Pedagogy as care: Love,loss,and learning in the world politics classroom

Abstract

In this article, we elaborate pedagogies of care, contemplating what it means to teach with and about care in the world politics classroom, situated within the neoliberal, colonial, heteropatriarchal, white western academy. Further, we actively reflect on what it means to work caringly and carefully in practice, exploring pedagogy as care. What are the dilemmas that arise for scholars and teachers, differently positioned in the academy, who seek to teach with and about care in the context of a world politics education? How can we teach with care in often uncaring educational institutions that are hostile to staff and students, particularly those from racialized and other oppressed and marginalized communities? How are our practices and methods of teaching also acts of care? Building on interdisciplinary feminist literature on care, we argue that caring pedagogies can disrupt academic hierarchies and foster intergenerational connection. We also position pedagogy as care, acknowledging that as we teach, we mourn and honor/care for antecedents (both human and more-than-human), nourish our present selves and those with whom we interact, and build community/care for (visions/versions of) the future. Our intervention contributes to ongoing conversations about opening our classrooms as spaces of radical possibility in contemporary higher education.

Introduction

In this article, we—as writers, teachers, and learners—take as a starting point that our pedagogies are not divorced from our own memories of learning, or from the experiences of learners we care about. We revisit these stories with a curiosity about how the care and carelessness we experienced and witnessed has shaped our own practices and relations in the classroom now. In these accounts, we acknowledge that pedagogy is both mimetic—manifesting in that “oh yes, please, I want to do that too” that surges when we watch or hear about practices that intrigue us—and it can form in opposition to our past experiences and present encounters, like pushing against the wall of a swimming pool to gain momentum and swim in a direction that feels right for us.

Specifically, we ask: What are the dilemmas that arise for scholars and teachers who seek to teach with and about care in the context of a world politics education? How can we teach with care in often uncaring educational institutions? In what ways are our practices and methods of teaching also acts of care? These are questions that necessarily invite us to make peace with the ambiguities and complexities of care (Olarte-Sierra, 2023; Tronto, 1993) and pedagogy alike (Motta and Bennett, 2018; Timperley and Schick, 2022). They are not questions we will answer with a prescriptive “how to,” especially given the differences within and among educational institutions, teaching philosophies and practices (Mutlu, 2015), labor circumstances (Ivancheva et al., 2019), and inequalities in contract structures and opportunities (Krystalli, 2023). Instead, we focus on narrating both care and pedagogy through encounter, acknowledging that teachers are not merely in the classroom to share subject-matter knowledge, but to “convey how one might align oneself to desire, to curiosity, to a search for knowledge and healing” (Inayatullah, 2022: 7). As we make our offering of what care can look like in some classrooms, and reflect on the dissonances, contradictions, and structural limits of care in our own practices, we invite readers to bring their own classrooms and experiences into the text, to push against the wall with what does not appeal and to experiment with what resonates.

Laura’s story

When I was four years old,

They tried to test my IQ.

They showed me a picture of three oranges and a pear,

They said, ‘Which one is different, it does not belong?’

They taught me different is wrong.”

Ani DiFranco, My IQ, 1993 (Righteous Babe Records)

My child ¹ and I—both neurodivergent, both “twice exceptional” (a term used by educators to describe people who are both “gifted” and who have specific learning support needs or disabilities)—have learned, through schooling and socialization, that different is wrong. We have made ourselves small in the face of such ignorance and we have folded away criticisms and we have clawed our way through long and difficult days because we know we are different (we are wrong, we do not belong). We are both, in our own ways, trying to learn otherwise now—trying to unlearn a lifetime of often self-imposed limits and masking and disconnection, trying to live unbounded.

