Co-Authoring Transnational Feminist Pedagogies in the Canadian Academy

This co-authored essay stories the cross-cultural knowledges and translations of three friends, whose relationality begins and continues from our shared location within the Canadian academy as graduate students and sessional instructors. A piecing together of distinct yet overlapping histories, experiences, and translations, this essay reflects ongoing and recorded conversations on the potentialities of transnational feminist pedagogies^[1]Our respective locations and experiences within and across the Mexican, South Asian, and Caribbean diaspora have informed our understanding that Global South feminisms are—out of “geographical, … Continue reading as they are imagined, enacted, and embodied by women of colour in both academic and everyday life.  These conversations have taken place in our homes, across kitchen tables and living room floors, and alongside the home-cooked meals we continue to share and enjoy with one another. By foregrounding this work as a product of friendship, we critically respond to, and work against, the structures and practices of legitimacy and legibility permeating contemporary Canadian identity politics that condition women of colour’s location on the “outside” or “at the margins of” academia. Together, we have come to recognize multifarious threads binding our enmeshed experiences as women of colour graduate students and sessional instructors. As we reflect on our individual experiences in the humanities, our shared pedagogical imaginings, renegotiations, and commitments unfold and converge. Informed by unique relations to space and place, our respective courses pursue alternative stories and storytellers to collaboratively, critically, and creatively rethink the dominant narratives that we—both ourselves and our students—encounter in the Canadian academy. Transnational feminist pedagogies are conditioned and constrained by the normative, neocolonial, and capitalist systems they emerge in and respond to. Accounting for this contradictory tension, our conversations speak to the joys and frustrations of crafting critical pedagogies, the potentiality of creativity in the classroom, and crossings of failure and hope.
 
Storytellers

To frame the conversations and reflections which follow, we begin with brief accounts of our respective pedagogical experiences, investments, and orientations to establish how our work as co-storytellers has developed in the context of distinct, overlapping, and interacting identities, histories, and relations. It is our hope that these biographical notes convey a process of co-storying that is based in critical and loving recognition of our differences. Our unique and often precarious positions and experiences as sessional instructors have led us to reject the individualizing and apolitical assumptions underlying the colonial systems sustained within the Canadian academy. In turn, our pedagogies engage imaginative and creative practices grounded in coalitional friendships^[2] We approach our coalitional friendship through Shireen Roshanravan’s conceptualization of “Women of Colour coalitions” as those which “cultivat[e] deep understanding of one’s … Continue reading and relational ways of knowing and being that women of colour imagine, co-design, and mobilize in and beyond the academic institution. We locate generative potentialities and dis/continuities within our pedagogical, ideological, epistemic, and material interventions and resistances that engender and sustain coalitional solidarities. 
 
Maddi (“Narratives of Health,” Spring 2023): I am a queer feminist scholar in/of the Caribbean diaspora. My research emerges out of sustained relation to my Guyanese grandmother, Mavis Chan, and attends to the embodied and relational knowledge systems affected within and across Caribbean women’s matrilineal and diasporic networks as sites of dis/rupture to the spatio-temporal logics structuring and sustaining colonial world(s) and imaginaries. In the context of pedagogical dis/rupture, these embodied and relational ways of knowing circumvent the standardizing scripts of academic learning. The idea that there is only one way to learn, one way to succeed, one way to live is, for me, fundamentally at odds with the many learners and knowledge makers situated in and beyond the academy who cannot or do not want to prescribe to these rigid trajectories. In my teaching, I work against these scripts by prioritizing transnational feminist pedagogies (Alexander 2005, Hosein 2011, Nagar 2014, Charkravarty et al. 2026) that centre collaboration, reflexivity, and critical creative practices and view students as active agents in their own learning and as integral knowledge co-producers in and beyond the classroom. 
 
Rajeshwari (“Global Anglophone Literature and Film,” Fall 2024): I am a South Asian scholar, whose research investigates how epistemic violence rooted in colonialism and white supremacy shapes everyday life. Originally from Kerala but born and raised in Bengaluru, Karnataka, I was educated in Catholic institutions established to promote colonial interests. My identity is forged in this displacement, defined by the imposition of English over my mother tongue Malayalam. Yet, within these inherently colonial educational spaces, the pedagogical practitioners I encountered and learned from led me to postcolonial thinkers like Edward Said, Partha Chatterjee, and Ania Loomba, whose writings continue to guide me in questions of how processes of colonization influence how we dream and imagine. After moving to the Canadian institution as an international graduate student in 2019, I remain in a process of constantly translating my ideas into English. I bring this emotional, linguistic, and cultural tension to my classrooms, where I encourage students to interrogate the systems and institutions that shape how they dream and imagine, and the everyday “translations” they perform unconsciously. My pedagogy challenges colonial normativity, where I see the classroom within the Canadian academy as a space for challenging and reclaiming power.
 
Stephanie (“Creating Writing in/with/for Communities,” Fall 2024): I was born on the southern tip of the Rio Grande, along the Mexico-US border. My research, pedagogical practice, and spiritual knowledge are shaped by my understanding and lived experience of the borderlands as a queer land of crossings—an embodied and psychic space where I simultaneously live with and live away from. My work reckons with this point of contact through the relational movement and theory of conviviendo, the Spanish word meaning to live together. Conviviendo creates space for both the violence and wounds, pleasures and possibilities, that crossings or movements of the otherwise open to our souls and bodies. My pedagogical practice and desire to dismantle traditional dynamics of power and expertise between educators and learners reflect this notion of coexistence between all things, where our knowledges, ancestral teachings, and experiences are continuously engaged in processes of touching and being touched. In my worldview, we are all producers of knowledge; we are all storytellers.
 

Crafting a Pedagogical Practice

There are main threads binding us as interlocutors and pedagogical practitioners. Our experiences are transnational and distinct, but a shared desire to feel, know, or imagine otherwise carries across Steph’s conceptualization of conviviendo, Maddi’s thoughts on self-knowledge and matrilineal relationality, and Rajeshwari’s comments on translation. There are also encounters or crossings with systems and borders that crush us. These are the joys and wounds of enacting and dreaming transnational feminist pedagogies in the Canadian academy. 

Do you see a thread between your experiences and pedagogical practice?

S: If you look back to the name of my course, you will see “with” in the title. This “with”—and “in” and “for”, in their own way—captures the relational spirit of conviviendo. In a course centred around community-engaged narrative arts, the desire to actively engage in collaborative practices is almost non-negotiable. The course asks undergraduate students to make use of their skills in creative writing and talents to initiate and co-create a sustained project with a community of their choice over the span of thirteen weeks. Each community is different in its desires, needs, and dynamics, so the approach and form of each student project vastly differ. The same can be said of my course design. For a course focused on community-engaged narratives, I decided the most important teachers and storytellers in that setting were the community partners and practitioners that the students and I co-existed with throughout the term, and elsewhere. I also was fortunate to have two TAs in addition to myself, meaning my pedagogical method could take a more hands-on, relational approach. Each teaching team member worked closely with about twenty students, meeting with them individually throughout the term to check in on the project’s development, to work through any challenges or differences that arose in the process of collaborating with their community partners, and overall, to support and encourage students in what was, for most, a new experience.

