Pedagogies of Relationality through This Bridge Called My Back

Abstract:This reflective essay explores the challenges of teaching This Bridge Called My Back at a large Canadian tri-campus research-intensive university over the course of two years. Holding space for students' sometimes fraught reception of the text, I show, beautifully and frustratingly revealed some of the stakes of Bridge's calls for transnational feminist relationality. Framing Bridge as a model for confronting ourselves, and as an invitation to learn and respond to difficult questions, I reflect on what it means to demonstrate practices of community-making and care as we resist the neoliberalization of the academy and its reproduction of colonial and capitalist relations.