Abstract
In envisioning literacy at a crossroads, we ask what may be the potential of a different, intense, possible love, a love we may scarcely know and may yet discern—what we think of as a cosmic love, an explosive love. Such stance-taking in literacy research provokes new possibilities for research, teaching, and learning. We share brief narrative vignettes, moments we pointedly name as these tellings, and assert possibilities across two interconnected approaches: these tellings as beginnings, and our lives are entangled in our work. In these approaches, we point to opportunities for (re)conceptualizing prisms through which to engage in the work of literacy research and practice as we recognize, respond to, and build from both joy and heartache urgently present, across times past, current, and to come.
What may be the potential of a different, intense, possible love, a love we may scarcely know and may yet discern—what we think of as a cosmic love, an explosive love, in the way of stars exploding in the universe, as life-giving, as traveling with us, as carried within us. In envisioning literacy at a crossroads, we wonder with Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist who told a New York Times reporter of the potency of what may be newly seen with different lenses: Rigby, speaking of the brilliant supernova unexpectedly viewed through the James Webb Space Telescope, said, “That was always out there.… We just had to build a telescope to go see what was there. I get a very similar feeling of maybe people in a broken world managing to do something right and to see some of the majesty that's out there” ( Roston, 2022 ).
Joanne 1 recalls it was a Thursday, St. Patrick's Day. She was giving a talk in the doctoral seminar of a colleague and friend in a classroom on campus. Joanne finished and the friend passed her a cell phone, and said Vaughn had texted. Joanne had forgotten her own phone on the kitchen counter and hadn’t seen Vaughn's texts noting that Carter, our son, had emailed from school.
The email had no subject, its text sparse:
“can u pick me up”
Joanne used her friend's phone to call Vaughn, who was teaching his own class on Zoom from the guest bedroom repurposed as an office three semesters ago, when COVID-19 prompted online instruction, and then she called Carter's middle school. The secretary didn’t know why Carter had asked to be picked up. When Joanne arrived at the school, he was standing just inside the entranceway wearing the green hoodie he liked, his eyes brimming with tears. The story came out in spurts.
He was in gym class.
He was pulled out of gym class.
He was accused of stealing another kid's wallet. He told them he didn’t do it.
He didn’t know what was going to happen. He didn’t do it.
He just wanted to go home.
A few weeks later, Joanne watched at home through the living room window as Carter and a new middle school friend walked the half block down the street, toward the public park where the summer before, Vaughn, Joanne, Carter, and his sister, Carmela, circled six laps to the mile to train for the 8 K road race they’d run as a family. Joanne caught glimpses of the boys across the afternoon, throwing a football between them, climbing on the playground bars, and later, gliding back and forth on swings through air still chilled in a Michigan spring, familiar sights seen and felt differently, nearly new, so many months after social distancing brought an abrupt end to playdates with friends.
At the start of the pandemic, Carter was a fourth grader, more visibly a child. Now, he was only 11 but almost as tall as Joanne.
The boys, just beyond the park's edge, running between cars parked in the small lot used by families and teachers of the childcare center on the first floor of the building that, from 1922 to 1985, housed an elementary school, then closed for a time until the city council, the year we moved from New York City to Michigan, approved a community development organization's request to convert the upper floors into apartments for seniors and the first floor into the preschool for children (Kammerer, 2017). The hood of Carter's sweatshirt pulled up to keep warm, Joanne worried someone might accuse the boys of trying to break into the cars. She was angry at herself for not telling this new white friend, or his parents, that if the police ever approach them, the boys must not run.
Four summers ago, we drove across the United States, 14 states in 19 days from our home in Michigan to California, Venice Beach and the Pacific Ocean, and back. We drove, and wrote about the interplay of our experiences as the Black father and white mother of two children, and of the popularized narrative of Donald Glover's rap song “This Is America” (Childish Gambino, 2018), released in 2018 and since viewed 878 million times on YouTube (Glover, 2018). We drove, and wrote, and complicated meanings of “austere love” in Robert Hayden's (1985) 14-line poem “Those Winter Sundays” as we recalled time spent with Ms. Hanson, who, as a Black woman, led teachers and staff, primarily Black and Latina/o, as founding principal of City Public, where we taught—Vaughn for 12 years and Joanne for 13 in New York City (Marciano & Watson, 2021).
