Against the GrainTeaching and Learning in Art History and Cultural StudiesVarda Nisar, maya rae oppenheimer, and Edith-Anne Pageot

In 2022, art historians, writers, and educators Varda Nisar, maya rae oppenheimer, and Edith-Anne Pageot reflected on their respective pedagogical approaches to teaching global art history in the francophone and bilingual contexts of Concordia University, the University of Ottawa, and the Université du Québec à Montréal in Canada. Their conversation addresses the importance of drawing upon transnational experiences, and experimenting with Beginning of page[p. 96] collaborative and critical pedagogies. Using self-reflective autoethnography and curatorial gestures, they champion context-sensitive, experiential learning that is decolonial, anticolonial, and critical, and shape their approaches to teaching and curricula accordingly.

Varda Nisar (VN): I want to start by asking what ‘against the grain’ means to you both, personally?

maya rae oppenheimer (mro): It takes conviction to work against the grain, and I think it is labour that is context dependent. It is not a method to take lightly. It is not a fashion nor is it only a critique. It is an embodied practice that requires time, persistence, support, improvisation, and creativity. It is a tactical position.

In her keynote talk for the Concordia Undergraduate Journal of Art History annual symposium, ‘Embodiment: Art, Space and Society’, Dr Charmaine A. Nelson spoke about her work on histories of Black life in what is currently Canada: part of which involves reading notices for fugitive enslaved Black people found in Canadian newspapers as well as sale advertisements.11Nelson, Charmaine A., ‘“Ran away from her Master… a N- Girl named Thursday”: Examining Evidence of Punishment, Isolation, Trauma, and Illness in Nova Scotia and Quebec Fugitive Slave Advertisements’, Concordia Undergraduate Journal of Art History Conference, ‘Embodiment: Art, Space and Society’, 20 February 2021, hosted by the Department of Art History on Zoom. An eponymous chapter appeared in Unsettling Canadian Art History, ed. by Erin Morton (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), pp. 160–78 <https://doi.org/10.1515/9780228013280-009>. During the question period following her talk, she expanded on the position and method of reading these archival documents against the grain. She explained that the fugitive slave ads are documentations of an effort to escape slavery. They represent the interests and authority of the slave-owners; however, reading against allows Nelson to maintain agency of those dehumanized by transatlantic slavery. She poses critical Beginning of page[p. 97] questions related to the intelligences and experiences of those denied social-cultural expression and political position.22This position works to build stories of a human experience other than the white, cisgender, settler-patriarchal norm. See also Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds (Minnesota University Press, 2006), p. 123, and Sylvia Wynter’s ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, its Overrepresentation – An Argument’, The New Centennial Review, 3.3 (2003), pp. 257–337 (pp. 263–64) <https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015>, and her work on ‘counter-signifying practices’. I try to keep this in mind when I think about ‘against the grain’, and how it means to do something that uplifts, makes space for, does not centre power, white supremacy, or heteronormativity. And that it has roots in this difficult, radical, and anti-racist, Black feminist work.

Edith-Anne Pageot (EAP): The film, Professor Norman Cornett: ‘Since When Do We Divorce the Right Answer from an Honest Answer?’ (2009) immediately comes to mind when I think of teaching against the grain at the university level. In this documentary, director Alanis Obomsawin, one of the most distinguished Indigenous filmmakers in the world, pays tribute to Norman Cornett, a McGill University professor of religious studies who adopted very unorthodox methods of teaching. Through various artistic practices — such as automatic writing, listening to music — Cornett invited his students to get truly involved, to actively participate, to develop a ‘sense of self’, a sense of ‘care’ for others and for different subject matter, and to ‘validate their own convictions’.33Student’s comments transcribed from the 2009 film directed by Alanis Obomsawin, Professor Norman Cornett:‘Since When Do We Divorce the Right Answer from an Honest Answer?’. Cornett also believed that a classroom is a community based on a dialogical approach. Despite the profound respect his students expressed towards his teaching and their positive appreciation, Cornett was dismissed from his teaching duties in 2007. To me, this film embodied the essence of education, and it resonates with my deepest conviction that teaching against the grain means to be truly committed to critical thinking, in Beginning of page[p. 98] addition to experiential knowledge. Education cannot only be about memorizing information, gaining competence in a certain domain, and mastering a set of disciplinary methodologies. Teaching and learning against the grain are about positionality and self-reflective thinking, which entail practising and experiencing education.