“Our lives we have carefully constructed from watermelon sugar and then traveled to the length of our dreams.” The opening line from In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan has lived rent-free in my head for 30 years. Until recently, I never reckoned with the damage that it did to me, being hived off from the swarm of other students and isolated in an anteroom with a pile of books to read and report on. While I perceived it—still perceive it, perhaps perversely—as a form of care to be identified as “in need” of enrichment and extension, to be identified as “in need” of something that was going to function as a lifeline to tether me to the work that my peers seemed to find so easy to navigate but to which my connection felt so very tenuous, I can also acknowledge how it harmed me, as I repeatedly flew restlessly (often recklessly) against the glass that separated me from them. This pedagogy was careful, care-full, and yet it hurt. It reminded me, 3 days a week for an hour at a time, that I did not belong (I was different, I was wrong).

At first, I didn’t connect my experience of this feeling of otherness (feeling different, feeling wrong) to my child’s encounters with formal education. Our shared delight in words, in reading together and their obvious understanding of and delight in the world, meant I was ill-prepared for their struggles with writing, with planning, with task initiation. My child was so like me that it was confounding when they were not like me, as I was an avid mark-maker from an early age. As I have said repeatedly, across different fora, I don’t know who I am if I’m not writing. My child is the opposite: they have gradually retreated first from writing, then from reading, then from school altogether, until they reached the point we are at now where attendance each day cannot be presumed, has to be gently coaxed, because their brain is telling them they feel wrong (they are different, they do not belong). I spend many hours wondering what care looks like in this context: what pedagogy can connect my child with learning? How do I hold my child’s heart with care while insisting that they present themselves in environments that are overstimulating, overwhelming, dysregulating—environments that are fundamentally hostile to who they are and how they encounter the world?

So now I reflect not on what we have learned from growing up, from being educated, as neurodivergent humans in a neurotypical world but what we can learn—what I am currently learning, with care as my curriculum. Receiving a formal diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder and, simultaneously, a diagnosis of autistic burnout, has required that I put effort into healing and regulating my nervous system, because autistic burnout is deeply and substantively a function of dysregulation. The vulnerability I now acknowledge in my body shapes my efforts to build community, my engagement with classes, and my conversations with colleagues. I consider my pedagogy an act of care, enacted care, as I learn to care for layers of myself from which I was previously completely disconnected. I am learning to feel my feelings in my whole body and to learn from my body when I am feeling unsafe or anxious or joyful. I am trying to pass on this pedagogy of the body, this pedagogy of care, to my child, as a way of countering their own feelings—which I am also unlearning—of being “in need,” “too much,” different (wrong). Perhaps a pedagogy of care is learning that we belong.

I carry with me my musings on belonging as I begin to think about pedagogy as care. To think about teaching and learning through the prism of belonging is to think pedagogy otherwise in the neoliberal academy, which attempts “to produce a culture of hierarchy, competition and individualism through the eradication of cultures of solidarity, care and collectivity” (Motta and Bennett, 2018: 634). There is a reason that Lorgia García Peña described “community as rebellion” (2022) and, while the experiences that García Peña describes are particular to the women of color for whom and of whom she writes, it is an act of resistance to the strictures and structures of the neoliberal academy for all of us engaged in pedagogy in higher education to foster solidarity and kinship in our classrooms. Belonging is a relational concept, implying the creation and fostering of connections, cohort building, the encouragement of friendships and solidarity. These are all central aspirations in my pedagogy; belonging as a dimension and a practice of care guides my sense of pedagogy as care in two distinct but related ways.

First, I describe the concept of belonging using the metaphor of prism rather than lens because belonging is necessarily spectrumatic and plural. Prisms diffract light, and thinking through belonging can diffract both identity and privilege, revealing how these vectors of power intersect, combine, and are (re)configured in different contexts to shape both the individual and the systems with which they interact. This is not to say that I encourage students to parse the various aspects of their identities, expecting to tease apart the whole into discrete categories or markers of difference, but rather that I ask students to think with me about identity and privilege and how these analytical concepts can both enable sense-making (of belonging, and access, and participation, and other concepts and practices that travel well from the personal to the political) and nurture reflection.