We recalled austere love in Ms. Hanson, dishing out curry chicken and green beans from sterno trays for lunch in the school library during professional development days; reminding teachers to call students’ homes, fostering relationships; and handing out engraved plaques, public recognition that challenged deficit notions of what students and teachers at City Public “cannot do or do not have” (Marciano & Watson, 2021, p. 346). We learned, 3 weeks into the third school year after we moved to Michigan, that Ms. Hanson unexpectedly died. What did we know, we now recall, of austere love, of what we think of as the deliberate, difficult, abstruse, and often unrecognized ways love lives across everyday experiences and interactions. We remembered and we wrote, across our drive, of Ms. Hanson, and the joy and melancholy evoked in “This Is America” as reflective of austere love—or as Huddle (2013) noted of Hayden's poem, composed, son to father, expressing unanticipated regret: that “the office of love can be relentless, thankless, and more than a little mysterious,” that “the duties of love…are often scrupulously carried out in invisible and thankless ways” (pp. 252, 255, as cited in Marciano & Watson, 2021, pp. 338, 340). We recalled that we understood “This Is America” “vividly, and devastatingly in everyday use, as enactments of social inequities and racial violence” (Marciano & Watson, 2021, p. 337), and we asked how teachers, teacher educators, and literacy researchers may foreground relationships, experiences, pasts, and possibilities to more fully recognize and extend literacies practices of youth of color as strengths from which more equitable curriculum and teaching opportunities may be designed and enacted. (p. 341)
Underscoring complicated notions of love that we navigate, Bauer and Sánchez (2022) envisioned spaces of “self-transformational” and “coalitional” love as counterpoints to discourses of exclusion, to “redraw how [an immigrant youth and her mother] participated in a divided world” (p. 655). Hotchkins (2022) named the urgency of “responsive pedagogical love” and developing “cultural love literacy practices—trauma acknowledgement and trauma resistance” as African immigrant male collegians navigated contexts of anti-Blackness in higher education (p. 609).
In dwelling in and with austere love, with learning as unfolding, we thus glimpse how Hayden in his poetry “realizes love as it lived,” how Hayden compels “the reader to reconsider the lives of those who helped us make our way into adulthood” (Huddle, 2013, p. 253, as cited in Marciano & Watson, 2021, p. 339). In the years that seem at once shortened and stretched since our previous conceptualizing of austere love, present times shifting and sifted into past memories, we, and our children, are older, necessitating different and yet still ongoing conversations at the intersections of family, schooling, and the limitations and opportunities of literacy research. We therefore contemplate meanings of austere love, necessary, yet incomplete, and assert: What may be the potential of a different, intense, possible love, a love we may scarcely know and may yet discern—what we may think of as a cosmic love, an explosive love?
We thus share these brief narrative vignettes, moments we pointedly name as these tellings, by which we gesture to what Watson and Knight-Manuel (2020) discussed as “tellings of embodied Diaspora literacies that affirm and extend presences and absences of Black bodies of immigrant youth and young adults from West African countries” (p. 3). In these tellings, we call back to Vaughn's exchange with Paul, Jayson, and Marcus, then each a year away from graduating from City Public, where Vaughn and Joanne each taught for more than a decade. Vaughn recalled the boys stopped him between classes in the second-floor hallway (Watson, 2018).
“Watson, did you hear it?” Paul asked. “To Pimp a Butterfly. Kendrick Lamar. It's out.” (Watson, 2018, p. 11). Paul, Jayson, and Marcus, Black adolescent boys, excitedly anticipated the release of the new album by Lamar, streamed a record 9.6 million times that first day of its debut (Watson, 2018). Clover Hope (2015), reviewing the album, asked compelling questions of Lamar's lyrics: “‘How do you capture the detail and the overwhelming visibility of invisibility?’ in songs involving ‘deeper themes of community, power dynamics (between men and women, black and white), utter otherness and the comfort of home’?” (Watson, 2018, p. 11). In these tellings, we return to Jayson, Marcus, and Paul, and to their anticipation that Kendrick Lamar in his new work would trace a resonating narrative, foreshadowed in the closing song he titled “Real” in his previous album, a coming-of-age assemblage recounted by a teenaged Kendrick Lamar.
The song ends with a voice mail left by Kendrick's mother, Paula Oliver, to her son: Mrs. Oliver shares that a record producer “called the house” to ask Kendrick, then a high school sophomore, to “come to the studio,” what may be for the rapper who, years later, would win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, a journey's beginnings (Duckworth & Martin, 2012, stanza 10). “Tell your story to these Black and Brown kids,” Kendrick's mom implores her son. “Give back with your words of encouragement” (stanza 12). Worried for his safety as a Black teenage boy navigating adolescence in a U.S. city, weary from trying to reach him across the hours, Kendrick's mom adds, yet affirming, “And I love you Kendrick. If I don’t hear you knocking on the door you know where I usually leave the key. Alright?” (stanza 12).