Varda, what were the reasons behind your suggestion to use the expression ‘against the grain’ in our title?

VN: I resonate with the approach that Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Professor of Teacher Education, takes on ‘teaching against the grain’. For her it is a practice that is not only rooted in but also generative of ‘critical perspectives on the macro-level relationships of power, labor and ideology’.44Marilyn Cochran-Smith, ‘Learning to Teach Against the Grain’, Harvard Educational Review, 61.3 (August 1991), pp. 279–311 (p. 280) <https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.61.3.q671413614502746>. These perspectives then are emerging from the very biographies of teachers who are not only challenging the existing curricula, but also the practices of their institutions. As such, I believe that any practice that is against the grain is a radical stance. It requires constant engagement with our positionalities and our histories, both in and out of the classroom, and alongside those who share that space with us. As a person of colour, which I must add is a recent shift in the way I identify or am identified, I think there is no other way to engage pedagogically than one that is against the grain.

mro: This is a challenging position to embody and maintain; it is also difficult to teach. To work against the grain, as IBPOC (Indigenous, Black, and People of Colour) scholars Beginning of page[p. 99] and writers and artists do by their existence and labour in an institution, one sees the potential harm in store. One recourse would be to inform and empower the gesture with multiple methods, practitioners, supports, accomplices. Tensile strength needs many components.

VN: I think that this is a good point then to dig deeper into our own biographies and positionalities, and begs the questions, how has that informed our ‘against the grain’ practice? And especially, how is this practice linked to our experiences in various institutions?

mro: Something about art school suits me. Stitching together moments of frustration, confusion, and elation, I have spent most of my life in and around them: first as a child, making pots and paintings at the Winnipeg Art Gallery free community classes; then in 2001, I started to gather a portfolio and moved from Treaty 1 Territory to Mi'kma'ki to start a BFA and figure out an art practice that felt meaningful.

Since then, I’ve studied further (in and outside of schools) and worked as faculty. I’ve done so at the LL Fitzgerald School of Art in Winnipeg, MB, Canada, and at the Royal College of Art and the Cass School of Art + Design, University of the Arts (London College of Communication) in London, UK. And now in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal at Concordia University, first as a surprising hire in the Department of Art History, and now in Studio Arts with another foot in Interdisciplinary Studies Beginning of page[p. 101] in Fine Arts. This peripatetic trajectory suits me, too: I’ve migrated across mediums, disciplines, schools, cities, and continents.

Despite having spent a lot of time in art schools, I wouldn’t claim that I feel comfortable in them nor that there was a particular moment of determination for me. What I value, and why I stay, is the sensitivity to inquiry, to making otherwise, and to engaging with a constituency of folks who are committed to experimenting with ideas, discussion, and meaning-making with materials they feel existentially bound to and responsible for. I also value how work and conversations in art schools are so embedded in the personal and in the accountable: these are modes of engagement that preoccupy me deeply.

EAP: Autoethnography, which you evoke maya, is a qualitative research and pedagogical approach more commonly associated with the visual arts. It is quite a challenging and controversial political act with respect to art history’s canonical methodologies! I think that my reflection on pedagogy and art history may also be described, in part, as some sort of autoethnography. For the past twenty years, I have had the privilege of teaching art history, first as a lecturer and then as a faculty member, in two Canadian universities — Ottawa University, a bilingual university in Ontario, and Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), a francophone university in Québec — in two different departments, visual art and art history, respectively. Be that as it may, my reflections concerning pedagogy began not Beginning of page[p. 103] as an art historian but as a violin teacher, which was an incredible learning experience for me! Through music, I have learned that pedagogy (and learning) is not only a rational, cognitive, and intellectual affair but also an embodied experience and a relational process that requires patience, time, and openness. Music has taught me different ways of listening, different narrative languages, and various ways of being attuned to different responses. A process in which silence, and listening, also play an important role.

