Maija Jones & Emma Heikkilä, University of Helsinki: Pedagogy of love, loving pedagogies, pedagogical love: What is love in pedagogical encounters?
This experimental workshop invites the participating community to collectively delve into the meaning of love in pedagogical encounters. We follow the tradition of critical pedagogy in which pedagogy is not confined into classroom interactions but reflects broader processes of dialogue and learning that occur in different societal interactions (cf., e.g., Freire, 1968/2017; hooks, 1994; Giroux, 2020). Essentially, the workshop is a call for action in reshaping what pedagogical love means and how it can manifest in Finland. The motivation arises from the need to revisit the work of Simo Skinnari, Pedagogical Love [Pedagoginen rakkaus] (2004), which reinforces a white, Eurocentric and patriarchal philosophy of love centred around formal learning spaces. While this workshop recognises the value of Skinnari’s work from the perspective of shifting away from competitive pedagogies, the aim is to problematise the narrow representation of love’s connection to Lutheran Christianity with the support of white, male academics’ works, which overlooks the long history of (black) feminism and love.
Drawing on bell hooks’ (1994, 2000) and Sara Ahmed’s (2014) explorations of love, in addition to the Finnish publication on Intersectional Feminist Pedagogies [Intersektionaaliset feministiset pedagogiikat] (2022), the workshop invites colleagues to question what does it mean to approach pedagogic encounters with love and to love the pedagogic encounters you come across?
Johanna Ennser-Kananen1, Hai Nguyen2& Sanna Riuttanen1, (University of Jyväskyla1, University of Turku2): Playing with transknowledging: Making epistemic in/justice visible in (our) data
Whose knowledges count? has been a central question in a 5-year critical ethnographic study that examined the epistemic negotiations at a Finnish community college for adults with forced migration experience and interrupted formal education. In this interactive presentation, we introduce the concept of transknowledging, a potential theoretical outcome of this study. In its current form, it refers to processes of knowledge construction or negotiation, such as human-human, human-text/data, or human-other-than-human interactions. Drawing on a large body of decolonial and critical scholarship, transknowledging aims to tease out the transgressive, historical, self-reflexive, praxis-oriented, and relational in such exchanges, while also calling for lifelong re/learning of all involved. With this orientation, we hope that the concept will promote and facilitate a closer understanding of “whose knowledges count” as it intends to reveal and dismantle epistemic hegemonies that hark back to and perpetuate a racio-colonial and cis-heteropatriarchial world order.
In this presentation, we offer some data samples to show how the concept could be used to make epistemic negotiations and their power-laden histories visible. For instance, we show transcripts of audio-recorded interactions and fieldnotes from school (classroom) contexts with adult learners from forced migrant communities and ask: Along which lines or line-crossings is epistemic legitimacy de/constructed? What linguistic/racial/gender/… histories surface in the interaction? What relations are forged? What epistemic praxis and self-learning is involved for all agents? We invite the audience to participate in data analysis and/or play with the concept in relation to their own data (including in subversive and collaborative ways of playing) to test its usefulness for research in the areas of (for example) migration, antiracism, intersectionality, and linguistic justice.