In the uneasy verisimilitude of an everyday voice mail rendered as song, pressing, necessary, from mother to her Black son, as Josephs (2016) wrote for Spin magazine, the phone calls are reminders that before these artists’ stories became ours, they continued the hopes of the generation before them. Momma Lamar['s]…loving sentiments also add a sense of urgency. Yes, simple advice and affirming praise feel like minor joys; but they’re often one of a parent's only navigational tools for sending a young African-American man out into the world's madness. Not doing drugs, abstaining from alcohol—those are things we can control. Heartbreak, police brutality, and the [deficit narrative of the] damaging construct of black masculinity—those are things a parent's love can’t defend against. (para. 6)
A few weeks after Carter and a friend played at the edge of the park, he and Vaughn each pulled a bike out of the garage, Carter guiding down the driveway the maroon 10-speed handed down from the friend whose class Joanne had guest taught in, that St. Patrick's Day. The bicycle is new to Carter, who spent the first 5 years of his life in New York City, learning to weave through walkers on sidewalks on the blue three-wheeled scooter that now rests farther back in the garage on our mostly quiet street in a college town. Later, Carter pedals the bike on the uneven sidewalk, unsure of whether it's safe to ride in the street where cars pass closely by. Vaughn follows half a block behind, watching as Carter approaches a neighbor walking on the sidewalk ahead, who steps to her left, onto the grass as Carter passes by, and yells something Vaughn doesn’t hear.
Back home, crumpled into the living room couch in front of that same window that overlooks the public park, Carter is sobbing. We ask what happened. What happened? The neighbor, a white woman who has lived down the street for as long as we’ve lived in our home, yelled an expletive at Carter as he passed by.
What did she say?
“‘Fucking’ something,” he blurts out from the couch.
Shocked and scared, Carter had pedaled home as fast as he could.
On summer break, we climb the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and walk east along the National Mall to the Washington Monument, half a mile from where yellow paint on asphalt denotes two pedestrian blocks on 16th Street NW as “Black Lives Matter Plaza.” We remark at the chain fencing still flanking the U.S. Capital, so many months following the January 6 attack.
We started the day, Joanne, Vaughn, and Carter—Carmela attending a summer camp nearby—at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. We move through an exhibit on the concourse level titled Make Good the Promises: Reconstruction and Its Legacies. We glimpse briefly as we walk at the exhibition guide that explains that the exhibit intends to explore legacies of post-Civil War years, the Reconstruction era, “and its connection to contemporary events and issues to explore how these themes still resonate today” (National Museum of African American History and Culture, 2021, para. 4), somber pasts and presents of “voter suppression, racially motivated violence and unlawful incarceration” (Smithsonian, 2021, para. 3). We observe a pew from Presbyterian Church on Edisto Island, South Carolina, where formerly enslaved Black congregants “sat in segregated seating in the balcony” until, following the Civil War, they “moved to the main floor and held their own services, led by an African American minister,” and later “established a school at the church” (Smithsonian, 2021, para. 11). We view the black helmet Bree Newsome wore in 2015 when she “climbed the flagpole on the grounds of the South Carolina State House and removed a Confederate flag in the immediate aftermath of the massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston” (Smithsonian, 2021, para. 15). We pause at a final display in the softly lit exhibit space.
Carter stands just in front and to the side. We stand just behind him, and looking into the display case, we recall a bevy of breaking news with fresh, familiar grief: “a bag of Skittles and a can of Arizona iced tea” (Botelho, 2012, para. 1); “George Zimmerman Found Not Guilty of Murder in Trayvon Martin's Death” (Botelho & Yan, 2013); President Obama, 5 days later, speaking from the White House: “When Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son” (Memmott, 2013, para. 1). We stand together, looking into the display case. Trayvon's hoodie sits behind glass now, mounted on a display board that tilts back slightly. The arms…folded forward, as they might be in a moment of quiet reflection. A museum official stands nearby, gently advising each visitor as they arrive that no pictures of the hoodie, and Trayvon's other items, are allowed. That's how his parents want it. (Roig-Franzia, 2022, paras. 35–36) Thus while hate cannot be terminated, It can be transformed Into a love that lets us live. (lines 21–23)
We choose to live in this predominantly white college town, to engage in literacy research and teaching at a predominantly white university, and we wonder in and with our work every day, entangled in and with our lives, how our research and teaching with youth may transform, may unfold new possibilities that extend beyond this community, may generate more just learning opportunities that challenge persistent and ongoing racism encountered by students, by children, by our children.