When I started my career as a lecturer at Ottawa University, Francophones, at that time, appeared to be overrepresented in contractual and precarious teaching positions. Allow me to provide a little historical context to that situation. Founded by the Oblates in 1848, Bytown College became Ottawa University in 1866. French was relinquished in 1874, to be reinstated only in 1901. In Ontario’s schools, French was officially discontinued by law between 1912 and 1927. Despite these measures, Francophones at Ottawa University formed the majority of its students until the 1960s. During the 1980s and 1990s, the number of Francophone students dropped dramatically due to several factors, most notably, the adoption of a new per capita funding system which encouraged the recruitment of as many English-speaking students as possible. As a result, today Francophones represent less than 30 per cent of Ottawa University students. Furthermore, learning resources in French are sometimes inadequate and Francophone students ‘undergo a form of anglicization’.55Serge Dupuis, ‘Établissements bilingues et gouvernance francophone: espoirs et déroute du projet universitaire des Franco-Ontariens (1945–2008)’, Enjeux et Sociétés, 8.2 (2021), pp. 47–77 <https://doi.org/10.7202/1078489ar>.Beginning of page[p. 104]

mro: This took me a while to understand when I first got to Montréal and started teaching: so many of my references were anglo-centric. The nuances in Québec and talking about colonization were new to me. Where I was teaching started to affect how I taught, because of this.

EAP: In Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, the linguistic-demographic profile is quite different from the one in Ottawa. On the Island, the demographic weight by mother tongue is distributed as follows: French 49.5 per cent, English 23 per cent, other 18.6 per cent.66‘Rapport sur l’évolution de la situation linguistique au Québec’ (Québec: Office de la langue française, Gouvernement du Québec, 2019), p. 20. Overall, the island has four universities, two English and two French. In recent years, the number of university students whose first language is neither French nor English has increased considerably in all four universities.77From 6.4 per cent in 1986 to 15.8 per cent in 2014. ‘Rapport sur l’évolution de la situation linguistique’, p. 45. Located an hour away from Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, Kiuna College (Odanak, Québec)88The Kiuna Institution is often considered the descendant of the Manitou Community College/Collège Manitou, opened between 1973 and 1976 in La Macaza, Québec. is the only provincial post-secondary institution which offers studio classes, art history courses from an Indigenous perspective, and some Indigenous language courses. As you know, linguistic tensions in Québec and Canada are intimately linked to the dual process of colonization. The arrival of French settlers on the shores of the St. Lawrence River in the early seventeenth century, which had been occupied for centuries by Indigenous peoples, marked the beginning of the settlement process. In the wake of the intercolonial wars, Britain’s conquest put an end to 150 years of conflict between the French and British in North America. The Treaty of Paris, signed in 1763, marked Britain’s victory.Beginning of page[p. 105] This brief historical portrait and the linguistic statistics show that, in Canada, French occupies a paradoxical posture, being both the language of the oppressor, the colonizer, and the oppressed.

VN: I guess I fall into that 18.6 per cent then! But I experienced that sense of nuance even back home. And now I just experience it in a different manner here in Montréal.