Processes of co-learning and co-creation inform all aspects of the course, from its structure and learning outcomes to its modes of evaluation. Beyond the first two weeks, there were no formal lectures. Instead, workshops, visiting speakers, peer-review, and studio classes which provided designated hours for the student to engage and be with their community in some way, shaped the remaining weeks. In an anonymous Mid-term Reflection I incorporated into the sixth week of our course, students were asked: What has been the most valuable knowledge, activity, or experience so far in the course? Many student responses highlighted guest speaker and cultural worker Jeff Chow’s “Document Your Culture” workshop, whose title and ethos borrow from Emma Warren’s Document Your Culture: A Manual (2020), a “handbook…designed to help you tell the story of a space or a community” (5). As part of the workshop’s activity, students were asked to engage with the reading material through movement, music, collective and personal reflection, and to write out their responses to Jeff’s guiding questions together on whiteboards (see Fig. 1).

In their Mid-term Reflection responses, students described the workshop with Jeff as “inspiring;” “grounding;” “enriching;” “a deeply moving experience;” “a clear and helpful blueprint for the project;” and an opportunity to “see what we have read and studied in praxis” (3CW3 Fall 2024, “Mid-term Reflection”). It is impactful to read and receive this kind of response from students as a first-time sessional instructor who is also in the process of learning and unlearning how to teach within the Canadian academy. Their feedback signals to me that students are not only interested but affected by feminist pedagogies and modes of learning that aim to “bring theory back to life” (Ahmed 10). In the same way that Jeff’s questions encourage students to critically think with Warren’s handbook and to reflect on their role as community storytellers through play, movement, and introspection within a collaborative space, I want to provide the students that I teach with a grounding framework from which to develop their own community practices and ethics. A toolbox, of sorts, that aligns with their particular worldviews, cultural ways of knowing, and the unique dynamics of their community. With living and creating together, there are many possible knowledge production pathways. My course structure and assessment methods were designed to speak to this question of what does it look like to not simply live/work together but to live/work together well in the spirit of community?
 

Fig. 1. Student responses to Jeff Chow’s “Document Your Culture” Workshop inspired by Emma Warren’s Document Your Culture: A Manual. September 23, 2024. Photos by Stephanie Rico.

 
M: I wonder if you can speak to the evaluative process. How do you decide if a project will remain accountable and sustainable to the community? Was the community involved?

S: The decision aspect is contentious because even with the “right” measures, ethical considerations, and practices of accountability and sustainability in place, no evaluation process is free of pitfalls. Communities and the relations we sustain are always in flux, our needs and desires change. But a framing conversation around what we hope and imagine our community to feel, provide, and coexist is a starting point. I think of the project proposal students draft at the beginning of the semester as this initial step. It outlines how students with their collectives imagine the trajectory of the project based on initial communications, their roles and responsibilities, and the benefits or reasoning behind the project’s format. It is also an opportunity for the teaching team to offer feedback on whether the project can logistically meet the goals and expectations of the project in thirteen weeks, or if other steps and resources are needed to benefit the project’s future sustainability. 

The end-of-term evaluation forms that both students and their community partners complete serve a similar purpose. These forms were introduced in the first iterations of the course taught by Dr. Daniel Coleman, a friend and mentor of mine. They remain an opportunity for both parties to reflect on and share their experiences of co-creating a community-engaged narrative arts project. The form lists some brief questions centred around the process: the individual’s experience and enjoyment in seeing the project take shape, the student’s leadership and initiative in developing and completing the project, but also the outcome: the extent to which the project incorporated the community’s priorities and the sustainability of the project’s ongoing benefit for the community. The equal weighing of both the process and the outcome aims to ensure and define these measures of accountability and sustainability, as well as the community’s unique ethos. Whereas my experience as both a student and teacher in the Canadian educational system has often centred and valued the outcome of my efforts, what I can prove or produce, I see these two factors (process and outcome) as necessary and influential parts existing and creating together within community-engaged work and life. I desire assessments that make space for all involved parties to not only reflect on an experience, but to acknowledge that sometimes writing with/in/for community means there will be disagreements, disappointments, or differences.  

M: Returning to your point about anti-hierarchical course design, I took a similar approach when I taught “Narratives of Health.” Students were placed in learning collectives at the start of term to prioritize participatory learning. After each lecture and class discussion, students joined their collectives to creatively and collaboratively work through (and against) dominant narratives of health. This “work” took the form of creative and art-based activities, ranging from collaborative collages and poetry to subjective mapping, and were often designed in relation to assigned readings. 

For instance, I designed the “Crafting Care Webs” (see Fig. 2) exercise to pair with assigned readings from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work, a book that centers on and celebrates the ongoing work of sick and disabled queer/BIPOC in co-crafting and co-enacting disability justice through radical love and multiform acts of care work.
 

 
Following our class discussions, students returned to their collectives to discuss how they understood and/or experienced “care without charity,”^[3]I assigned this reading to frame our discussion on charity as a dominant narrative of health as it points to alternatives to care dreamt, designed, mobilized, and led by disabled folks: “a model of … Continue reading and how we might reconsider the imperative to “learn to do” collective care as an invitation to embark on a journey towards “revolutionary love” or “collective access” (Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 33). Students were then asked to imagine how they might represent care as a “destination,” and were invited to use the blank postcards they received at the start of class to visualize their responses. Anyone who chose to create one would eventually submit their postcard for display in  “ENGL 3NH3’s Care Web” (see Fig. 3).
 

 
The “Crafting Care Webs” exercise was, like all other creative in-class activities I assigned, deliberately low stakes. My evaluation of their creative work was never contingent on the outcome or product but on students’ active and engaged participation within their collectives. Students didn’t need to create if they didn’t want—they could listen, discuss, take notes, or offer support to their collective members. 

Approaching creative and collective work this way made space for students to develop trust in one another and in the creative process—an essential part of the final group project, where students codesigned an alternative and just framework of health, illness, disability, and/or care centring disability justice.^[4]Final project submissions included a podcast on alternative anti-capitalist frameworks for long-term care during public health crises; educational materials on queer reproductive health for … Continue reading Similar to the proposal for Steph’s creative writing course, each group was tasked with crafting individual and collective commitments and learning goals, task assignments, and accountability strategies for their final project proposal. This aspect of the project encouraged students to see themselves not only as active agents in their own learning but also as knowledge co-producers within the collective. 

S: There is a focus on processes of cocreation across our approaches to collaborative learning that require a careful awareness of both individual and collective motivations. To work and learn as a collective, in a shared space, necessitates a continuous kind of relearning or reorienting around how we show up in the classroom, whether as a student or instructor. 

R: I agree that this approach to unlearning/relearning goes both ways. With “Global Anglophone Literature and Film,” I had to navigate the challenge of designing a course, whose department-assigned title suggests students will “read and watch around the world in thirteen weeks.” In response, my syllabus worked to move away from the tendency of “Global Anglophone” to provincialize Europe as the origin of English literature and instead focused on South Asia and Anglophone diasporas in North America. To decentre canonical ways of thinking, reading, and seeing the “Global Anglophone,” I paired anticolonial scholars such as Edward Said, Katherine McKittrick, and Ania Loomba with the works of creatives like Gabriel Okara, Amitav Ghosh, and Souvankham Thammavongsa. While working to trace the diverse and expansive scope of Global Anglophone literature, I approached my course as a journey centring diasporic subjectivities and my syllabus as an iterative work; that is, one that can be constantly renewed, since a global experience can never be captured in one semester. 

