Pedagogy of Hope: Of Dialogues and Encounters

Beaudelaine Pierre

This article is a part of AGITATE! Vol 6 (2026): Pedagogy of Hope

an inclusive and transformative possibility of any/all feminist thought must fundamentally take into account the special and particular ways of seeing that Black and other marginalized female scholars bring to the knowledge production process, not as biological constructions but as historical, political, and cultural constructions, under constant and vigilant negotiation, and conceptualized to disrupt at least, and possibly ‘‘to dismantle the master’s house ’’ (Lorde, 1984, p. 112).

– Cynthia B. Dillard, 2000

 
Introduction
 

On the evening of April 17th, 2025, Professor Richa Nagar, her Smith College community, especially her students, research assistants, and pedagogical partner in Sections 2 and 3 of the Introduction to the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and myself gathered in the Weinstein Auditorium at Smith for a conversation on intersectionality and the collective ethos of feminist knowledge production.^[2]I want to express my sincere gratitude to Richa Nagar for her invitation to be in dialogue with her communities at Smith College, and particularly her students, research assistants, and pedagogical … Continue reading I had responded to Smith’s invitation to discuss my monograph You May Have the Suitcase Now (Pierre 2021, hereafter, The Suitcase), a very rare opportunity to return to a book I had not opened in the last couple of years. The gathering reflected the organizers’ unquestionable attention to personhood, humanity, and everyday life as an explicit component of the process.

The process leading to the encounter illuminated the weight of the current sociopolitical context upon our inquiry. Simultaneously, each one of us was undoubtedly wrestling with what that context represented and how to collectively respond to it, a struggle that enriched the foundations and the process leading to our conversation. This attention to complexity, individual expressions, and everyday life would open historical and contemporary contexts of oppression and resistance with new epistemic possibilities.

As I embraced the invitation, I pondered afresh how everyday life was a necessary force to be reckoned with, as it continuously begs new words, new works, and new realities of being human. The everyday struggles for life and breath that birthed The Suitcase were also in deep resonance with the national atmosphere of sociopolitical authoritarianism and xenophobia that inspired the conversation at Smith. Moreover, from a Black feminist standpoint (Dillard 2000, 2021; Hill Collins 2006), the everyday is the very language which disrupts and unsettles the erasure of the marginalized in institutionalized ways of knowing. The gathering, thus, was instrumental in helping us examine the yearnings and questions that led to the conversation with those who shared that space. It also clarified how collective exploration of liberation and transformation are important pedagogical, theoretical instruments for confronting the language of oppression.
 

Contexts and Agitations
 
The return to The Suitcase (Pierre 2021) in April 2025 paralleled the return of Donald Trump as President and his efforts to make do on his campaign promises to reduce the number of immigrants in the U.S. if re-elected. Trump’s second term ignited unprecedented fear and disarray among folks who have lived decades of extreme precarity regardless of the government in power. Especially, undocumented immigrants under Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—a status I held for 15 years until August 3, 2025—were simultaneously aware that their situation could dramatically and meteorically take a dangerous turn. Truth be told, a few weeks following Trump’s inauguration, eleven-year-old Jocelynn Rojo Carranza of Texas died by suicide after being bullied at school over her family’s immigration status. Overnight, more than half a million TPS holders from places such as Nicaragua, Haiti, Salvador, and Venezuela became subject to deportation and detention following announcements of termination of several TPS programs by the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The rise of anti-immigrant sentiments in the U.S. politics also coincided with campaigns of terror against pro-Palestinian students and faculty on various U.S. public university campuses, and the denial, by the Trump administration, of the existence of trans and non-binary people. This moment of heightened anti-blackness (re)constructed migration as an invasion against the American people and gender variant subjects as inevitable threats to white nationalism. In other words, April 17th came at an unmatched intersectional moment in the aftermath of the U.S. presidential election, a moment that was ripe for agitational dialogues.

