Spiritual Occupations: Reflections on Pedagogies and Everyday Stories of Globalization

• In Event: Reflections on Engaging Culture, Race, and Spirituality

Abstract

In this chapter, the author takes up the notion of occupation as a global response to injustice everywhere, insightfully drawing from a personal story to illustrate global interconnectedness and solidarity in the human experience with social injustice. She argues that it is within the local response to everyday oppressions that we must turn our vision to understand political movements that occur on a global scale.
Constructing a pedagogical context to reflect and construct critical practices opens up the possibility of reframing classrooms to engage in examining the complex relation between local and global power, local and global resistance, and local and global knowledge production. Nevertheless, these pedagogical experiences cannot be understood in relation to an abstract global movement but instead in relation to pedagogies where we foreground an understanding of the unique consequences and the individual stories of those affected by the power of global multinational power.
Critical globalization studies sociologist Santos (2006) articulates a complex sociopolitical analysis to make visible the ways in which the idea of globalization masks more than it reveals. What it doesn’t reveal is how people in traditionally marginalized communities continue to be at the bottom of hierarchies of power and oppression that are not any different than other historical moments. He goes into conceptualizing the idea of “insurgent cosmopolitanism” that inspires my idea of critical literacy as strategizing practices, to describe social actions that engage in resistance against the inequalities that are produced by top-bottom models of globalization, more specifically corporate markets. Nevertheless, what the author sees missing within some of these contemporary ideas coming from sociology is the spiritual importance in such acts of insurgency.
Responding to a chapter on teaching from Dillard’s (2006) paradigm, the author describes a pedagogical solidarity. This pedagogical solidarity involves engaging with the world at a deeper level, “one that inspired us to privilege the sacredness of humanity and the communal nature of truth, respect embodied and cultural knowledges, embrace of the risks of learning for a politics of liberation, and engage in redemptive dialogues” (Lynskey, 2013). It is a pedagogy that honors the power of collective social actions and the ways in which individuals act in everyday oppressions. Examining how multiple paths and trajectories toward social consciousness intersect and interact to create a more just world in contemporary times is a powerful humanizing pedagogy.

Author

• Carmen L. Medina, Indiana University - Bloomington