ignorance of heinous histories, the articles in this issue point to the possibility that “building livable lives together in the wreckage” might be possible through educational projects oriented toward building communitas.

In the first article, titled “The Sound of the Beast: Structure and Anti-Structure in Religious and Secular Schooling,” James Seale-Collazo offers examples, from two contrasting school contexts, of what liminality and communitas can look like. Similarly situated within the colonial context of Puerto Rico, marked by ongoing economic crises and the devastation of “natural” disasters, the two schools that Seale-Collazo describes are also remarkably different: one a private Protestant school dedicated to providing an education grounded on Christian values, the other a selective “elite” public laboratory school dedicated not only to a secular education, but to an ostensibly progressive education grounded on democratic principles and a commitment to nurturing leadership in students. While both schools are highly structured by schooling hierarchies, Seale-Collazo points to moments, through rituals at the first school and through student activism at the second, when such structures appear to be suspended and teachers and students encounter each other, at least momentarily, as equals.

These moments are not without contradictions, of course, and as Seale-Collazo notes, “those spaces of student power correspond exactly to the ultimate outcomes each school seeks to foster: spiritual development at one school, leadership development at the other” (p. 216). These may be necessary paradoxes, but Seale-Collazo encourages us not to dwell on them and instead to consider the possibilities that arise, not just in extraordinary moments of resistance or transformation, like the ones he examines in the article, but also in the small moments of what he calls “everyday” liminality. Even brief or passing encounters, like a handshake, the act of being vulnerable through sharing personal stories with students, or responding to a personal message outside the space of schooling, can create liminal spaces that contribute to communitas. Reflecting on the ways in which the shift to online schooling during the pandemic reduced opportunities for such everyday moments of liminality, Seale-Collazo cautions us against assuming that just because students may be learning material just as well as in person, the educational encounter is entirely the same. In fact, we may very well be missing “the best that happens in educational settings” if we ignore the “ebb and flow in everyday practice” that unfolds through the embodied encounters of in-person schooling (pp. 219–220).

These ebbs and flows of everyday encounters are also crucial in community-based education settings, where moments of liminality might perhaps be more common and sustained, particularly when they encourage creative symbolic work. In her article, titled “‘Locked Out of Lynn’: A Portrait of Youth Symbolic Creativity in a Gentrifying City,” Raquel Jimenez brings us a detailed account of just what these moments might look like in a community setting. Entering the world of a group of young people in Lynn, Massachusetts, Jimenez offers us a view into how poetic knowledge brings language to the shifting material circumstances that shape their lives. From the material space of the city, the youth employ creative symbolic work in the liminality of gentrification, where even as gentrification is celebrated in local discourse, the youth reveal their uncertainty. Participant Kylie’s poignant assertion encapsulates this: “It’s like we’re being locked out of Lynn” (p. 231). Through their testimony, this renewal narrative is revealed as unsettling to those who are not read into this new discourse.

Jimenez wrestles with how the standpoints of both educators and youth can differ, creating tension in interpreting curricular spaces. Drawing on concepts from the field of cultural studies, the author discusses three kinds of meaning-making processes that unfolded as young people began to co-construct shared understandings about the interlocking symbolic, political, and spatial inequalities that comprise gentrification. Creating space for youth’s creative symbolic work, she argues, can create opportunities for them to develop the shared understandings needed to pursue collective action. While the community context is not devoid of structures that prescribe roles, a focus on symbolic creativity can bring attention to the capacity of young people to make sense of their world and create opportunities for these structures to collapse, perhaps momentarily, to produce communitas. The liminality necessary for this seems to arise, for instance, when students begin to theorize their lived realities as they encounter each other anew through their creative symbolic work, whether these encounters are mediated by adults or not. In these moments, young people push back against the dominant political and developmental narratives of gentrification that frame their existing conditions as unlivable. Perhaps more importantly, the kinds of interactions that Jimenez describes illustrate that it is possible to create moments of communitas, “where young people engage with locally salient sociocultural dynamics and discourses, devise narratives that reflect their own experiences and viewpoints, and forge meaningful connections with others” (p. 238).

Similarly, such moments are also possible even within more hierarchical educational spaces, such as university classrooms, where liminality might seem like a complete contradiction. In fact, Indigenous educators have led the way in offering pedagogical strategies for creating different kinds of encounters in such classrooms, ones that might be characterized by the notion of communitas. Haudenosaunee scholar Jennifer Brant, in her article titled “Confronting Colonial Violences in and out of the Classroom: Advancing Curricular Moves toward Justice through Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies,” offers such an approach. Maternal pedagogies are not defined by the structural role that women, as mothers, play in the sexist and capitalist demarcations of what it means to be a mother, as defined by compulsory heterosexuality and gender binaries. In fact, maternal pedagogies counter “the essentialist notions of the very word maternal, what it means to mother and to be mothered. In this way, maternal theory speaks back to education as a patriarchal site by advancing feminist praxis” (p. 248). Brant brings this to bear on her practice as a Haudenosaunee mother/scholar who not only teaches about colonial violence, but who must also contend with that violence in the context of the classroom.