A few weeks before the conversation, promotional materials for the book reading were on display on several boards at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst campus where I work. The announcements also circulated through emails and departmental networks. Clearly, and given the conjuncture, I was on display before students and colleagues. I took count of my undocumented TPS status under review, and this time, a large pool of witnesses were also taking count of me—and not just the everyday immigration agent. The head of the undocumented was wanted by the state for making the U.S. a home despite the crushing weight of U.S. immigration bureaucracies, and despite the fact that the undocumented is not at all wanted in the registers of the nation.

A few months prior, the elected president—then a candidate—declared during a 2024 presidential debate that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eat pets. I was outraged by the allegation, albeit in a rather optimistic way: that the average American citizen may somehow finally come to be in touch with a state of affairs that many have, for so long, wished not to see or acknowledge. That for the U.S. state to stand on its feet it needs relentlessly to dehumanize the noncitizen, the abject, the waste of its making. Having been on TPS since 2010 and made abject within the registrar of state bureaucracies, I face the terror of the state in all its forms. The constant dehumanization was a condition of my being. I was thus just fine seeing my head volunteering itself to state killing, nothing was new.

What foregrounded my coming to a space of dialogue with Richa Nagar’s students, then, was the fact that I was approaching the encounter as a less than human who cannot pretend to exist within the state frameworks. Being disposed of human status, I was also to be removed from race, from sex, from gender, and sexuality altogether. In this way, I stepped into the intersectional moment fully knowing that what led the conversation was the idea that many of us hopefully were not humans in that space. In this way, approaching critically the complexities posed by intersections of different axes of power in which some are humans, many less-than-humans, and many more outrageously non-humans, meant privileging the dimensions of an encounter where the dehumanized can exist only as dead, or as a negation. This was not only about decentering the normative subject in feminist spaces, nor simply privileging the lived experience. Instead, the question was: being ontologically and logically removed from the polity, from language, and from existence, what posture was needed to make possible an encounter from the locus of dehumanization itself? In other words, since I was never a human and with no pretension to be one in the registers of state citizenship, what could “thinking intersectionally” even mean within the materiality of dehumanization processes?

I knew before I heard the tale of pet-eating Haitians in Ohio that I could eat pets myself. In fact, I’ve done just that in the last decade. When you have to travel to the next city every day to go give your biometrics to the state, when every day immigration services knock at your door, when the agent of citizenry asks you to bring your body up every time they desire just so the Homeland pins you down at every corner, and when your right to life and to livelihood is incessantly put into question, then you have no other choice than to give your life to waste. The irony, however, is that people like myself—wasted in the movements of bodies, information, and capital—are ceaseless repetitions. Bodies eaten and eating in turn, coming and going and coming back—slave chattels, convicts, indentured, immigrants, undocumented, and so forth, and more than 500+ years of the U.S. government debilitating the Haitian people’s right to sovereignty. This flesh-eating goes back hundreds of years or so in the consciousness, in the layered body of a people who know they can act out all imaginable and unimaginable senses and ways of being in the face of state violence and racism.

In “The Substance of Things Hoped for, the Evidence of Things not Seen” Cynthia Dillard (2000) conceptualizes an “endarkened feminist epistemology” to discuss the persistent negotiations that African-American women deploy against “simplistic,” “biological,” “didactical” notions of being human. Endarkened feminist epistemology understands the culturally constructed socializations of race, gender, and other identities as shifting and dynamic sets of social relationships that must be examined in the materiality of everyday life. In the overlap of culturally constructed notions of identities and the lived cultural expressions of people often erased in dominant conceptualizations of the social, this negotiation can go as far as dismantling the master’s house. What it means to be gendered, racialized, and sexed under differential sociopolitical processes of othering can be a futile question for many whose humanity was negated before they could even be a candidate to gender or class. So what is left to do then when death, negation, and refusal are the conditions that enable affirmation or politics?