Second, belonging surfaces for me when I think about pedagogy as a community-building praxis. In addition to thinking about how we (the “we” of my seminar room, lecture theatere, virtual supervision meeting) are brought into relations of (un)belonging through pedagogy, there is a broader theory-practice that inspires my efforts, which is perhaps best articulated as a form of intergenerational community-building. Sketching out the wider communities to which I belong, to which I feel a sense of indebtedness and also with which I feel a sense of kinship, is an intentional part of my pedagogy. It is a way of caring for those who worked in this space, to create and hold this space, long before I stumbled in and a way of caring for those who will come after, with much more interesting insights to share and important work to do: in this context, I am a vector of connection, bring new possibilities of belonging into relation with each other. Sara Ahmed writes of citational practice and reading recommendations as “feminist bricks . . .the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings” (Ahmed, 2017: 16) but it is also the raw material of our selves; the intellectual selves who will live in these dwellings are created in relation and through the work that we do together with the intellectual resources we gather and which nourish us. Academic work—including academic teaching - is necessarily a communal endeavor because we carry with us the sharp insights, pithy quotes, and revelations of those who shape our engagement. We are never alone. The method and practice of teaching (as pedagogy can be described), at least at the tertiary level, is always then a practice of care—of enacting belonging, of building community, of bringing past and future into relation, of opening our selves to new connections and affinities and, by so doing, of creating new worlds in which these affinities can flourish.

Roxani’s story

When adults asked “what I wanted to be when I grow up,” I would reply that I wanted to be a teacher. My childhood desires were not always met with trust. “You’ll change your mind,” grown-ups in my orbit would say, fully expecting me to want to be a ballerina instead.

In the meantime, I would line up my stuffed animals on the stairs of my childhood home in order to teach them. I would assign homework, which I would do in different colour pencil for each animal, and which I then corrected in a red pen that made me feel knowledgeable and officious. The rabbit was a bad speller, the koala struggled with math. The panda was preternaturally excellent at everything.

In playing the teacher, I adopted behaviors that were common in primary education in Greece, where I was born and raised. The classroom was to be a space of absolute silence. If anyone were caught whispering or passing notes, they would have to stand at the corner, facing the wall, with their classmates looking at them. The teacher was the ultimate authority, and so was the government-issued textbook. We were to demonstrate our learning by repeating the statements in the textbook verbatim in our written exams. Deviating from the textbook—let alone critiquing it—would result in points off.

This style of rote learning was called αποστήθιση, consisting of the preposition “από” and the noun “στήθος.” The literal translation is “from the heart,” or learning by heart, even if there was little heart involved in this rote repetition. The more colloquial way by which this style of rote learning was known among teachers and students alike was παπαγαλία, which means to parrot.

Nearly three decades later, I have traded parroting knowledge by the Mediterranean for becoming attuned to the movements of geese over the North Sea. I teach university students about the politics of nature and place, which often involves sitting beside them in gardens and looking at the sky or the ground, listening for song or smelling for evidence of decay. Students and I share our “place biographies,” and wonder what it means to love and care for—and be cared for by—a place. The answers to these questions cannot be found in a government-approved textbook, nor can they be memorized and repeated to perfection. This is learning from and with the heart, rather than “by heart.” The change in prepositions is not always easy, nor does the heartful invitation automatically obliterate hierarchy in the classroom or address all pedagogical dilemmas. A pedagogy of care is one of “sitting with”—sitting with each other, with trees and with birds, with curiosity and with doubt, and with the kind of attention that brings the world into focus.

If a pedagogy of care is sometimes about how we sit with knowledge, other times it is about what we consider worthy of teaching and learning. On the eighth month of the COVID-19 pandemic, twenty-one students gathered in a Microsoft Teams channel for my undergraduate seminar on Feminist Theories in Global Politics. Some were in their childhood bedrooms, others were in dorm rooms at the University of St Andrews, unmade beds visible behind them, laundry drying on a rack at the edge of the screen. Occasionally, a parent or flatmate walked into the frame, then shuffled quickly out of view.