I opted for architectural studies in my undergraduate programme back home in Pakistan, and I do not remember asking or even questioning the need to be studying the Renaissance or Baroque movements and buildings in such great detail, while completely ignoring writings — not that there were that many to begin with — about structures and styles from our own region. And so this inability of mine to differentiate between these European artistic movements, which had no references in my environment, led to what Edward Said calls the ‘panic of the visual’.99W. J. T. Mitchell and Edward W. Said, ‘The Panic of the Visual: A Conversation with Edward W. Said’, Boundary 2, 25.2 (1998), pp. 11–33 <https://doi.org/10.2307/303612>. It is a panic that emerges from a lived experience that is rooted in a visual culture and art that differs from the ‘perspective and the representation of a figure, and with iconography of the sort that one finds in Western pictorial traditions’.1010Ibid., p. 20.

And that panic made a reappearance when I took on the position of a Teaching Assistant as a first-year PhD student for ‘ARTH200: Perspectives in Art History’.1111‘ARTH200, Perspectives in Art History’, is a foundational, year-long survey course in the Department of Art History, Concordia University, that primarily revolves around art movements and periods in the European-American context. My lack of knowledge, context, and interactions with these ‘canonical’ works was once again staring me in the face, compounded by my lack of teaching experience in a Western university as an international student.Beginning of page[p. 107]

So my pedagogical approach is grounded in this personal history and lived experiences in Pakistan — part of the Global South, having been elevated from its previous status as a Third World, underdeveloped nation-state.1212Russell West-Pavlov, ‘Toward the Global South: Concept or Chimera, Paradigm or Panacea?’, in The Global South and Literature, ed. by Russell West-Pavlov (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1–19 (p. 4). While the label ‘underdeveloped’ emerged from economic and trade KPIs and metrics, for me it remains associated with the lack of public and cultural spaces that could have allowed for that panic to be countered.

mro: I appreciate, Varda, how you intertwined your answer not just with institutional biography but with autobiography. I am still learning to do this.

In my case, my mother’s side is Icelandic, and as far as we know, her family had always been there. That side of the family immigrated to the Interlake Region (Manitoba) in the 1920s — as did many Icelanders and Ukrainians in this period — to farm and fish. This land and lake access was offered for sale or for wage-labour by the British Crown, land stolen from the Anishinaabeg, Cree, and Lakota, and the heartland of the growing Metis nation. My father’s mother was born on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and as far as we know, her family had always been there — before the Portuguese, before the Spanish. Los Guanches is the umbrella term for the Indigenous population of the Canary Islands, however, no one in my family identifies as anything other than Isleños, which approximates to an ethnic identity in Spain.

I like to think I am sensitive to how where you teach influences how you teach. That we have different relationships Beginning of page[p. 108] to norms, language inheritances (or gaps) and cultural references. I spend a lot of time and energy broadening my references to help students and myself grow critical stances. As educators we should never assume a common baseline, and this needs broad reading, in my experience.

VN: I agree, which is why I am so glad I got the opportunity to undo this visual panic for myself as a TA for the course, ‘FFAR 250: Keywords: Reading the Arts Across the Disciplines’,1313‘FFAR250’ is a year-long core and compulsory foundational course for all undergraduate students in the Faculty of Fine Arts (averaging 875 students a year), which maya rae oppenheimer has coordinated from 2019 to 2022. The course is rooted in Raymond Williams’ philosophy of keywords, published in his 1976 text Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Nature (Oxford University Press, 1976), and expands on different terms that are discussed as both methods and sites of application. because it allowed me to expand that very baseline, not only for myself but also for my students. It was a pedagogical method that allowed me to give myself the grace I needed, but also to centre knowledge from my own context. And that is a radical stance in itself.

I approach the classroom through dialogue as a method, which I had adapted as an art educator for the debut of the Karachi Biennale in 2017. This approach developed from a place of empathy which recognized that the majority of those visiting the Biennale would be interacting with contemporary and/or visual art for the first time; that all of us shared a similar lack-of. But this lack-of context/familiarity became a critical factor in learning together and arriving at our own conclusions. Because how can one be expected to not-lack when they have never had the opportunity to counter it?

