A Chronotopic Examination of Healing in a Third Space

• In Event: Institute for Teachers of Color Committed to Racial Justice: Purposeful Counterspace to Heal and Grow

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines my testimonio (Blackmer and Curry, 2012) on participating in the Institute for Teachers of Color (ITOC) Summer Institute, exploring the discourses of healing that stood out for me and their implications for my work as a transnational BIPOC teacher educator at a predominantly white mid-Western institution.

Perspective(s)
Studies have shown healing as central to supporting TOC’s commitment to racial justice (e.g. Acosta, 2020; Valdez et al., 2018) because it is collective and empowering (Pour-Khorshid, 2016), reflective and reciprocal (Pour-Khorshid, 2018), and emotionally charged (Cariaga, 2018). While most of these studies focused on the qualities ascribed to healing by TOCs from a trauma-informed perspective, I focus on the process of my healing from a culture-informed (e.g. Tello and Acosta, 2012) perspective. In doing so, I conceptualize ITOC as a third space where one examines, communicates, and produces cultural hybridity and, ultimately, identity (Bhabha, 2006). In exploring how this third space affords healing, I draw from nostalgia (Author et al., forthcoming), memories of spatiotemporal cultural practices with particular social types and dispositions (Bourdieu, 1984), and subconscious embodied memories.

Methods
I utilized testimonio, because it pushes against dominant discourses, allows racialized communities to critically reflect on their practices (Mizell, Flores, & Cardona, 2023), and provides healing to its composer (Pour-Khorshid, 2018). To analyze the discursive themes constructed through testimonio, I adopt chronotope (Bakhtin, 1981), a discursive configuration of time, space, people, and behavioral norms (Blommaert, 2018).

Materials
Data include ten handwritten pages of reflective journaling, one hour of recorded collective conversation, and many hours of informal conversations with the ITOC fellows.

Results
The results suggest that I discursively constructed healing through embodied memories of cultural practices within different sociopolitical contexts. I engaged in communal belonging as I experienced the chronotope of home at ITOC through “long wavy and curly hair of fellows,” “lots of hot tea,” and “collective dancing in an ‘academic’ space” that I very rarely encounter at my institution and life in the U.S. Authenticity ensued healing as I engaged in an “updated” translingual disposition: writing an idiomatic Russian expression, “аж, ком в горле” along with English and Tajik. I experienced healing through difference when I heard whiteness being perpetuated when my colleagues addressed their trauma by focusing on their feelings primarily through English, a common cultural practice here vs. there (post-Soviet Central Asia). ITOC served as a liminal space where I nostalgically situated and problematized the present to create a new world (Tinsley, 2020), transforming the dispositions determined by the cultural and social systems in which I was born (Author, 2020). These impact how I continue to advocate for racial justice as a BIPOC scholar in the U.S. by belonging through difference and with authenticity.

Significance
The conceptualization of ITOC as a third space builds up trauma-informed approaches through culture-informed healing perspectives. A chronotopic analysis of TOCs’ discourses of healing whilst negotiating critical literacy in a third space offers a nuanced understanding of the historical, socio-political, and cultural processes that shape such negotiation.

Author

• Madina Djuraeva, University of Nebraska - Omaha