We consider how, the night before Carmela's first day of 10th grade, her first day of in-person school since eighth grade, we had to sit Carmela down and explain how earlier that evening, at a parent meeting for an extracurricular activity, a parent volunteer told Joanne that Carmela needed to “do something about her hair,” that Carmela's long braids were not going to “fit” as part of the required uniform for another extracurricular group she participated in.
Now home, we retreated to the couch in the basement, grappling with what happened as we drafted the email to the extracurricular group's adult advisor:
Carmela should not be discriminated against, nor made to change her hairstyle, to participate.
Carmela's choice as a Black girl to wear her hair in braids should be affirmed by the adults she interacts with in a school program.
The policing of Black students’ hair is not a new problem.
We added a link to the news report, now unanticipatedly urgent, and close to home, of Andrew Johnson, the Black and Puerto Rican high school wrestler forced to cut his dreadlocks to participate in a match in New Jersey (Washington, 2019). We shared a quote from the story, seeking to convey just one example of a complicated narrative that tangles anguish and joy, that there is a long history of white people trying to legislate and regulate the gravity-defying, shape-shifting glory of black hair. White people may think their rules are neutral, but they come from a mindset that, consciously or not, defines white hair as normal and black hair as deviant. Black hair must be controlled, conform or cut down. (Washington, 2019, para. 53)
Within the hour, the advisor both wrote back and called Joanne's cell phone. They assured us that they appreciated us bringing the parent volunteer's comment to their attention, that they wanted to reiterate that the parent's comment was inappropriate, that Carmela—who while we talked had laid out her outfit, spread out her new brightly colored binders and folders across the dining room table, organized the binders and folders by class subject, and packed her lunch for that first school day—that Carmela was a welcome and valued member of the group, that they would address the comment the next night at a scheduled meeting with the parent and additional parent volunteers attending and assisting, and that the parent's comment was not reflective of the group's stance.
We recall heading upstairs, and interrupting Carmela's back-to-school preparations to remind her to please tell us when a parent or any person makes comments about her hair, about her beautiful braids she had been so excited to wear as she prepared for the first time in more than 17 months to walk through the high school's entranceway, to navigate hallways and linger at the edge of the cafeteria before glimpsing friends new and familiar, and asking how was your summer.
On a weekday morning the following spring, close to the end of the school year, Joanne told Carmela how much she appreciated the story authored by a student in the school newspaper that Carmela had brought home. Joanne shared that she read the entirety of the story about disparities in the number of students of color enrolled at the high school in Advanced Placement (AP) courses. Now, an hour into the school day, when Carmela should have been taking the AP exam in world history, her first AP exam, she called, and then texted, story simultaneously rushed and hesitating.
There weren’t enough tests.
They didn’t have one for her.
She could go home. Or she could go back to class.
A classmate, she wrote in the text message, “was one of the 2 or 3 people who were smart enough to run to the front of the gym and grab an unoccupied test from a table before we realized they were gonna have us leave.”
It wasn’t intentional, school officials told us later. They were short staffed. No one counted the test booklets. By the time they got to the end of the alphabet, they realized there weren’t enough for each student. Carmela was one of a handful of students who didn’t get one. She could take the test at a future date.