However, there is a key difference between working on home terrain and in a Western institutional setting: on home turf, there was a lack-of in relation to the visual which could only be addressed or unlocked by shared worldviews,Beginning of page[p. 109] cultural symbols, and signs. This is not the case when working as an international student in a North American institutional context, in times of racial and social reckoning and belonging to a minority group that in 2016 made up only 9,515 people in Montréal.1414‘Census Profile, 2016 Census — Montréal [Census Metropolitan Area], Quebec and Canada [Country]’, 8 February 2017, Statistics Canada, <https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/prof/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo1=CMACA&Code1=462&Geo2=PR&Code2=01&Data=Count&SearchText=Montreal&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=01&TABID=1&B1=All> [accessed 17 April 2025]. Along with the panic of the visual, I am accompanied by a new fear of how my lack-of knowledge or awareness of certain debates and concepts can be detrimental to my future.

mro: You make a really important point here, Varda, by bringing this conversation to a specific example. Another issue with FFAR250 is its scale and structure. As a huge class, students sometimes feel like insignificant entities: they may churn through the course just to check a box en route to getting their degree. So, as a teaching team, we do a lot of work to bring their positionality and personal practice goals into the learning space. For educators, this means quite a bit of pastoral care in addition to developing course outcomes. It is not lost on me that this is hard work and can be vulnerable-making. Especially when so much is set in the curriculum, the course dynamics and the spaces in which we gather: to run the course holistically takes a lot of time and energy to try and buffer the hierarchy of professor-coordinator-teaching team-students.

The theoretical work and various practices of worlding that we have all been orbiting together with the Worlding Public Culture teams has helped me in this work. I see our work with students as opportunities to give them skills for complicating what they may have considered to Beginning of page[p. 110] be single-narrative topics. Classrooms become webs of rich exchange rather than uni-directional receiving spaces. Sylvia Wynter’s work on praxis was hugely influential when I redesigned the curriculum for this course. ‘Practising’, used to be the first keyword explored with students, and we looked at Wynter, Adrian Piper, Philippe Petit and Raqs Media Collective.1515The Fall semester involved three mini-modules of four weeks each investigating ‘practising’, ‘critiquing’, and ‘working’, with the first module becoming ‘framing’ in the most recent iterations. The readings included excerpts from Wynter’s conversations with Katherine McKittrick in the eponymous text Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Duke University Press, 2014), Piper’s writing on ‘Arting’ in ‘To Art (Reg. Intrans. V.)’, The Fox 1.1 (1975), pp. 60–65, Petit’s On the High Wire, trans. by Paul Auster (Orion, 2019), and Raqs Media Collective’s ‘How to Be an Artist by Night’, in Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century, ed. by Steven Henry Madoff (The MIT Press, 2009), pp. 71–80. Each of these very different perspectives met on a frequency of attempting, rehearsing, continuing as a way of being in the world and with humility. During the pandemic, we had to streamline the reading-work, but this plurality has remained in our pedagogy — sometimes as roundtables with invited guests, and sometimes unpacked as readings and examples in lectures.

What is the situation like in your classrooms, Edith-Anne, regarding many worlds in your pedagogical spaces?

EAP: Thank you maya for your question. Through the years, I have discovered that teaching entails responsibility and the self-consciousness of intellectual practices, as well as an awareness of the power relations and privileges associated with it. Therefore, I need to be self-critical. Like curating, teaching is performative. Teaching art history shares with curatorial practices the task of selecting, ordering, presenting, translating, showing, and narrating collections. It calls for attention and care in the ways one engages with participants in the classroom, with subject matter, and with language. For these reasons, I came to envision pedagogy in art history as a ‘curatorial gesture’. The word gesture derives from gestura (from medieval Latin)Beginning of page[p. 111] or gerere (Latin) which means to ‘bear, wield, perform’. In French geste is borrowed from the latin gestus, and implies a mouvement du corps; it reveals an affect and an intention. Thus, as a metaphor for trying to teach inclusive art history, curatorial gesture emphasizes the idea of a situated, embodied, and critical pedagogy. In bell hooks’s well-known texts on pedagogy, she offers a profound critical perspective on institutional and structural prejudices by focusing on class and race. She urges us to reject principles based on competition and individualism typical of the neoliberal and capitalist models and suggests that individual transformative practices (changes of attitude) are crucial to think ‘against the grain’.1616bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters (Routledge, 2000), p. 124. This is a key component in the fight against class discrimination and to resist and combat imperialistic, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, and ideological indoctrination.1717bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (Routledge, 2004), p. xxi. Thus, teaching against the grain implies a rejection of ‘pure’ objectivity and universal knowledge ingrained within institutional frameworks.