The course is quite popular with students in both the Humanities and the Social Sciences, and for students in STEM disciplines. Even though it is a 300-level course, it often serves as their first introduction to Global Anglophone literature. When I taught this course,  I sought to collaboratively assess and address potential knowledge gaps with my students. I designed an introductory survey for the start of term that invited students to note and share their curiosity around course content and, for some, the unfamiliar genre of “Anglophone literature.” Situating myself as a second-language speaker and “receiver” of English, one of the first questions I posed in my lecture asked students to consider how we each “received” the English language. Anticipating incredulity, I reposed the question: If you are not specifically related to the Queen’s family, how did you come to speak this language? Drawing from personal experience and my ancestors’ encounter with English through an “act of violence,” the discussion focussed on how our ability to speak in the colonizer’s tongue remains unquestioned and thus continues to reinforce colonial knowledge hierarchies, where English proficiency signals a marker of refinement and class. Our conversations deeply resonated with students who, like me, were taught to speak and think in English without question. One student, for instance, shared with me in our last class that she felt encouraged to participate more actively in the course because of my early self-positioning as an English instructor who is a second-language speaker.

In hindsight, I shaped the syllabus in relation to my own personal journey and my embodied feelings of belonging and unbelonging within Canada, and the anxieties that come with being an international student: study permit renewals, never-ending paperwork, and immigration rule changes. Weaving my personal experience of immigration into my lecture, my course reflected how state sanctioned borders operate in the determination and documentation of belonging in ways that exceed “legal status” and permeate our emotional and epistemic subjectivities.
 
Tainted Joys in Creative Pedagogy 

Our experiences all touch on the influence of colonial and neoliberal practices and principles within the institution, and how we are conceptualizing creative pedagogical practices as an alternative mode of engaging learning and teaching. Can we elaborate on the role or presence of creativity in our course imaginings and workings? 

S: I am interested in the rising popularity and demand for creative writing courses across several English departments—how these trends point towards the desire for more creative modes of engaging learning. Most of these courses, I imagine, centre on creativity as a tool of the imagination or on developing creative writing skills in a specific genre or style. My course, Creating Writing in/with/for Communities, alternatively, asks students to use their creative writing skills, interests, and talents (which I would argue we all have) in service to a community. Students are not just writing for themselves, but for a community of people, each with their own desires, needs, and complex ethical considerations. At the start of the semester, I make a point to introduce the course as do versus how to in style. This structure and learning experience are initially daunting for many students. Our years in educational systems that reinscribe colonial beliefs and values have taught us to be disembodied retainers and producers of knowledge; it can be difficult to shift from this learnt mode of individualistic knowledge production which follows the logic of: these are my ideas, this is what I envision for the project, here is how I will execute them. As you said earlier, Maddi, there are preconceived expectations that students bring into the classroom on day one that extend beyond you or the collective. How do we as pedagogical practitioners, then, work with students to prioritize and transition towards modes of learning rooted in listening, questioning, and guiding rather than knowing? 

What I try to express to students is that, in my worldview, processes of living, listening, and creating with others are the catalysts for building skills that I cannot solely teach students in a lecture. Incorporating action-orientated and public-facing qualities into the design of any course makes creative writing, pedagogy, and learning take on a more critical edge. You are no longer the isolated artist or intellect who produces and accumulates knowledge for yourself, from yourself, and with yourself. You belong and are accountable to a communal “we,” whether it be the interpersonal (smaller group or 1:1 exchange) or the collective (classroom or other formal/informal community). It would not be wrong to describe my course as orientated more towards cultivating skills in creatively storytelling collective movements or histories, and in building a praxis that facilitates more just and sustainable community relations, than as a course on how to write well or creatively. 

M: Thinking about the possibilities and potentialities of collective creation, I return to a lecture I co-facilitated in “Narratives of Health” with my friend, Dr. Linzey Corridon. A queer Caribbean scholar and poet, Linzey came to discuss his poem “A French Canadian, but not really, moves to Hamilton” (see. Fig. 4).
 

 
The poem begins with “This is Hamilton, or so I have been told…” and explores, in part, the complexities of navigating settler-colonial space and queer diasporic un/belonging. As a group, we discussed the themes of the poem with Linzey, and afterwards, students were tasked with writing a 5-line poem beginning with: “This is health, or so I have been told.” This exercise included both individual and collective components; students rejoined their learning collectives to co-create a collaborative poem by using components from their individual pieces. At the start, most students expressed discomfort and anxiety concerning whether their work was “poetic” or “good enough,” but the shift into collective work fostered celebration, excitement, and wonder. At the same time, Linzey travelled around the class and offered advice and encouragement to students as they wrote. Through this experience, I got to witness, if only for a moment, students across both humanities and STEM-based disciplines seeing themselves as creative writers and feeling the freedom of un-disciplining in the process. It reinforced how creative practice affords space to actually practice, wonder, and play with alternative learning methods and knowledge work.

S: I have had my share of “ah-ha” moments of wonder where something clicks in our pedagogical practice, and often because of creativity and the possibilities that can emerge when we make space for play. I love to see students, who are initially interested yet hesitant or insecure to delve into a particular genre or creative medium, completely trust themselves and create something incredible in the process. We hold an end-of-term Gala for students and their community partners to showcase and engage with all the different projects, and I have chills and wide eyes the entire time. Students have created short-documentary films about food sovereignty collectives, large-scale printed newspapers highlighting the voices of unhoused peoples in Hamilton, educational websites that simultaneously serve as digital community archives, informational booklets on subjects ranging from beekeeping to occupational therapy, avatar-based video games that educate and advocate for disability justice and accessible architecture, and so on. Public-facing, multi-modal creative projects have a level of relevance and imaginative criticality that I feel will start to, if they have not already, shadow and reorientate our value and understanding of traditional assignments—dare I say the essay?

R: I took a slightly different approach than both of you. Much of my creative energy went into designing the syllabus as a journey through Anglophone spaces. My primary objective was to help students reflect on how we have “received” the English language. In this spirit, I deliberately centered my syllabus on South Asia because that is the region where I, as their instructor, received the English language. This choice is reflective of “tainted joys,” a concept I have begun theorizing for narrating the affective pathways that shape my understanding of positionality as a woman of colour scholar and international student within the Canadian academy. “Tainted joys” emerged in relation to the feedback I have received from my students. Time and again, students approached me after my lectures with comments related to their recognition, excitement, and longing for the topics we were discussing. These conversations undoubtedly filled me with joy. Yet, I had to reckon with the realization that many of them were occupying a space where they could openly critique colonial-capitalist structures for the first time.