The preparations and conversations leading up to and preceding the event were met with an uneasiness in handling matters of race, sex, class, gender, and geographical locations, as true reflections of our positions and positionings. Hesitation, silences, and breaks become a palpable force in the exchanges between myself, Richa, and Minha Virk, who was helping organize the event. The agitation between us interweaved our back and forth leading up to the encounter. We dwelled in what emerged as a space to collectively struggle with the resounding weight of words such as one’s race, one’s gender, one’s nationality upon one’s beings; of transgressing the hegemonic commitments these markers provoke; and of removing their weight upon the process in order to move towards a language that is the conversation itself. This point of departure placed us in a movement towards one another that could possibly excite our humanity against alienation and disenfranchisement. I am thus indebted to Richa and all her students and collaborators at Smith College who occupied the stage, and who engaged in a conversation with me on the evening of April 17th and in their letters that they addressed to me later that semester—unapologetically advancing a dialogue on feminist intersectional framework that calls for disobedience, dissent, and radical self-affirmation (see PDF at the end).

The dialogue at Smith was, thus, holding hope against all hope, encountering others in conversation, dreaming of possibilities, a matter of collectively asking ourselves by means of negation and disenfranchisement: in what language can we be human again? What colonial situations hail is precisely the absence of dialogues beyond the commitment to a certain social order: a hegemonic allegiance that cancels out all those who can only exist as marginals and whose only choice is to refuse that order. The encounter and the dialogue that such situation calls forth demanded an acknowledgement of inhabiting the present conjuncture as negation, and most certainly (too) as stubborn, liberated beings who can nevertheless work a present and a future, even in the exhaustion of the myriad languages, regimes, axes, and representations that impose themselves in the present.
 

L’oeil: A feminist pedagogy of hope
 

Feminist and queer studies scholar Amy Brandzel advocates for a feminist politics of presence that both exposes the violence of normative, anti-intersectional projects and is accountable of the experiences of violence, trauma, and pain that hegemonic and systemic practices inflict.^[3]In Against Citizenship, Amy Brandzel elaborates on the politics of radical presence and accountability for transformative feminist politics as both a critique of the politics of inclusion and … Continue reading In Against Citizenship, Brandzel (2016) argues that the very critical work of being present, of acknowledging how categories of identity and difference are forged and segregated within the limiting structures of citizenship can enable modalities that disrupt status quo and hierarchies. It is in regard to the multiplicity and complexity of our modes of knowing and being that Ergun et al. equally affirm a critical epistemology that is anchored in “critical pedagogy as an ongoing movement of relationships, visions, and ways of being in the world” (Ergun et al. 2022). Attention and accountability to the individual, contextual, and communal sensibilities enabled movements of reciprocity and care prior to and during our conversation in the Weinstein Auditorium. It was a way of being together that was freeing; the process did not demand that we hail a similar language on the realities of communities or on intersectional feminist frameworks.

What took place, then, was, all of us in the auditorium walking together, tremoring, moving along the lines, the sighs, and the voices of each of us, of all of us, which was a lot more like breathing together. The auditorium turned into a large laboratory which gathered both sections of Richa Nagar’s course and in which every participant was fully present and contributed to the dynamics of the conversation. These contributions, amid knowledge sharing, weeping, passing up a handkerchief, drinking water, introducing a participant, arranging the seating configuration, or asking questions offer us the possibility to write ourselves into the encounter with our own particularities, and with also the possibility of responding to one another, of talking to each other. Isn’t this how we birth one another, unnoticed, unexpected, the distance in two people making each other up in (their) otherness, or a people twisting up a language to make a new one? This depth of agency acknowledges a manner of hand-holding in difference, in togetherness, an insistence on being (in) the current.

A collective language was thus woven through the intentional work of acknowledging pains, of inhabiting a shared space predicated on violence, and of holding the experiences and hopes of shared bonds that the same space enables. It’s also the intention that tremoring with can call into being… as you notice the ways in which this issue of AGITATE! puts itself together through spacing; through repeated long breaks and silences; through wonder; through re-joining of arguments, tempos, and assignments; through making decisions to hold on to, and then to let go of, or to join in and respond, or to move along or play together; through everyday acts of creation. The tremor, also the pull of a place, its bodies of land, its food, rhythms, and wind rituals changing a people, how they carry themselves—a re-composition. You never imagined yourself bearing an accent in your own backyard, in your own tongue, tongue knitting your skin, and here you are your akee under your armpit to plant in the new land the roots home made.