My teaching experience has drawn my attention to specific issues, one being language. Although postcolonial critics have investigated the role of language in colonial structures and in the production of knowledge, the context surrounding the question of language is too often missing in intersectional analysis pertaining to pedagogy and art history. Yet, language is neither ahistorical, neutral nor transcendent. Language is a constitutive part of ‘racial imagination’. Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda describe racial imagination as:Beginning of page[p. 112]

…the scene of race taking up residence in the creative act. This is what we mean by a racial imaginary, an unlyrical term, but then its lack of music is fitting. One way to know you’re in the presence of — in possession of, possessed by — a racial imaginary is to see if the boundaries of one’s imaginative sympathy line up, again and again, with the lines drawn by power.1818Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda, ‘On Whiteness and the Racial Imaginary: Where Writers Go Wrong in Imagining the Lives of Others’, Literary Hub, 9 April 2015 <https://lithub.com/on-whiteness-and-the-racial-imaginary/> [accessed 17 April 2025]. Text adapted from the foreword to The Racial Imaginary: A Collection of Essays, ed. by Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda.

The pervasiveness of monolingualism, resulting today in anglo-normativity and standardization, is rooted in the one world, one language ideology. Yasemin Yildiz has shown that the genesis of the monolingual paradigm is closely linked to the construction of national identity and modern society.1919Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (Fordham University Press, 2012) <https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0cqr>. Monolingualism privileges the ways of doing things, the ways of thinking, and the aspirations linked to the use of one language and the culture it conveys. A form of coloniality,2020On coloniality of language, see Walter Mignolo, ‘On the Colonization of Amerindian Languages and Memories: Renaissance Theory of Writing and the Discontinuity of the Classical Tradition’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34.2 (1992), pp. 301–30. On the coloniality of language and education, see Carolyn McKinney, Language and Power in Post-Colonial Schooling: Ideologies in Practice (Routledge, 2017); Fernando Garcés, ‘Las Políticas del Conocimiento y la Colonialidad lingüística y Epistémica’, in El Giro Decolonial: reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global, ed. by Santiago Castro-Gomez and Ramón Grosfoguel (Siglo del Hombre Editores; Universidad Central, Instituto de Estudios Sociales Contemporáneos y Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Instituto Pensar, 2007), pp. 217–42; Zingisia Nkosinkulu, ‘Fanonian Art Practices: Toward a Decolonial Grammar of Being’, Journal of Black Studies, 54.5 (18 May 2023), pp. 394–409 <https://doi.org/10.1177/00219347231173151>. a coercive force, it reinforces hegemony of knowledge, and today’s economic globalisation. In their article titled, ‘Multilingualism in Academic Writing for Publication: Putting English in its Place’, Mary Jane Curry and Theresa Lillis demonstrate how, in fact, monolingualism is a myth, and how multilingualism shapes contemporary knowledge production in an academic setting. Therefore, they commend resistance to the ‘ideology of English Only in global academic knowledge production and communications’.2121Mary Jane Curry and Theresa Lillis, ‘Multilingualism in Academic Writing for Publication: Putting English in its Place’, Language Teaching , 57.1 (2024), pp. 87–100 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444822000040>. Furthermore, in his seminal book, The Invention of Monolingualism, David Gramling suggests that multilingualism might also be an invention based on the false idea of separate languages, framed entities with distinct nonporous borders. He calls for a conception of Beginning of page[p. 113] multilingualism which would consider the dynamics of exchanges, transfers and juxtapositions between languages.2222David Gramling, The Invention of Monolingualism (Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2016).

