Embracing Relationality

• In Event: Watering Our Foremothers' Garden: Building a Community for Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color Resistance in Education

Abstract

We posit that radical relationality and interdependent orientations are fundamental to accepting educational responsibility. It is based on our obligation to be dynamic in our responses to the unique agencies of members of that group, and what our unique responsibilities are to them as well (Whyte, 2017). Such a collective orientation is not only consistent with counter-hegemonic and non-Eurocentric ways of being that are prevalent in Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities (Cajete, 1994; Kimmerer, 2014; hooks, 1989; Love, 2019); the moral qualities of these relationships also advance our self-determination, resiliency, and collective continuance (Whyte, 2017). Potowatami scholar Kyle Whyte (2017) characterises collective continence as the moral bonds or affinities that “connect diverse members of a society together, human and nonhuman, through establishing reciprocal (but not equal) expectations about how each member ought to treat one another” (p. 88). In cultural-historical understandings of learning, relationality has deep implications for the processes of partnering (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), for building politicized trust in research partnerships (Vakil et al, 2016), and for the possibilities of social dreaming together (Espinoza, 2008). We are conscious that the racialized nature of solidarity and trust cannot be assumed; cultivating them requires work (Vakil et al, 2016).
We foreground relationality in this workshop - as both the process, practice, and goal of our time together; it is proleptic in nature (Cole, 1996; Vossoughi, 2011). Closing the ontological distance between self and other to form more continuous and interdependent identities is part of co-creating renewed possibilities of future work (Zavala, 2018). We take seriously the commitments to honor each other’s histories and futures in this workshop. Furthermore, this attention to difference refuses individual frameworks of “accepting educational responsibility” that flirt with colonial logics and desires of change. Through the process of multi-modal (visual, audio) collective reflection, storytelling and listening, and art-making, we hope to enact (1) learning practices that presence a relational orientation across our unique histories and standpoints, so that we may engage in social dreaming together, and (2) create a collective artifact, a zine, that commemorates our learning together in forms that are more-than-text. Through this workshop’s embodied reflective processes, we intentionally seek to create a “beloved community” - especially in times of crises (hooks, 1996; Solnit, 2010), that “is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world” (hooks, 1996, p. 265).

Author

• Meixi *, University of Minnesota