Simplistically, a “tainted joy” is any joy that is tainted. When you look at the definition for the word “tainted,” it conveys something that is tinged or impinged upon by something external. What we commonly recognize as joy is characterized by this feeling of complete elation and exuberance. Pure or untainted joy belongs to this suspension where, even if only momentarily, we can be uprooted from the reality that surrounds us in our everyday life. As a racialized academic within a colonial space, I have realized that there are few moments for women of colour to experience this sensation of untainted joy. Rather, what I experience most are “tainted joys.” The relational dimensions and affective pathways of tainted joys constantly remind and keep you rooted in the reality of working, thinking, and producing labor within a colonized and ableist space. Thus, you are never fully free to disconnect from your reality as opposed to when you are experiencing, say, what is a regular or untainted joy. The experience of “tainted joys” is a reality I have had to reconcile with while working in academia, both in India and Canada. Ultimately, this affective pathway serves as a reminder of all the work there is left to do within our academic spaces.
 

Fig. 5. Nandkumar, Rajeshwari. “Unpacking ‘Colonialism’ and ‘Postcolonialism’– Reading Robert Young, Ania Loomba and Kamila Shamzie” ENGLISH 3V03 Lecture, September 2, 2024, McMaster University, Slide 4.

 
In my course, one of the ways I wanted my students to think about “tainted joys” was by having them visualize these affective pathways and journeys through repurposed world maps—a traditional colonial cartographic tool. I displayed maps that deliberately highlighted the connection between colonialism, land, and language. One map explicitly demarcated countries where English is an official first language and those where it was used as a second language (See Fig 5 left). Another map used satire to label and demarcate countries into the binary categories of  “colonized” and “civilization” (See Fig 5 right). My intention behind displaying these maps in class was to not only offer students an alternate seeing of the cartographic and colonial hierarchies but also to cultivate a space where subaltern knowledges are prioritized and to challenge the violence of homogeneity. Through these exercises, students could visually see the challenge of navigating the vast terrain of Anglophone literature within the constraints of a 13-week semester.

S: This reminds me of what I was saying earlier about my own learning and unlearning around how I teach in the classroom, but also my students’ responses to more embodied and affective learning pathways, such as those engaged in Jeff’s “Document Your Culture” workshop activity. On the one hand, I am elated that a majority of the students found the workshop to be deeply inspiring, illuminating, and grounding. Yet as Rajeshwari notes, I am conscious that for most of my students, the workshop was a “new” kind of pedagogical space in that it prioritized joy, play, our bodies, and minds. I do not believe jumping up-and-down on the spot or mindful movement in a classroom of sixty-plus students, the mode by which Jeff began his workshop, is an everyday norm students encounter within the university. However, because of Jeff’s presence and leadership in our classroom, jumping became a pedagogical point of departure. For me, this experience is a tainted joy, of sorts, that reveals the collective’s proximity to but also embodied defiance of ableist and neoliberal colonial values that treat education or community-engaged work as a tradeable commodity rather than a site of connection and action.

M:  Rajeshwari, I immediately connected with the experience you relayed—of students’ approaching you after class with elated recognition, and the tainted joy that their excitement and longing prompted. It reminded me of a time when a student thanked me for assigning excerpts from Audre Lorde’s (1993) Zami that spoke to her shared experience of never finding her mother’s “home” on traditional maps since, like Carricacou, the atlas her elementary school provided never included Fiji.^[5]Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Crossing Press, 1993, pg 14. For this student, Lorde’s reconceptualization of home as a relational, embodied, emotional, and mythical site gave her the language to describe what she had always felt. While thrilled by this student’s connection, I was disappointed that this was her first introduction to alternative, diasporic ways of knowing—a sensation of tainted joy. Thinking back, however, this is not where the conversation ended; the text inspired the student—for the first time in her university career—to submit a personal reflective essay for her final project. More than four years after this course, she reached out to update me that she was pursuing law school with the hopes to become an immigration lawyer, a decision, she noted, partly informed by her first encounter with, and the continuing influence of, Lorde’s work. 

Reflecting on this experience, I am particularly excited by your theorization of tainted joys as a sensation and a method for describing the often-interconnected points of disjuncture and dis/rupture that women of colour may experience within and beyond the Canadian academy. My student’s encounter with Zami is an encounter with my pedagogy as it interacts with Audre Lorde’s critical work to create a relational web of knowledge. Perhaps the potentialities of tainted joys emerge in the—at times unanticipated—convergence of women of colour’s affective and affecting responses to the co-creation of counter knowledges within colonial space. 
 

Mapping Crossings, Pedagogy, and Failure

After discussing Rajeshwari’s conceptualization of tainted joys, we created a subjective map charting the affective pathways and relational dimensions of our individual and collective journeys into the Canadian academy. Through this process, we found continuities across our unique yet intersecting experiences. Our trajectories into and through the Canadian academy are constituted by matrilineal kinship networks, and epistemic and ontological motivations and desires rooted in the knowledge and teachings we received from those whom Sara Ahmed might call our first feminist teacher(s).^[6]Ahmed, Sara. “Feminist Aunties.” feminist kill joys, 12 Feb. 2016, https://feministkilljoys.com/2016/02/12/feminist-aunties/. When our paths cross in grad school, the coalitional friendships we develop are grounded by epistemic and geopolitical sites which exceed the Canadian academy by tethering us to matrilineal roots and nurture radical and (re)generative coalitional movements within and beyond the academy.
 

 
S: I like your framing of the learning process in your course as an affective journey. I have also been grappling with the crossings that occur when we traverse psychic, spatial, temporal, cultural, and linguistic borders—all those things that compose identity within this spatial metaphor of a journey. Especially regarding crossings that are spurred on by shifts in place, movements and visions of the otherwise, and all the emergent transborder relationalities and difficulties, hopes and wounds, that come out of that crossing. I feel that within the academy and elsewhere, our transnational feminist pedagogies are continuously crossing with the dominant systems and values of the university. So often this pedagogical crossing, as with those across land borders, is framed as a choice, but I know from my own sense of failure and also desire for an alternate mode of learning, that this crossing so often is a response to a felt and known presence of an insufficient and exhausted present. The vocabulary of burnout and imposter syndrome has become colloquial in the spaces where we learn and teach. I want to unsettle the limiting belief that these outcomes are chosen and natural to the process of exchanging and building knowledge, particularly because it is often queer or femme bodies of colour straddling this precarious crossing.

M: I really like what you were saying about the language or logic of choice. While choice might come into play, how is choice complicated when there is no other viable option? How can we account for survival and the overall complexity of living?

R: The language of crossing or survival makes me think of the personal and social, as well as the embodied and psychic crossings I must do at various moments. Back in India, I often felt a sense of academic unbelonging for not attending the top national universities in the country, like Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi or the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) in Hyderabad. Despite my education in my home province being quite rigorous, I always felt (and still do to a large extent) a nagging sense of discontentment. During my university studies in India, we had limited access to research databases as they were expensive and paid in USD. I recall some of my professors working tirelessly to secure essays through their personal networks, often relying on colleagues or former students who were employed in universities in the UK and US. This disparity in access to resources underscores the broader economic inequality and uneven distribution of knowledge between institutions in the Global North and Global South. Despite attending university in an era when information appears more accessible, much of it remains locked behind paywalls, available only to those with institutional privilege. When I came to McMaster University in 2019, I was taken by surprise by how easily I could get access to research material through digital library sources. 