Therefore, it seems to me that opening a critical space in the classroom means considering research conducted in multiple languages, and as well scrutinizing the coloniality of language, to deconstruct, and to ‘expose the racial dynamic’, as Rankine and Loffreda would say, embedded in the nomenclature and terminology of art history. In the Canadian context more specifically, that entails acknowledging the colonial origins of both official languages, English and French, and to consider French’s paradoxical position. But it can also mean taking under consideration the dynamics of interaction and interpenetration between languages (notably English, French, Indigenous languages). A critical appraisal of language is surely a way to decolonize art history teaching, and self. Opening such a critical space also means accepting being exposed to critics, undermining authority and objectivity, and thus inhabiting a space of vulnerability.

mro: This puts me in mind of Juliette Singh’s writing on methodology but also on intent. Disciplines of course are caught up in trajectories of training and for many, ideally some sort of ‘mastery’. Singh argues for a collective need for reorientation to ‘other possible “modalities of the human”’.2323Julietta Singh, ‘Introduction: Reading against Mastery’, in Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery: Humanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Duke University Press, 2018), pp. 1–28 (p. 3). Here Singh is quoting Alexander Weheliye’s 2014 work, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Duke University Press, 2014), which also connects to Sylvia Wynter’s ‘different genres of the human’, cited above.

How we position ourselves as facilitators rather than gatekeepers to knowledge is a shift in terms of how I was trained in academia.2424Dr Deborah Thomas made a similar argument in her talk, ‘Embodiment, Performance, Decolonisation, and Listening Practices,’ at the Worlding Public Cultures Amsterdam Assembly, ‘Letting Go of Having to Talk All the Time’, 7 October 2021, at Framer Framed in Amsterdam. I recall having seminars on how to get around questions you don’t know the answer to at conferences,Beginning of page[p. 114] the sparing use of first-person, the need for a juicy ‘discovered’ archive to justify new and objective claims. A perfecting of language, and that language was English. Especially when wielded with an omniscient tone. I do not work this way now, and I’m rewriting my doctoral thesis to bring it into a more generous space of relating ideas. I also openly identify as neurodiverse, and I welcome other ways of writing into my students’ submissions. Essays should not be the baseline measuring-device for competence in art history or other subjects. I say this as someone who is not an art historian, so this gives me some angling for such claims, but I have become determined in this as someone who is continuously assigned core-requirement courses in their teaching workloads.

EAP: I would like to go back to your idea of teachers as facilitators. Seeing the professor’s role as a facilitator invites us to think about pedagogy in terms of openness to points of view, participation, interactions, and above all interpersonal relationships. These are all very important pedagogical characteristics. However, teaching is not neutral — it invariably requires and elicits the professor’s opinion, as well as his or her expertise. This, therefore, brings me back to the concept of ‘curatorial gesture’ which links teaching (art history in particular) and curating (from the Latin curatus, ‘to take care of’). This point of view leads one to also see the classroom as a community of learners and to acknowledge the varying degrees of interdependence among its members. Thus, while avoiding a paternalistic Beginning of page[p. 115] vision and understanding of care, linking teaching and curating calls for a relational ethics based on reciprocal responsibility. I believe this view to be much more engaging than either a strictly facilitator or mediator role.

VN: There is another methodological approach that I want to bring in here: that of vulnerability. Tiffany Page, sociologist of Media and Higher Education, brings forth the concept of ‘vulnerable writing’ as a method to acknowledge ‘that modalities of not-knowing within the production of knowledge are pertinent especially within transnational research’.2525Tiffany Page, ‘Vulnerable Writing as a Feminist Methodological Practice,’ Feminist Review, 115.1 (1 March 2017), pp. 13–29 (p. 14) <https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-017-0028-0>. And this connects to this shift towards facilitating rather than gatekeeping kind of attitude in academia.

