Resisting/Yearning for a Pedagogy of Love in Academia: A Collective Self-Study of Academic Mobbing

• In Event: Academic Mobbing in Higher Education Internationally: Pursuing a Spiritual Center Amid an Injurious Void

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to 1) review the collection of papers by the panelists, as a meta-affective-collective autoethnographic text, as an example of the cultural nature of social science research across our respective disciplines and situated spaces in order to 2) theorize academic mobbing in our lives through an interdisciplinary framework within the academy. The conceptual framework (Ravitch & Riggan, 2012) used within this meta-affective-collective autoethnographic self-study is interdisciplinary in nature. I cull from Decolonalizing mental health (Mills, 2014), Mad Studies (Erevelles, 2015), a Spiritual Paradigm within qualitative research (Dillard, 2012) and Disability Studies in Education (Ware, 2011, 2012) to theorize academic mobbing in our personal and professional lives for theory, research and praxis for empowerment, healing (hooks, 1994) and make feeling-meaning making (Lemke, 2013) of our and my experiences within not only the systems of thoughts (Foucault, 1989) but emotional labor (Hochschild, 2015) it creates, and hence systems of feelings given other’s affects (Ahearn, 2013). This conceptual framework, then, has theoretical implications for the study of energies, at the emotional and spiritual levels, of how multiply marginalized scholars and teacher educators experience the academy. This is a collaborative self-study (Coia & Taylor, 2009), using autoethnographic texts, that include my self-reflection, meta-talk, and meta-emotion and affective talk, in other words, emotion-laden talk (Prior, 2016), about the interrelationships between the panelist research/self-studies within their respective teacher education spaces along their intersectional positionalities.
Each of the papers speak to micro, meso, and macro levels of human exclusion that they have experienced. This includes myself, since I include my own analysis of my experiences at my positionalities and relationalities within higher education. The overarching mechanism of control and exclusion, that manifested in different ways within and across the papers, was academic mobbing, that left trauma on our psyches, bodies, souls, and spirits. We can NO LONGER hold on to that affect that came from outside of us.
There is a need for centering a pedagogy of love (Darder, 2015) not only within the classroom, but one that is systematic in nature within and across organizational contexts within higher education in the everyday practices of social science research for a liberatory praxis for ALL! We can not be afraid of each other’s humanity at each of our positionalities and relationships. Anchoring a meta-critical emotion praxis that is cognizant of not only our own but each other’s feelings, emotions, and affects and the embodiment of them, can lead to revolutionary language in the social and emotion construction of the self. Dialogue with self and others, is critical for this to engender care for self and others. This is critical given the role that emotions, feelings and affects have in human interaction (Ahearn, 2013), human development and exclusion. The human exclusion across the four papers, demonstrates the need for critical emotion revolutionary praxis in spaces that were not designed for us, which is antithetical to a larger vision of what it means to be human that is currently not institutionalized within the academy.

Author

• David Isaac Hernandez-Saca, University of Northern Iowa