My decision to pursue a second MA and a PhD at a reputable post-secondary institution like McMaster, as a means to access and work within a university with far greater resources than the colleges I attended back home, came with an economic cost as well as the affective challenges that come with relocation and immigration. Looking back, I view my initial feelings of discontentment as an outcome of the culture of “meritocratic belonging,” a sentiment rooted in colonial neoliberalism which permeates the Canadian academy.

Soon after moving to Canada, I realized that there was an underlying expectation imposed upon me to make my identity tangible within a new country. There was a shift of methods that required a process of translation. The border space, for one, demands the presentation of certain documents at Immigration: my passport, English Language Test scores, and proof of financial support, all of which translated/s my identity into the language demanded by the bureaucracy of migration and determined/s my legality/illegality. Informed by eugenics and marked by surveillance, the language of migration serves as a tool of colonial violence that determines the mobility and survival of certain “legal” body-minds.

While the bureaucratic discourse of migration imposes an overt and more direct form of violence, from here, there is also a cultural translation. On the one hand, my position as both an international student and instructor lends to moments of recognition, relation, and empathy with students. On the other, you must explain your quirks, your manner of speech, your pronunciation of certain English words, or even justify to others why your food, or even your body, smells a certain way. The self-consciousness I continue to experience, which as Stephanie mentions, is euphemistically framed as “imposter syndrome,” constantly reminds me that as I work and think in this space, I must also translate and reconcile with my feelings of unbelonging. I view these affective processes of translation as a broader example of how colonialism renders colonized cultures legible or illegible within and for the dominant social order. 

S: Your comments on both the effects and affects of crossing bring into focus the ephemera of crossing, thinking with Muñoz’s essay “Ephemera as Evidence.” How even after you have crossed, there are “traces, glimmers, residues, or specks of things” from/following the crossing that you continually have to re-encounter or translate, or that you leave behind in the worlds you occupy like a haunting, evidencing our wounds of unbelonging, but also our hope for creating and imagining alternate horizons (Muñoz 10).

M: This reckoning with translation is making me think about the role of difference and misunderstanding, which I understand as inevitabilities and potentialities within relational ways of being. As in, misunderstanding can of course be violent and harmful, but it can also be/witness/produce a possibility. I have been reading M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing (2005) which looks at the radical practices that come out of the experience of marginalization, and their destabilization of dominant knowledge by crossing the fictive and exclusionary boundaries of the “margin.”^[7]Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Duke UP, 2005. This work has pushed me to reconsider misunderstanding, difference, and conflict as inherent to living/lived experience. Alexander’s reorientation of these preexisting binaries and beliefs makes clear that there is never one “right” answer. This feels particularly important when we are thinking through and moving towards alternate ways of knowing and living. If we open ourselves to the inevitability of misunderstanding, what potentialities of difference can we generate and work with? 

Of course, the question then becomes: who is allowed to misunderstand and who is expected to be misunderstood? Here, in this space together, being misunderstood is safer than in others. We can sit and imagine the potentialities of misunderstanding and failure. Then again, I think the practical application of theory is always more complicated and difficult. The potential wounding brought on by misunderstanding can feel way more palpable or visceral than the potentiality.  

S: The simultaneous presence of a wounding but also a potentiality is what conviviendo as a praxis and theory tries to hold together in suspension. Both the palpable and the abstract are occurring at once, and we must somehow find a way to reconcile with and make space for the contingencies of both to coexist. Either way, I love this conceptualizing of misunderstanding as possibility, as signaling ambiguity, and as an acknowledgement that there are gaps in our knowledge. Misunderstanding of course can be violent or harmful like you mention, but you also fairly point to its potential to break down preexisting hierarchies of knowledge by way of creating opportunities to question and understand otherwise.

R: Perhaps it is worth conceptualizing misunderstanding in relation to failure—and its opposite, success. For most women, particularly racialized women, our metrics of success are continuously confronting a white, cis, hetero male standard. My experiences of failure are not always distinct but instead felt like tiny paper cuts that cause slight abrasions yet still hurt deeply. The paper cut could be as small as not being able to articulate or meet your accessibility needs in the classroom, such as a lecture schedule that makes your commute home harder or unsafe. This accessibility failure of the institution then becomes a felt failure that must be unlearned. For instance, if my lecture goes until nine at night and I cannot stick around in the classroom to chat with students, I have to not see it as a failure but as an act of self-preservation. I have to choose to prioritize my own personal safety over being an “approachable” or “good” teacher. This unlearning is hard for many academics occupying marginal identities because an ableist and neoliberal notion of success is predefined for many of us, and for some, it remains the only metric we have known our entire lives.

S: So, failure in this sense is not necessarily “bad” but rather an unlearning of what it means to embody space or to be an embodied person in this space. That said, what is the role of abolition in this context? Because we are talking about the impossibility of possibility. We are talking about how, at once, there is a desire to fail because failing means that you’re not in alignment with these colonial capitalist processes. As in, I actually desire to fail in this context. I want to abolish those systems. Yet at the same time, you must adhere to the systems because failure means not being able to teach, not having professional opportunities, not being able to manipulate and stretch boundaries, not being able to offer students an alternative vision or mode of learning. Abolition, or Audre Lorde’s (1984) notion of the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house^[8]Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Sister Outsider, Crossing Press, 1984., seem essential as we confront this dichotomy: the paper cuts of failure that wound our desire and love to teach and learn with others, that obscure the possibilities that (institutional) spaces of learning can create and offer, yet also point us to the palpable limitations of enacting and dreaming otherwise. We so often talk about the university as a bubble: this invisible barrier that obstructs our potential to see, create, and think beyond. How do we as educators pop the bubble, or have an arm outside of the bubble?

R: I have noticed some professors who are able to “jump out of the bubble.” This jump is made possible partly because of their proximity to capital. The type of capital I am describing includes but extends beyond money. There is the capital that comes with the privilege of having attended certain elite institutions, which is often a prerequisite for a tenure-track position, and other lived experiences. Without these capital affordances, graduate students, postdocs, and early scholars are left to struggle for years as underpaid and overworked bodies. In the Canadian academy, true security comes much, much later, if at all, for those who lack this kind of capital. 

M: I think capital is important but also not enough. The idea that once we become tenured professors, or we secure enough social, cultural, political, and economic capital, we will be able to actualize what we are imagining/dreaming has proven itself a fantasy. While capital obviously affords more safety, more access, and more institutional support, there are always going to be

obstacles within the institution, which is why abolition is important to flag. An integral part of imagining, co-designing, and mobilizing radical pedagogies is the awareness that this will never fully work within the physical and ideological space of the Canadian academy because radical pedagogies often fail within settler-colonial space. So perhaps it is less about overcoming these paper cuts of failure and more about leaving a residue—

S: Or our own paper cuts on the university and spaces we inhabit? Now I am thinking about infections—perhaps there is a way to “infect” the bubble through pedagogy.

