The Greatest Commandment? A Mormon, Social Justice–Oriented Researcher's Grapple to Love God and Neighbor

• In Event: 26.034 - Intersections of Faith in Education: The Often Silenced Connections of Faith, Education, and Global Religions

Abstract

Many individuals daily navigate among seemingly contradicting aspects of self, causing them to feel included and “othered” simultaneously (Johnson-Bailey, 2012). The purpose of this paper is to tease out the complexities of being both a Mormon educator in a predominantly Latter-day Saint (LDS) community, and a social justice oriented graduate student. The author dissects this intersectionality drawing from autobiographical narratives (Crenshaw, 2009), and situates his beliefs within West’s (1994) “prophetic” framework and Laible’s (2000) “loving epistemology” (2000), wherein he is both Christian and an ally to the marginalized. This paper begins with a narrative of working on a predominantly LDS faculty where situations turned toxic for anyone who did not identify with dominant group topics of right-wing political television programs. Several cases from the author’s journaled observations of the dominant group’s overt discrimination toward students and co-workers who were “othered” serve as examples. Equally troubling, the author describes several experiences where academics have stereotyped him as either a critical race theory researcher or a religious person. The author regularly must choose between what parts of his identity to perform/disclose to each group. This paper is decidedly postmodern: rejecting dualism, while embracing situated cognition grounded in experience; evocative of dangerous and difficult issues; and constantly evolving as the researcher becomes aware of differentiated aspects of self (Slattery, 2013). This paper serves to provide a pedagogy of hope wherein one can utilize these experiences as a means to understand the harmful effects of essentializing, stereotyping, and dualistic thinking (hooks, 1994; Steele, 2009).

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Author

• James Arthur Gambrell, Portland State University