But I also just want to build upon this concept by acknowledging and recognizing my vulnerability as a researcher-scholar in a context where my body acts as a racialized marker for others, and where the epistemological differences sometimes feel irreconcilable. In such a context, my own doctoral research needed to be in parallel with another kind of research: that of Montréal, Québec, with its own specific political, social, and cultural context, in conjunction with the larger waves of rightful demands of reforms on institutions. Not to mention learning the ways to navigate the city, pay bills, and do the laundry.

It becomes important for me to recognize my lack of knowing in one context is nonetheless compensated by other modes and forms of knowing. And I can’t be the only one feeling that way in a classroom. The classroom is a contact-zone,2626Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession (1991), pp. 33–40 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595469> [accessed 17 April 2025]. where vulnerability becomes a way to Beginning of page[p. 116] centre diverse knowledges in the room, including mine, and that multiplicity of approaches is the core of doing anything against the grain.

EAP: In different ways, with different vocabulary and languages, our three approaches talk about vulnerability.

mro: I agree with this as a principle. The context of its exercise could be overwhelming. The ‘FFAR250 Keywords: Reading the Arts Across the Disciplines’ course that Varda and I have been talking about… Well, its scale is vast, and the goals of the teaching team sometimes feel utopian. Every year, I hire and train a teaching team of twenty-four tutorial leaders, writing tutors, and a Scholar in Residence to take on a weekly lecture-tutorial structure. This course has existed at Concordia for over a decade, and with various ideas of its efficacy and purpose shaping its content and contours and student attitudes. I took over in 2019 and set a curriculum that aims to support students figure out their practice, to allow them to not know, and to take risks figuring out their toolkit. Fall semester concerns verb-keywords that underscore the importance of framing one’s position before critiquing cultural work and that working comes in many shapes, forms, capacities. The Winter semester applies these methods to sites of concern (home, memory, archive, care, futures, breath, climate…) and through guest-roundtables and research creation briefs, hopes to empower students in the complexity of cultural engagement. Engagement that they are surrounded by but just need to attune themselves to.Beginning of page[p. 117]

The ‘curatorial gesture’ that Edith-Anne discusses relates to the dramaturgical, in my view, as well as vulnerability. We can certainly relate to students in such a way, but as a curator of content, here our knowledge and work (against the grain) and experience help us support students with what they need to know to develop their work and to distinguish it. What do they need to know about expertise and norms in their field to then build connections and their own unique practice? That takes intellectual knowledge development but also emotional and embodied intelligence of who is in a classroom.2727I borrow this language from bell hooks’s ‘Engaged Pedagogy’ chapter in Teaching Critical Thinking: ‘This discovery [of what students know and what they need to know] happens only if teachers are willing to engage students beyond a surface level. As teachers, we can create a climate for optimal learning if we understand the level of emotional awareness and emotional intelligence in the classroom. That means we need to take time to assess who we are teaching’ (Routledge, 2010), pp. 19–22 (p. 19). Here, success should not be ‘how to get an A+’, but rather, to distinguish their creative, critical work in a way that is meaningful to them as cultural workers who are accountable to their constituencies and not a preconceived (biased) notion of what ‘mastery’ should be. If students are supported in ‘not-knowing’, not expected to master an abstracted catalogue of a field’s distinctions, but to know how to work against the grain in accountable ways, and to understand how those grains forcefully came to be there.

Adapting a curriculum in this way is complex and not what universities are set up to do, as they are disciplinary gatekeepers by design. Some students will also push back on such a model. It is where I see the work of going ‘against the grain’ meeting a ‘curatorial gesture’, work that is always context-dependent and ongoing.

VN: Hear, hear!