In truth, it’s the insolence of the waste, of the abject, the filth, the non-counted whose gazes linger, linger again, and then linger some more, on the flight for freedom. The bond that surpasses the fact of recognition and negation between the wanted and the unwanted as you’re told to go home, as they ask you to behave, but this land is my land, this too you know. And it’s in the day-to-day that the diseased, the pus, the pungent smell, and the familial make the home an impossible reach. It is also a way to beat death’s belly, to do culture, to take account, to not die for nothing.

The illustration above, “L’Oeil” (the eye) is made of papier mâché, rambling, rumination, and recycled paper. It stages look as the stuff of the everyday. Gazes fill the routine and the intimate. One looks and is looked at, one looks from above, one looks back, or in every direction. A look is a familiar and unfamiliar opening up or closing up of intimacies. Any look from anywhere, putting food on the table, voicing an opinion, choosing between wearing a skirt or a pair of pants, or who to love, or when to speak can derange. The marks that look makes have always been about transforming and transcending god eyes’ views, and being god oneself. Similarly, trying to hold a story can be some sort of negotiation between languages, between forms, and between gods. You rely on gaps and silences to leave yourself hanging, and whatever passes by may catch you, a whole lot like writing, like talking, like breathing: you don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s okay, too.

The awareness of looking, of being looked at can also engage a shared practice of doing things together differently, of recomposing, of remaking ourselves from scraps and blank spaces, of redoing how we endure with others. At the same time a gaze (here the protuberant eye on the top right in the first panel, on the left in the second, and right in the middle in the third) brings forward a dimension of place marking, of political consciousness between the personal and the collective with a profound recognition of how we make up one another. I have very little to no relationship with the story. Once the story is out there, it’s out there, you can’t get ahold of the breeze. bell hooks(1999)’ assertion, “There is power in looking,” affirms that the oppositional gaze constructs modes of relations, networks, and agentic positionings that disrupt operations of power. The social landscape is always constructed and lived from different, embodied, situational points, making both the gaze and the object of our gaze continuous and active acts of responsibilities.

The tremor can also be in the movement of going back and forth, in points of contact, from time-to-time movements of leaving yourself behind, occasionally, you drop yourself up on the ground, and someone shows up to pick you up, to hand your yourself back to you. Like you are in the room with everybody else making theory, or conferencing, but suddenly out of nowhere, because it’s always out of nowhere, somebody says, “well, at home in the Caribbean, we’ve always been taught not to trust the system,” and you pick yourself up back again, to remember where you are, that you are free, that you’re not the system. After all, the theoretics of theory making often come after things have acquired their ways, and desire comes back trying to make sense of what has happened. The story, thus, becomes about someone telling on someone else telling on someone telling on someone else telling on someone much further telling on someone else telling a story about an infinity of others in an infinite play of proximity.

And we say the land, the territoire, the backyard, the mother tongue, the childhood home, to say the roots that give a point zero to persona, to where you come from, a point of departure, a hold, the way of beginning from scratch, to say home. All the while home remains the carrel, the pillow, the moment the shoulders rest themselves in the night, here and there in all the places a door remains open. And we say home to say the home we make; the home we keep on claiming, unattached; the food that has become our body; the pull of gravity we enact each second to ground down an ancestor, a distant happenstance, a fleeting thought, the smell of a gumbo, or something, anything for which the home under-feet has become blaringly inadequate and blatantly incapable of providing the right language, the right mood, the right feeling, the right space. Home can be something for which a language or a persona or a space is yet to be invented. And isn’t the story of you and me, the chronicles of our uncles and brothers and cousins, our pѐres de la patrie, opening up violently the legs of the sisters as soon as the night closes our doors?