M: Totally. Counter-hegemonic knowledges and embodiments are not only affected by but affecting the institution; there are residues and ripple effects that extend beyond the institution and our roles within it.
 

Translations of Hope, or Reimagining Desire Otherwise

Guided by transnational feminisms, we refute neoliberal feminist approaches to the classroom as universally or naturally liberatory, particularly since feminist knowledge production “does not stand outside,”^[9]Trotz, Alissa. “Going Global? Transnationality, Women/Gender Studies and Lessons from the Caribbean.” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, n.a., no. 1,  2007, pg. 14. what we envision here, as a bubble, but often emerges within the colonial processes and architectonics of the academic institution. Transnational feminist pedagogies approach the classroom as a contentious, contradictory, and almost always temporary site of resistance while consisting of strategies, practices, and imaginings that inevitably exceed the classroom by negotiating our place and survival within the institution as marginalized learners, educators, and friends.^[10]Chakravarty, Debjani,  et al. “Introduction.” Transnational Feminist Pedagogies: Meanings, Methods and Experiences, Routledge, 2026, pg. 4.

S: I wonder if we can return to this visual metaphor of having a part of yourself outside of the bubble. An aspect that I love about the course I taught is that students, unless their community formally exists within or on the university, must extend themselves outside of the institution—to make the academic social. Also, because their community likely exists outside of the institution, it offers a tangible space where an alternative reimagining or being otherwise is possible, or, at the very least, more accessible as an action. Given that I must precariously exist and work with/in the bubble, I am limited by certain institutional constraints and policies, but I can offer students a toolkit and the resources to do critical counter-work in a community space that bridges their academic life with their personal life or communal self. It is the bridging of these two worlds, of ultimately seeing them as inherently connected, that can illuminate hope even in failure. My hope for students is you have developed a toolkit through experience, built or deepened a relationship with your community, and now desire or can sustain this relationship, or other collective relations in your life, beyond the time we gathered. I am always thinking about the relationality between things, and the hope that is not abstract but can be known and sensed if we look for it in our everyday lives. To echo your thoughts, Maddi, the hope that may not be realized fully within the institution but is possible elsewhere, perhaps, in part, due to the ideas or tools that you have gathered from your formal education.

R: Because I like to poke holes in everything, I worry that hope is often presented as a solution or byproduct that is pre-imagined for us under white epistemologies and imaginaries. While hope can be a survival mechanism, it can also feel like a predetermined narrative and compulsion that we are expected to follow and hold onto. As in, the notion that no matter what, you will always have hope. This compulsion to feel hope at all times is an outcome of capitalism, and our programmed state or mindset to need things. The offer of hope from white capitalist societies is a strategy for absolving responsibility. By rejecting this offer of hope and instead turning towards our own lexicons, our own languages, our own indigenous ways of registering hope, we reimagine and absolve ourselves from the hope of white epistemologies.

M: I would argue that poking holes in hope is crucial because you are reflexively and critically imagining an alternative concept of hope that is responsible and accountable. These qualities are what the “hope” of white imaginaries, which as you express, is an empty promise, fail to offer. Rajeshwari, when you teach your students, that English is something we receive, you’re denaturalizing and politicizing language by prompting a reorientation to the ways in which language acquisition is constituted by uneven power relations. This feels to me like a version of hope that is not defined under white imaginaries, simply because it is an invitation to imagine, learn, and know otherwise. 

I am a monolingual English speaker. I wonder if there is a non-English word for hope that is better suited for this alternate imagining?

R: I do not think I know what the word for hope is in my mother tongue.

M: Oh, that is a [expletive] bar.

[…]

R: So, there are three words in Malayalam, my mother tongue and the primary language spoken in the South Indian province of Kerala. There is the word വിശ്വാസം (pronounced as Vishwasam).^[11]The use of English translations for Malayalam words highlights the extent to which colonization has removed me from my mother tongue, as I would be unable to read these words without the English … Continue reading Vishwasam is more like trust, a trust that you know your future will be good, or to trust in someone. It can also mean hope in some contexts. Then there is ആശ (Asha): a desire for a different future. For example, I have an ആശ  to own a home or live a healthy life. There is also പ്രതീക്ഷ (Pratiksha). Pratiksha is anticipatory. For instance, if you are visiting, and I am looking out the window for you in anticipation, that is called Pratiksha. In the context of hope, it is more so anticipating a more beautiful future, or a better future.

S: In Spanish, hope translates to esperanza, which could carry anticipatory connotations. The verb, esperar, which shares a similar root means to wait. Taken together, to wait upon the promise that you are anticipating. But as you visualize, Rajeshwari, when you are looking out the window in anticipation of an arrival, and the arrival comes, whether in the form of a person or otherwise, there is a crossing. In the crossing, hope shifts from something that is disembodied to embodied, and therefore, it can be felt, seen, known, and touched. We often conceptualize hope in terms of the future and neglect to see its place and potential in the present.

M: I am excited because it feels like hope transforms in your mother tongues to describe a mode of being that is relational without falling into transactionality or paternalism. When we talk about building and expanding a toolkit, the toolkit itself is not an object you hand off with the empty promise: “Here, students, have some hope”. Instead, when we talk about hope, we are suggesting that hope is not enough, and it is not hope that is saving us or can save us.

S: In addition to the words for hope in our mother tongues, what about reimagining hope through our lived understandings of desire? How do we feel, sense, and know desire as women of colour who in the entanglements of our crossings also happen to be pedagogical practitioners, knowledge creators, creatives?

M: My understanding of desire aligns with the framing of Eve Tuck and C. Ree in “A Glossary of Haunting” (647-648). Here is a direct quote:

Desire is a refusal to trade in damage. Desire is an antidote, a medicine to damage narratives. Desire, however, is not just living in the looking glass. It isn’t a trip to opposite world. Desire is not a light switch, nor a nescient turn to focus on the positive. It is a recognition of suffering, the cost of settler colonialism and capitalism, and how we still thrive in the face of loss anyway; the parts of us that won’t be destroyed. 

For me, then, desire is the antithesis of the “empty promise” of hope as understood through whiteness. I am drawn to Tuck and Ree’s conceptualization in particular because of their use of “antidote” as opposed to cure. An antidote prevents the total absorption of poison or interrupts the poisons’ effects on the body, but it cannot undo or erase the fact that damage occurred or can be felt, nor does it wholly eliminate present or future risks of harm. Tuck and Ree go on to say, “Desire, in its making and remaking, bounds into the past as it stretches into the future. It is productive, it makes itself, and in making itself, it makes reality” (648). This framework for desire, reminiscent of Édouard Glissant’s work on imaginaries and materialities, is both dream-making and world-making, co-constituting our imaginaries and materialities.^[12]Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing, U of Michigan P, 1997.

S: The language of “making” makes me wonder, then, whether we locate desire in the realm of the personal or in the interpersonal or both. Is desire something that comes from the self? Or is desire something that is co-constituted? 

