Pedagogies of Writing and Theory-Making: The Labor Relations of Disrupting Dominant Imaginations

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum Theory-Making: Tensions and Possibilities

Abstract

In Barbara Christian’s 1987 “Race for Theory,” she makes a Marxist claim that academic theoretical writing had become a “commodity” within the North American University to get hired and promoted. This paper draws from women of color feminist theory and cultural studies more broadly to consider the labor relations of writing and knowledge-making. More specifically, it considers the kinds of psychological labor involved in countering dominant norms of knowing, the work of naming traumatic systems of violence, and the labor of imagining a more just world. Weaving contributions from Barbara Christian, Jose Muñoz, Edward Said, and Trinh T. Minh-Ha, this paper asks: Do our institutional writing practices honor the psychological labor of disrupting dominant imaginations and imagining an otherwise world?

Author

• Kimberly Brunelle George, University California San Diego