We sat together, 16 months prior, Joanne, Vaughn, Carmela, and Carter, watching TV at home on that living room couch by the window that overlooks the park as Gorman, the National Youth Poet Laureate, delivered a hope-filled poem at President Biden's inauguration from the steps of the U.S. Capitol, 2 weeks after we watched together from the living room and tried to understand with one another why crowds of people stormed the Capitol. Sixteen months later, Gorman (2022) would write, in the wake, as we may think with Sharpe (2016), of Buffalo and Uvalde: We carry tragedy, terrifying and true. And yet none of it is new;… …We must be altered— That we must differ or die, That we must triumph or try. Thus while hate cannot be terminated, It can be transformed Into a love that lets us live. May we not just grieve, but give: May we not just ache, but act;… (lines 4–5, lines 18–25)
The discovery was a supernova, a luminous burst of dust and gas “caught by sheer luck shortly after the star exploded” (Pultarova, 2022, para. 2). Astronomers describe a supernova as “the biggest explosion that humans have ever seen” (NASA Science, 2021, para. 1), “a brilliant burst of light” (Thompson, 2022, para 1). In their study of supernovae, astronomers “better understand that we live in an expanding universe, one that is growing at an ever increasing rate” (Bernoskie et al., 2018, para. 8), and have learned through supernovae the urgent, life-giving nature of exploding stars: that stars are the universe's factories. Stars generate the chemical elements needed to make everything in our universe. At their cores, stars convert simple elements like hydrogen into heavier elements. These heavier elements, such as carbon and nitrogen, are the elements needed for life. (NASA Science, 2021, para. 11)
We think, across these tellings, these narratives of daily sense-making, about how “a supernova can light the sky up for weeks, and the massive transfer of matter and energy leaves behind a very different star” (National Geographic, n.d., para. 11), about how “all of us carry the remnants of these distant explosions within our own bodies” (para. 2). What may be the potential of a different, intense, possible love, a love we may scarcely know and may yet discern—what we think of as a cosmic love, an explosive love, in the way of stars exploding in the universe, as life-giving, as traveling with us, as carried within us. In envisioning literacy at a crossroads, we wonder with Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist who told a New York Times reporter of the potency of what may be newly seen with different lenses: Rigby, speaking of the supernova unexpectedly viewed through the James Webb Space Telescope, said, “That was always out there… We just had to build a telescope to go see what was there. I get a very similar feeling of maybe people in a broken world managing to do something right and to see some of the majesty that's out there” (Roston, 2022).
Eighteen years ago, we stood together in the ground-floor foyer of a historic home on Delaware Avenue in Buffalo, once owned by the publisher of the Buffalo Evening News, the paper Joanne read each morning with her dad before they drove to the high school where he taught science and Joanne was a student, the paper where Joanne spent a summer on the news desk as a college intern. Family, neighbors, and friends traveled from New York City, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Illinois, Georgia, Florida, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Ontario, Canada, to our wedding. They formed a circle around us as we moved to the music, our first dance. We recall holding tightly to the love in that room, to people in that room, perhaps unanticipating in the ways we discern now, years later, that the moment was at once fleeting and forever, to be replayed across time, across our lives, in artifacts, in conversations, and in the lyrics of the song we danced to that began: There is a universe that can’t be seen It's just a feeling if you know what I mean A delectable dimension undetectable by sight It’ll fill up your heart in the dead of the night. Some say that it's an astral plane Can’t be described can’t be explained The world exploded into love all around me The world exploded into love all around me And everytime I take a look around me, I have to smile. (Schneider, 2001, stanzas 1–2)
Vaughn first played the song for Joanne at home in Brooklyn, in that third-floor apartment above the nail salon on Washington Avenue, where running late on weekday mornings we’d jog the two blocks to Vanderbilt Avenue to catch the B69 bus to work, to City Public. Joanne hadn’t heard of Bob Schneider, the singer-songwriter from Austin, Texas, who recorded the song on his first studio album. The somber juxtaposition of the album's title, Lonelyland, rendering the plaintive declaration of the song we danced to then, and think with and hope with now, even more palpable: “The world exploded into love.”
Carmela and Carter ate their lunch outside at a picnic table, texting us photos of themselves smiling in the sunshine. Then they walked the quarter mile, past the College Bookstore with university gear in its windows, to Target, where they browsed the aisles together before walking back home, calling Vaughn's mom on speaker on the way to ask if she had any photos of the two of us she could send them.
Six months before, this past February, we visited Austin, the singer-songwriter's hometown. Vaughn had trained since November for his sixth marathon. Now, just 3 miles into the 26.2-mile race, he fumbled with his runner's pouch; finding his phone, he called Joanne. He’d gone out faster than he anticipated. The hills were tougher than he had trained for.
Let me talk to Carmela.
Let me talk to Carter.
The next day, Carmela and Carter called us into the dining room. The photos that Vaughn's mom, Grandmom, had found and texted Carmela, culled from albums gathered across the years and kept, at home, on her coffee table, played in a slideshow on Carmela's school Chromebook, next to a store-bought card, to celebrate our 18th wedding anniversary.
More than an hour after he thought he’d finish, Joanne, Carmela, and Carter greeted Vaughn at the top of that last steep hill, on Red River Street, and ran those few closing steps, past the Texas Capitol, toward the finish.
