Pedagogies of Embodied Resistance: Creating Borderlands for Collective Healing in Psychology Education

• In Event: Interrogating the Social Contexts of Higher Education

Abstract

This paper examines critical pedagogy as "quiet resistance" in psychology classrooms, creating borderlands where multiple ways of knowing can thrive despite authoritarian surveillance of education. Drawing on personal narratives and intergenerational stories of immigration trauma, I explore how traditional psychological frameworks replicate violent borders that fragment students' lived experiences.
My mother's experience as a political refugee—whose creative survivance challenged psychiatric institutionalization—informs my approach to cultivating critical hope. Her resistance under Ceaușescu's Romania, bringing students to cemeteries and mountainsides to "unforget" suppressed histories, provides a model for embodied pedagogical resistance.
I offer concrete strategies: centering marginalized voices, integrating land-based learning, honoring testimonial narratives, and treating discomfort as essential pedagogy. This demonstrates how teaching becomes collective care.

Author

• Emese Ilyés, John Jay College of Criminal Justice