R: I recently saw a post on social media about how friendships are political, which led me to think about the connection between desire and pedagogy. Much of our pedagogical work, from course design to classroom practice, is driven by conflicting desires, such as the desire to recreate canonical or colonialist methods of education, as opposed to the desire to undo these harms and introduce new ways of seeing. Even as humanities departments face an existential crisis—underfunded in the wake of global political shifts and the widespread adoption of generative AI—we persist, driven by a political commitment or a radical desire for transformative change. It is what drives us to continue teaching our students alternate perspectives within traditional academia, even when we risk being silenced. It is often people who occupy precarious positions who also undertake the crucial labor of teaching topics that could put their careers and growth at risk. Katherine McKittrick offers a more detailed reflection on this in her essay “The Smallest Cell Remembers a Sound,” where she discusses how universities profit from identity-based disciplines (Gender Studies and South Asian Studies, for example), even though these fields are often the first to be targeted during crises like the loss of university funding or shifts in dominant political ideology.^[13]Katherine McKittrick, “The Smallest Cell Remembers a Sound,” in Dear Science and Other Stories, Durham: Duke UP, 2021, pp. 35-57.

Yet, our work is driven by a profound desire to create new conversations in the classroom. I view our collective desire as yet another manifestation of “tainted joys.” Despite being poorly paid for the effort we put in, we persist with utmost sincerity and care. 

M: I think desire emerges in relation, and particularly the (in)articulatability of desire as something worked through/with/in community. Even now, as we are talking about our personal understandings, we are thinking alongside and citing others. 

S: That said, I am thinking about Mariana Ortega’s (2025) work^[14]Ortega, Mariana. Carnalities: The Art of Living in Latinidad. Duke UP, 2025, pg. 2.; she talks a lot about “movements of the otherwise”—those creative practices that we do for “for the purposes of gathering possibilities for self-care, survival, and world-making, and for being and sensing anew” (2). As you say, Rajeshwari, the decision to teach when you are very underpaid, with little benefits, and all the while potentially inhibiting your own progress in your program as a graduate student, is one that engages the otherwise within a colonial capitalist structure. Maddi, you similarly stress the importance of crafting and collaging in your course. There is a connection between desire and performing otherwise, or desire as a creative extension of what we teach, so to return to one of the earlier conversational threads, I wonder how you are potentially thinking about the role of crafting and arts in relation to desire in the classroom, Maddi.

M: Arts and crafts came into almost every class. Part of this was informed by my own undergraduate experience, where I had turned off or been conditioned to turn off any desire to playfully create and to instead reproduce the knowledge that was transmitted to me. As an undergraduate, you are asked to learn in ways that really do not feel like learning, instead you are evaluated on your ability to regurgitate information. Returning to my own creative practice was healing and moved me to recognize processes of learning that exceed the academic institution; it reiterated the multiform ways we can and do navigate neocolonial capitalist space. I was not sure if implementing this into the course would work, especially since I knew group work was, and continues to be, a contentious site for undergraduates—and often for good reason. So, I worked to integrate it in ways that were as low stakes as possible, to create a space where students could enjoy the process and just simply have fun creating, individually and collectively. This included, for instance, co-creating visual collages of “health” using images from magazines or developing a collective subjective map of “care.” The result of including arts and crafts into the university classroom exceeded my own expectations; it was unbelievably generative. Working, creating, and having fun together, students occupied a space of learning that was not contingent on the regurgitation of my knowledge and were really able to feel into the possibilities of co-producing knowledge.

I think this was especially reaffirmed to me on the last day of class when students came together as a class-wide collective to complete their final creative exercise, a collage titled, “ENGLISH 3NH3 Dreaming Disability Justice” (see Fig. 7).
 

 
Not only representing their learning and knowledge of disability justice, the students’ contributions to the collage marked their conceptual, methodological, and philosophical reorientations throughout the term. And these reorientations became even clearer afterwards as we closed the course with a roundtable discussion with students reflecting on what they had encountered, engaged, learned, created, and shared together throughout the term:

“we need to think about health beyond the health care system and into community”
“the way we use language and communication matters”
“there is knowledge in feeling”
“history is NEVER total or absolute truth”
“to bring this knowledge into my personal and professional life”
“how to be comfortable questioning others and myself”
“there is no such thing as ‘it’s not my problem’”
“it’s not enough to just critique the system, it’s about imagination and praxis; to reflect and DO differently”^[15]Quotes from spoken reflections offered by students during final class discussion. Reflections were anonymously transcribed in handwritten notes by Maddi Chan on June 14, 2023.

While I stand by the generative potentialities of arts and crafts, of collaborative and creative practice more generally, I do want to flag the responsibility that instructors and pedagogical practitioners have in implementing radical pedagogy. We imagine it is going to be a beautiful thing, and it so often is. Yet, the reality is that there are times, spaces, and contexts when the embodied learning that arts and crafts practices facilitate can feel unsafe. Embodied learning is vulnerable, and it is a vulnerability that we have been conditioned to reject in the academy. As I have mentioned, I made sure to emphasize—early on and repeatedly—that any arts and crafts exercises were low stakes; grading was based on participation and the content, material, and object that the student created was never evaluated. Moreover, their participation also did not necessitate active creation. If they were not in the space to create, they could write notes as other members worked on the creative portion of the activity, join the conversation, review the week’s readings, and so forth. To return to Tuck and Ree’s notion of desire as an antidote, this framework involves understanding that the damage or harm we locate within traditional learning environments cannot be cured or wholly remedied by pedagogies that are enacted within these same environments, no matter how resistant or transformative. Plus, the four months we gather with our students is not enough to “cure” decades of institutional conditioning, and radical pedagogies are not about “curing” anyways. That is not what desire—as we are thinking about it—is about. Yes, of course, we are dreaming otherwise and trying to tear down the system. But I think that desire is crucially always something more than destruction. 

R: I really like what you just said about desire being more than destruction. Like you pointed out, I do not think the goal is to find a “cure,” because what is a cure if not an erasure of disease or harm? Cures seldom remedy the cause of harm, just its manifestations. Instead, I think we need to focus more on creating practices that can simultaneously sit in the discomfort of the legacies of institutional harm while still making space to imagine something better. Our collaborative work could be seen as a step in that direction. At this point, I am also thinking about the next steps needed to take our journey forward. While we now have this document, which will be in a journal, I am thinking of strategies we could use to engage the broader public. I personally envision something like a public-facing project—perhaps a podcast or an interactive website designed like a map—where scholars from diverse regions can contribute and share their perspectives. But all of this is for when we can potentially secure some funding and also have more time. 

S: Well, if I have learnt anything from teaching my course, it is that community is a good place to start when you have little of both. I am interested in a kind of project that not only engages the broader public in its more final form but also during the creation phase. I think that is critical coalitional work that we are beginning to do here as friends.

 

Invitation

Our pedagogies emerge through and are sustained by a translation of hope exceeding white colonial imaginaries and the creative and relational practices which constitute the many crossings of women of colour in and beyond the Canadian academy. Guided by the matrilineal and cultural knowledge systems that nurtured us long before our first encounters with the Canadian academy, our commitment to radical and transnational feminist pedagogy is sustained in ongoing relation and dialogue with one another. 

