Prelims

Half Title Page

Trauma-Informed Pedagogy

Title Page

Trauma-Informed Pedagogy: Addressing Gender-Based Violence in the Classroom

Edited by

Jocelyn E. Marshall

Emerson College, USA

And

Candace Skibba

Carnegie Mellon University, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2022

Copyright © 2022 by Emerald Publishing Limited

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80071-498-4 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80071-497-7 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80071-499-1 (Epub)

Dedication

To survivors of gender-based violence

and

feminist educators and mentors

To bell hooks (1952–2021)

List of Figures

About the Editors

Jocelyn E. Marshall is affiliated faculty in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College. Her work focuses on contemporary US-based women and queer artists and writers, researching the relationships between intertextual practice, displaced positionality, and traumatic experience.

Candace Skibba is an Associate Teaching Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature at Carnegie Mellon University. The convergence of her literary and cultural studies interests and pedagogical foci have led her to investigate agency and empathy in both artistic expression and classroom practices.

About the Contributors

Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose teaches courses in writing and gender studies at Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY. She also facilitates writing-as-therapy at the Breast Cancer Coalition of Rochester. She is the author of two feminist poetry chapbooks, Imago Dei (Rattle 2021) and Wild Things (Main Street Rag 2021).

Sarita Cannon is Professor of English at San Francisco State University, where she teaches twentieth-century US Literature. Her scholarship has appeared in Biography, Ethnic Studies Review, MELUS, Interdisciplinary Humanities, and Asian American Literatures: Discourses & Pedagogies. She is the author of Black-Native Autobiographical Acts: Navigating the Minefields of Authenticity (2021).

Gabrielle Civil is a Black feminist performance artist who teaches Creative Writing and Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. Her performance memoirs include Swallow the Fish, Experiments in Joy, (ghost gestures), and the déjà vu. The aim of her work is to open up space.

Dr Tiffany Cone is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi. Her research focuses on psychological anthropology, visual anthropology, and higher education and pedagogy. Prior to her current position, she was an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh.

Monika Fabijanska is an independent Art Historian and Curator based in New York City. Recent critically acclaimed exhibitions include: Betsy Damon. Passages: Rites and Rituals (La MaMa Galleria, 2021), ecofeminism(s) (Thomas Erben, 2020), and The Un-Heroic Act: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women's Art in the US (John Jay College, 2018).

Meaghan Ford is a Queer Writer from New Jersey who was voted Most Likely to Leave and Never Come Back. They are a two-time National Poetry Slam Semi-Finalist and received their MFA from Emerson College. Some of their work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, NAILED, and PANK.

Ann Pleiss Morris is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin, USA. Her research focuses on female playwrights in the time of Shakespeare.

Kellie Jean Sharp is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, where she teaches writing. Her research is at the intersection of feminist philosophy, queer theory, biopolitics, and experimental writing.

Julia Rose Sutherland is a Mi'kmaq (Metepenagiag Nation) / settler artist and educator (Assistant Professor at OCADU) based in Tkaronto (Toronto, Canada). She earned her MFA at the University at Buffalo (2019) and BFA in Craft and New Media at the Alberta University of the Arts (2013).

Dineke van der Walt is a Curator and PhD candidate affiliated to the SARChI Research Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg. Her research examines curatorial strategies for engaging sexual violence. Recent award-winning exhibitions include her critical curatorial interventions at the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria (2021) and the exhibition program, Down to Earth, for the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival (2020).

Acknowledgments

The work in this field has never been richer, the future of our field never more imperiled.

–Carla Kaplan, Signs vol. 46 no. 4 (Summer 2021)

As first seeds of this project began with a conference panel, sincere gratitude goes to Sarah Goldbort for inviting Jocelyn to co-organize the initial discussion on “Cultivating a Consent Culture: Teaching Rhetoric, Writing, and Sexual Violence,” which took place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as part of the 2018 Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Annual Meeting. This collaboration occurred in part due to previous success with a co-organized roundtable discussion on “Feminist Pedagogy as Inclusivity: Teaching for Social and Emotional Justice” at the 2017 NeMLA meeting. We see this timeline as indicative of the strength behind continued collaborative feminist interventions, especially when they lead to work both inside and outside the academy. Thank you, Sarah, for the initial push to address gender-based violence in diverse ways.

We are also in gratitude to all contributors of this collection, many of whom have persevered through several challenges throughout the last few years. Organizing anything during the pandemic was (and still is) not easy, and it was a pleasure to continue to review drafts and learn from everyone as ideas and thinking evolved. Their work has unquestionably made us both better writers, thinkers, teachers, and community members. We hope readers are able to glean similar insights and moments of joy.

The conversations we had in other contexts during the writing and editing process were often inspired by fleeting moments of affirmation. It might have been another conference or a meeting with colleagues, but the conviction with which we derived the energy to complete this project would not have been possible without these numerous interlocutors.

Similarly, we thank each other for our shared commitment to this project in spite of many hurdles. Having no previous experience working together, the odds were not necessarily in our favor; yet, the dedication we each brought to the various tasks formed a rhythmic cadence, having one of us often seamlessly taking up the next step for the other as needed, which quickly formed a stable and secure bond vital to practicing the trauma-informed feminist approaches we aim to uphold in the classroom and beyond. This writing comes from a very personal space for all of us, and working through that delicate dance of personal and professional was possible via the mutual vulnerability and support that we provided one another. It is clear this experience and the resulting new understandings will inform future individual work and collaborations.

Last, we thank our publisher for the flexible support and much creative freedom throughout the past two years. This final manuscript is much different than the previously proposed collection, and that is largely due to the space Emerald Publishing provided to experiment with and grow new ideas and opportunities.