Facing colonial, racist, and sexist violence, Brant seeks to create a kind of communitas with her students by calling “upon emotion and vulnerability as a pathway for working through difficult knowledge” (p. 247). This work requires naming and confronting colonial violence and addressing the explicit and implicit ways in which students, particularly white settler students, resist learning about colonial histories and embrace a kind of “denialism” that insists on epistemological ignorance. In response, Brant works to produce what Cree Elder and scholar Willie Ermine (2007) has termed an “ethical space of engagement,” where everyone is invited to recognize, value, and dwell in the strength of the differences that shape the relational encounter. This requires approaching the learning encounter in a way that undermines hierarchies, including the structural role of the teacher. To that end, Brant positions herself “as a facilitator engaged in the practice of co-learning/unlearning and embrace[s] the relational and ethical encounter of the course as an opportunity to learn alongside students who share their own communal funds of knowledge” (p. 253). In this sense, this ethical space of engagement is a kind of liminal space where we can confront violence by recognizing each other and seeking to transform the ways in which we are oriented toward the Other. The kind of communitas that emerges through Brant’s Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies is full of potential for transformation through vulnerability and the kind of emotional learning necessary for social transformation.

Thinking with liminality and communitas also helps us to think through the challenge of what it might mean to grapple with white supremacist master narratives while promoting Black livingness. Authors Chris Seeger, Tiffany Mitchell Patterson, and Maria Paz wrestle with this profound contradiction, pondering how educators might sidestep the violence of curriculum while being in a system that actively perpetuates anti-Blackness. In the final article of this issue, titled, “Reckoning with White Supremacy and Anti-Black Racism in the Virginia US History Standards,” the authors uncover racial bias in the representation of different racial groups to better understand how themes of white supremacy and anti-Blackness are portrayed. Their analysis of the history standards critically grapples with the structural condition of being an educator mandated to valorize a curriculum that over-represents and mythologizes white men as heroes and portrays Black people as monolithic and diminutive. Against rushing towards improvement, they ask us to sit with our discomfort to better understand the construction of these standards. By doing so, they invite us to attend to reconstructing the curriculum with the same intentionality with which these standards were implemented.

Seeger, Patterson, and Paz’s analysis, however, does not end with a pessimistic warning or declaration, but instead points us toward communitas. We as educators must not abdicate our responsibility, but rather we must understand that a mandated curriculum cannot set the standard of pedagogy when it causes harm. The authors illuminate new themes and patterns and provide practical guidance for educators to reckon with their curriculum and recognize the worth of the Other. They demand the vulnerability and openness that communitas demands of us, asserting that being open to new information, recognizing subtle racism, and incorporating diverse narratives in the curriculum is vital to working against anti-Black racism. The authors invite us to build life-giving spaces by reimagining a curriculum free from problematic narratives and mythology.

The animation of communitas insists that imagination, creativity, the non-human, and even beauty are crucial markers of how we understand who and what we are in the world. Sylvia Wynter asked us to remake knowledge as we know it in light of our present order of knowledge (Wynter & McKittrick, 2015). What does that mean for education today? In our various corners of the world, we face challenges that cannot be placed into neat economic, social, or political boxes. Instead, we live in a time of multifaceted and ever-evolving concerns. Unlike other eras before ours, technology’s increased influence has made our concerns even more complicated. In this wreckage, how do we find space to dream, imagine, and think in between the violence? Each of the articles in this issue of CI offers us an entry point and a set conceptual tools for creating spaces where communitas might emerge. For Seeger, Patterson, and Paz, this work demands a critical deconstruction of past narratives to intentionally reimagine curriculum in a way that is life-giving towards all people. Similarly, Brant’s approach to creating ethical spaces of engagement moves against universality by inviting us to recognize, value, and dwell in the strength of the differences we bring into and that shape our educational contexts through vulnerability and emotional work. Jimenez helps us to imagine anti-structure as a challenge to prescriptive, top-down curricula that stifles sites of resistance and humanity, showing us how creative symbolic work might serve as an entry into collective understandings and challenging dominant narratives of development that produce rather than reduce inequality. Drawing more directly on the concepts of liminality and communitas, Seale-Collazo brings into view how engaging with and taking seriously young people, their concerns, and their analyses produces educational spaces where new relations might unfold and where we might encounter each other anew, as equals in our difference.

These moments of communitas, as Edith Turner (2012) has demonstrated, are fleeting and difficult to point to, perhaps even to understand, and require “an open readiness without preconceived ideas” (p. 219). Yet, as Maynard and Simpson (2022) insisted, it is only by encountering each other anew, as equals in our difference, that we can start to imagine a response to the violences that mark our present. This requires that we turn to the Land in order to nurture “a set of conversations and way of relating to each other outside of the institution and its formations” (p. 31). But also that we turn to one another, as beings in the world, “to nourish each other, to relate to each other, to listen and share, and to breathe together” (p. 31).¹ The authors in this issue of CI offer us entry points for what it might mean to create opportunities for just these kinds of encounters.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In her letter to Maynard, Simpson cites Black Trinidadian-Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist M. NourbeSe Philip as the source of these ideas.