Our conversations reveal a collective desire to grapple with the ways in which transnational feminist pedagogies resist, reshape, and are shaped by the Canadian academy—the work of making and sustaining connection. The dialectic and subjective processes of conversation and co-authorship reinforce our commitment to the generative and subversive potentialities of storytelling. Radical pedagogical practices can be read as methods in storytelling—a story of the ongoing work and workings of women of colour pedagogical practitioners and interlocutors in an academic space that requires their labors while simultaneously marginalizing them “sessional” or “term” instructors. 

Dialogues like ours emerge from a shared commitment and desire to collectively reimagine and implement critical and transformative pedagogical practices in the colonial spaces in which we teach and coexist. While our experience as sessional instructors is often a precarious one, our conversations illuminate the creative and relational methods, practices, and metaphors that hold us and that we hold onto in our journeys as pedagogical practitioners: conviviendo, tainted joys, paper cuts of failure, playful undisciplining, and crafting trust in community. Reimaging pedagogy otherwise requires us to make space for gathering these ways of knowing, relating, and learning beyond the rigid structures and systems of the Canadian academy. 

Similarly, the work of crafting transnational feminist pedagogies necessitates a committed awareness to the risk of epistemic violence nascent in traditional trajectories of knowledge and worldmaking within the institution. Rather than offer a definitive solution, our process mirrors the coalitional and reciprocal approaches we engage with in the everyday, creating space for dialogues to emerge without the limitations of a preset and disembodied framework. In so doing, we prioritize and amplify subaltern knowledges and ways of being, and also acknowledge the role of interlocutors, co-conspirators, and learners that continue to shape the trajectories of our transnational feminist pedagogies. We invite you to join us in dreaming transnational feminist futures.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Works Cited 

We understand our respective pedagogies as dynamic, living, and embodied processes and place our pedagogical re/imaginings and re/enactments in ongoing relation to our elders and the many other knowledge makers and practitioners who shape our praxis. Our conversation thinks with and contributes to a lineage of feminist, queer, brown, Black, and Indigenous scholars, teachers, students, and creatives who continue to push our imaginations, worldviews, pedagogies, and ideas beyond the harms of colonialism or conformity. We give special attention to our earliest matrilineal teachers: Maritza Meili Soto (“Annie”) (Stephanie’s grandmother), Mavis Chan (Maddi’s grandmother), and Jayashri Raman (Rajeshwari’s mother), Raman Menon, and Shantha Puthanmadhom (Rajeshwari’s maternal grandparents)—those elders who early on shaped our connections to our ancestral lands, teachings, and ways of life, and which we now weave into our feminist pedagogies and practices, bridging the past and place with our collective present and future.  

⚘ 

We further break from traditional academic practices by delineating our students as crucial interlocutors in our pedagogical praxes. Working within and against citational conventions, we cite our students as formal entries within the Works Cited page while disrupting standard alphabetical ordering. In so doing, we acknowledge our academic life and work as that which is fundamentally dependent upon and generatively shaped by the ongoing material, social, and intellectual presence of our students. By citing collectively rather than individually, moreover, we emphasize collaborative process over individual output within the classroom; that is, the collective labour and care required to imagine, build, and mobilize learning, together.  

Students of “Narratives of Health.” English 3NH3, instructed by Maddi Chan, McMaster University, Spring 2023.  

Students of “Global Anglophone Literature and Film.” English 3V03, instructed by Rajeshwari Nandkumar, McMaster University, Fall 2024.  

Students of “Creating Writing in/with/for Communities.” English 3CW3, instructed by Stephanie Rico, McMaster University, Fall 2024.

⚘ 

Alexander, M. Jacqui and Chandra Mohanty. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. Routledge, 1996. 

Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Duke UP, 2005. 

Ahmed, Sara. “Feminist Aunties.” feminist kill joys, 12 Feb. 2016, https://feministkilljoys.com/2016/02/12/feminist-aunties/. 

–. Living a Feminist Life. Duke UP, 2017.  

Chakravarty, Debjani, et al. “Introduction.” Transnational Feminist Pedagogies: Meanings, Methods and Experiences, Routledge, 2026. 

Chan, Maddi with Rajeshwari Nandkumar and Stephanie Rico. “Mapping Our Coalitional Networks.” Fig. 14. 1 May 2026, JPEG file. 

Chatterjee, Partha. “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question.” Recasting Women Essays in Colonial India. Edited by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, Kali for Women, 1989, pp. 233-253.  

Chow, Jeff. “‘Document Your Culture’ Workshop.” Visiting Speaker for English 3CW3, McMaster University, 23 September 2024.  

Corridon, Linzey. “A French Canadian, but not really, moves to Hamilton.” Hamilton Arts and Letters, Summer 2021.  

Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing, University of Michigan P, 1997. 

Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. University of Minnesota P, 1994.  

Hosein, Gabrielle Jamela. “Caribbean Feminism, Activist Pedagogies and Transnational Dialogues.” Feminist Review, vol. 98, no. 1, 2011, pp. 116-129.  

Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022.  

Loomba, Ania. “Situating Colonial and Postcolonial Studies.” Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Routledge, 1998.  

Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Sister Outsider, Crossing Press, 1984. 

–. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Crossing Press, 1993. Lugones, María. “Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system.” Hypatia, vol. 22, no. 1, 2007, pp. 186-219.

–. Pilgrimages/peregrinages: Theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. Rowman &  Littlefield, 2003.

–. “Playfulness, “World-Travelling, and Loving Perception.” Hypatia, vol. 2, no. 2, 1987, pp. 
3-19.

–. “Toward a decolonial feminism.” Hypatia, vol. 25, no. 4, 2010, pp. 742-59.
McKittrick, Katherine. “The Smallest Cell Remembers a Sound,” in Dear Science and  
Other Stories, Durham: Duke UP, 2021. 

Mohanty, Chandra. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Duke UP, 2003.  

Muñoz, José Esteban. “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.” Women & Performance, vol. 8, no. 2, 1996, pp. 5-16. 

Nagar, Richa. Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism, University and Illinois Press, 2014. 

Okara, Gabriel. “Piano and Drums.” AFLITRICA, www.aflitrica.co.za/wp-content/uploads/Things-Fall-Apart/TFA-Piano-and-Drums.pdf. Accessed September 2024. 

Ortega, Mariana. Carnalities: The Art of Living in Latinidad. Duke UP, 2025. 

Rico, Stephanie. “Mid-term Reflection.” 19 Oct. 2024. Microsoft Forms file. 

Roshanravan, Shireen. “Motivating Coalition: Women of Color and Epistemic Disobedience.” 
Hypatia, vol. 29, no.1, 2014, pp. 41-58. 

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York, Pantheon Books, 1978. 

Trotz, Alissa. “Going Global? Transnationality, Women/Gender Studies and Lessons from the 
Caribbean.” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, n.a., no. 1, 2007, pg. 1-18. 

Thammavongsa, Souvankham. How to Pronounce Knife. McClelland and Stewart, 2020. 

Tuck, Eve and C. Ree. “A Glossary of Haunting.” Handbook of Autoethnography, edited by
Carolyn Ellis, Stacy Holman, and Tony E. Adams, Routledge, 2013, pp. 639-656.

Warren, Emma. Document Your Culture: A Manual. Sweet Machine Publishing, 2020.