Before moving away from New York City, on a weekday evening, we rode the Q train into Manhattan. We’d bought tickets to Bob Schneider's show. We made our way to the middle of the dance floor. We weren’t so much dancing with one another. We weren’t so much dancing with everyone. We danced—“all of us carry the remnants”—and wished that he’d play the song, our wedding song. He didn’t play the song.
It's not easy to share these glimpses into our lives. Writing, revising, reliving, (re)considering. Yet we share these tellings, as we navigate the tensions within and across them, and we think about the ongoing work we do, the work we choose to do. We think with Razfar and Smith's (2022) algorithm of love, with Ohito et al.'s (2019) consideration that “love forces reckoning with changing and being changed” (p. 148); we think with explosive love, and recall NASA scientists who, sharing the news of the supernova, gathered at the Goddard Space Flight Center, named for the physicist and rocket scientist who, years prior, remarked to peers, “It is difficult to say just what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow” (Goddard, 2023, p. 11). We think with how Pultarova (2022), reporting of the supernova viewed by the James Webb Space Telescope, shared, “The detection could possibly open up an entirely new area of research possibilities, scientists say” (para. 1). We wonder what literacy research might become, and we assert a cosmic love, an explosive love as the lens through which we may envision and enact the literacy research and practice we need now.
A cosmic love, an explosive love as stance-taking provokes new possibilities for research, teaching, and learning; even beyond, given the urgency of these times, we offer implications for literacy research, teaching, learning, and living. We assert these possibilities across two interconnected approaches: these tellings as beginnings, and our lives are entangled in our work. In these approaches, we point to opportunities for (re)conceptualizing prisms through which to engage in the work of literacy research and practice as we recognize, respond to, and build from both joy and heartache urgently present, across times past, current, and to come.
These tellings as beginnings involves listening for, listening with, learning from, and amplifying the experiences, perspectives, pasts, presents, and futures of children, youth, families, and communities. These tellings as beginnings compels us to consider how each of our lives are entangled in our work within and across varied contexts, histories, and identities as literacy researchers, teachers, and teacher educators. We envisage that literacy researchers, teachers, and teacher educators may take up these interconnected approaches, these instantiations of explosive love as research methodologies, curriculum design, and teaching practice, in the following ways and in ways yet imagined—what may it mean to
reimagine the roles and forms of positionalities and positionality statements as tellings, acknowledging, questioning, and (re)considering how our lives are entangled in our work; support children and youth in generating tellings that center their own perspectives, refusing methodologies, pedagogies, and practices that center whiteness, assume criminalization, and delimit access to educational opportunities; affirm the range of ways of being and bodies knowing, moving, and existing across contexts; reassert the urgency of supporting students in reclaiming childhood and adolescence on their own terms, in ways encouraging learning with and alongside children, youth, families, and communities; develop awareness of critical issues as they unfold in the world while remaining open to possibility and unknowing, acknowledging what we may not yet fully know or understand as we establish and nurture relationships across contexts of schools and communities; and reject static notions of justice; affirm these critical tellings of and with communities, and educators, and researchers, particularly across moments unfamiliar; seek to experience, examine, and enact possibilities for disrupting injustices through our research, in our daily lives, in our everyday living.
What may it mean—explosive love as research and practice that reflects, that refracts, a love that's more than an illusion, a love that climbs uphill, a love that honors so many tellings told and, achingly, to come while simultaneously generating new perceptions of what's possible at this crossroads: where we find ourselves.
Supplemental Material
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Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-jlr-10.1177_1086296X231178515 for These Tellings: Explosive Love as Literacy Research by Vaughn W. M. Watson and Joanne E. Marciano in Journal of Literacy Research
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Supplemental material, sj-docx-2-jlr-10.1177_1086296X231178515 for These Tellings: Explosive Love as Literacy Research by Vaughn W. M. Watson and Joanne E. Marciano in Journal of Literacy Research
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Supplemental material, sj-docx-3-jlr-10.1177_1086296X231178515 for These Tellings: Explosive Love as Literacy Research by Vaughn W. M. Watson and Joanne E. Marciano in Journal of Literacy Research
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Supplemental material, sj-docx-4-jlr-10.1177_1086296X231178515 for These Tellings: Explosive Love as Literacy Research by Vaughn W. M. Watson and Joanne E. Marciano in Journal of Literacy Research
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Supplemental material, sj-docx-5-jlr-10.1177_1086296X231178515 for These Tellings: Explosive Love as Literacy Research by Vaughn W. M. Watson and Joanne E. Marciano in Journal of Literacy Research
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
References
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