Healing through Geography: A Spatial-Learning Analysis and Praxis

Learning takes place in and across settings. In this conceptual piece, a spatial-learning praxis is presented to understand geographic trauma to invoke healing from trauma through. I begin by providing a context of the links between oppression and trauma. I then highlight how it persists for learners and the consequences trauma has for students of color. I then build off of critical pedagogy, learning theory, Black feminism, Black geographies, and Indigenous studies to describe a form of learning and transformation that is dedicated to elements of healing centered learning. I briefly review these conceptual foundations as a preface to introducing a framework of healing centered learning and its components grounded in four anchors including (in no particular order): (a) learning and identity (b) geography (c) and oppression and trauma. Understanding geo-onto-epistemologies allows for mechanisms for learning to move past resilience and into healing, sustaining change over time. I conclude with learning and the applications to heal identities through the design of learning environments and spatial analysis.

Black Trans Feminism

In Black Trans Feminism Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each. Theorizing black trans feminism from the vantages of abolition and gender radicality, Bey articulates blackness as a mutiny against racializing categorizations; transness as a nonpredetermined, wayward, and deregulated movement that works toward gender’s destruction; and black feminism as an epistemological method to fracture hegemonic modes of racialized gender. In readings of the essays, interviews, and poems of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, jayy dodd, Venus Di’Khadija Selenite, and Dane Figueroa Edidi, Bey turns black trans feminism away from a politics of gendered embodiment and toward a conception of it as a politics grounded in fugitivity and the subversion of power. Together, blackness and transness actualize themselves as on the run from gender. In this way, Bey presents black trans feminism as a mode of enacting the wholesale dismantling of the world we have been given.

Anti-Racism and Existential Philosophy

Kathryn Sophia Belle’s (formerly Kathryn T. Gines’) publications engaged in this interview:2003 (Fanon/Sartre 50 yrs) “Sartre and Fanon Fifty Years Later: To Retain or Reject the Concept of Race,” Sartre Studies International, Vol. 9, Issue 2 (2003): 55-67, https://doi.org/10.3167/135715503781800213.2010 (Convergences) “Sartre, Beauvoir, and the Race/Gender Analogy: A Case for Black Feminist Philosophy” in Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, pages 35-51. Eds. Maria Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, Donna Dale Marcano. New York: SUNY, 2010.2011 (Wright/Legacy) “The Man Who Lived Underground: Jean-Paul Sartre and the Philosophical Legacy of Richard Wright,” Sartre Studies International, Vol. 17, Issue 2 (2011): 42-59, https://doi.org/10.3167/ssi.2011.170204.2012 (Reflections) “Reflections on the Legacy and Future of Continental Philosophy with Regard to Critical Philosophy of Race,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 50, Issue 2 (June 2012): 329-344, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-6962.2012.00109.x.

An Ode to Black British Girls

This article delves into Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum, examining how the cultural text builds upon Black feminist media discourse, and intimately grapples with the nuances of Black women’s sexuality while explicitly challenging misogynoir. This work illustrates how Coel is helping develop a Black British cultural aesthetic that centers Black women’s liberation, specifically from an African immigrant perspective, by using satire, all the beauty, pain, and struggles that come with #blackgirlmagic, eccentric adornments, and ‘awkward’ ostentatious characters that at times play into racist images and tropes of Black womanhood to expose the absurdity of life in an anti-Black, sexist, and xenophobic society. In sum, this article understands Coel’s work in Chewing Gum to be Black girl surrealism – the intersection of Afro-surrealism, British dark comedy, and Black feminism.