Said differently, the bodies got hold of me, another way to see, somebody is searching for release. It is more like in the story I am on a walk with the story, which can engage the physical, material body, it can also be a body of memory, a place, a language, a mood, or a song or perhaps, feelings of anger, of hopelessness, it can also be faith, hope, or love. But the stories keep changing, the suitcase has changed already in form, trajectory, and content, never to stay put, more papers to carry, more stamps, more passports. Some days it’s really heavy and you can’t carry it, some other times you find people along the journey, and they help you move forward, and more often than not you want to throw the whole thing over a bridge. You’ve seen death already.

You are at the immigration office and you’re about to leave the place and the police officer in attendance gives you a survey to fill out, “how did we do?” You cannot not notice being taken aback, disconcerted. First of all you don’t want to be here, second, you were summoned to show yourself, it’s not like you were given the choice. You realized in the moment that you’re told you have given consent. You exit the building with anger, and you toss the slip to the nearest dumpster, you never consented.

It is crucial that I constantly expose the state violence. In the classroom, I acknowledge and talk about living with TPS; in this way, both my students and I have the freedom to grapple with how our experiences are not separate from the production of knowledge. I have also tried to creatively make sense of the dehumanization of my personhood by the state (Pierre, 2022) and documented the repeated injuries immigration bureaucracies cause to people of color who live undocumented within the borders of state citizenship (Pierre, forthcoming). I complain a lot about TPS with friends. The terror of state citizenship is integral to my personhood and to how I inhabit the U.S academy. This acknowledgement is a pedagogical labor that tries to take nothing for granted. Besides, to not talk about how power dehumanizes would be like lending a helping hand to its machine of terror. At times, I also have remained silent, to avoid being a killjoy (Ahmed 2023), or to let power keep its illusions, especially in situations that uphold the violence of the state. bell hooks rightly asserts that engaged pedagogy is very demanding in that it asks for a commitment to self-actualization as we bear witness to how power plays out in academic books and in our lives (hooks 1994); not doing so is not a luxury many of us can afford.

Paying attention and being open to the assumptions, languages, and modes of relations that obscure the dehumanization by power is a radical invitation. It says in the moment of encounter, how are we going to be human to one another amid the violence of power, its citizenship, and blind spots. Dismantling the master’s house (let’s face it, the master’s house shall not hold), staying whole (hooks 1994) and practicing “radical vulnerability”(Nagar 2014) in order to repair the spiritual, cultural, and material damages done to us (Dillard & Neal 2021) remain our primary responsibility.

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Works cited:

Ahmed, Sara. 2023. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way. Hachette UK.

Brandzel, Amy L. 2016. Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative. University of Illinois Press.

Dillard, C. B. 2000. “The Substance of Things Hoped for, the Evidence of Things not Seen: Examining an endarkened feminist epistemology in educational research
and leadership.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 13:6, 661-681,

Dillard, C. B. & Neal, A. M. 2021. “Still Following Our North Star: The necessity of black women’s spiritual (re)Membering in qualitative (re)search.” Qualitative Inquiry, 27:10: 1182-1190.

Ergun, Emek, et al. 2022. “Epistemic Agitations and Pedagogies for Justice: A conversation around Hungry Translations: Relearning the World through Radical Vulnerability.” Feminist Studies 48:1: 146-175.

hooks, bell 1999 “The Oppositional Gaze : Black female spectators.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York UP, 1999. 307-19. Print.

hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, NY: Routledge.

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

Pierre, Beaudelaine. 2021. You May Have the Suitcase Now. Moorhead: New Rivers Press.

Pierre, Beaudelaine. 2022. “ I Live Under TPS.” in Unbound: Composing Home. Ed. Nayt Rundquist. Moorhead: New Rivers Press.

Pierre, Beaudelaine. In press. “Living with TPS: Monstrous chronicities, la dépouille, and life forces.” In special issue on: Living with Chronic Illness, ed: Miller N.K. & Oksman T. Women’s Studies Quarterly, accepted September 13, 2025.

 

Suggested Citation:

Pierre, Beaudelaine. 2026. “Pedagogy of Hope: Of Dialogues and Encounters.” Pedagogy of Hope: AGITATE! Vol 6: https://agitatejournal.org/pedagogy-of-hope-of-dialogues-and-encounters/