It is as a feminist teacher that I feel most alive (Krystalli and Enloe, 2020), most engaged, most hopeful. That semester, however, the prospect of teaching filled me with doubt. Carrying questions of patriarchy and violence from week to week felt weighty at a distance from one another. How could we talk about misogynistic violence while my students inhabit bedrooms that became some of the sites of it? How could I ask my students to be precise in the naming of oppressions—and then hang up the call and leave us each to confront the ghost echoes of patriarchy in the presence of our half-dried laundry and half-drunk cups of tea?

Feminism is not just a series of terrible stories about gendered violence. It is also the story of resistance to oppression, and of the joy and care that sustain feminist movements (Berry and Lake, 2020; Hobart and Kneese, 2020; Krystalli and Schulz, 2022). I became curious about how experiences of learning and teaching might be different if I centered that care in my pedagogy, and, specifically, in the curriculum (Manivannan, 2022; Manivannan et al. 2023).

Both specificity and naming matter when it comes to understanding the workings of power and the effects of violence. It is no surprise to a student interested in nature that classroom discussions frequently return to climate change, just as a student of critical approaches to peacebuilding expects to be part of conversations that specifically name the harms and legacies of violence. Yet, as the pandemic continued to unfold, I felt a sense of urgency around imagining a pedagogy and a curriculum that is more than “damage-centered” (Tuck, 2009). Reflecting on “a persistent trend in research on Native communities” (Tuck, 2009: 409), Eve Tuck critiques practices that invite people to “only speak from that space in the margin that is a sign of deprivation, a wound, an unfulfilled longing” (hooks quoted in Tuck, 2009: 413). She offers that “one alternative to damage-centered research is to craft our research to capture desire instead of damage” (Tuck, 2009: 416). “Desire, yes, accounts for the loss and despair,” Tuck writes, “but also the hope, the visions, the wisdom of lived lives and communities. Desire is involved with the not yet and, at times, the not any-more” (Tuck, 2009: 417, emphasis in original).

Tuck’s insights on research also apply to the realm of pedagogy and to the possibilities of curriculum design. The students and I read Lola Olufemi’s Feminism Interrupted, in which she frames feminism “as a political project about what could be” (Olufemi, 2020: 1). We take up her invitation to consider and act on the ways in which feminism offers us not only freedom from certain oppressions, but also the possibility of freedom to (Olufemi, 2020: 9)—freedom to imagine certain worlds, be, feel, and exist in different kinds of relations. In week 1 of the class, the students begin to keep a log of what feminism means to them, tracking “freedom from” and “freedom to.” We return to this log throughout the semester, watching the “freedom to” column become more populated as we practice approaching theory as generative of worlds, not only as critical of them. In the words of Sara Ahmed (2017: 2): “If we become feminists because of what the world is NOT, what kind of world are we building?”

Answering Ahmed’s question requires that we look to different sources of inspiration and that we read our critical texts with an orientation toward the worlds they can bring to bear. In navigating the task of thinking about relationships to nature and place that encompass care, mutuality, and nourishment, we read Azra Hromadžić’s storytelling of and through rivers in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in which she remains attentive to how rivers carry the stories of war and death alongside “revival, sociality, meaning-making, entertainment, and joy” (2022: 268). Academic texts are not the only companions on this journey of creating a curriculum that accounts for care alongside harm. Students tell stories of how their grandmothers have tended to gardens, narrating not only how people have cared for place, but how place can make humans feel cared for too. I invite students to keep “care diaries,” in which they log moments in which they care and feel cared for by friends, neighbors, flatmates, family, and strangers alike. We then consider together the contradictions and absences. In a class on the Politics of Nature and Place, how many of us felt cared for by sunlight, by the breeze, by the ebbing tide on a winter morning? Why might we have neglected to record this as care, and what does this say about our imagination of care and nature alike?

Assembling a curriculum—of academic texts and sunlight, of gardens and grandmothers—that offers kindling for care is a tightrope act. The people whose words and practices bring vitality and care to the classroom caution against the misinterpretation of what a desire-centered (or life-centered, or care-centered framework) entails. Desire-centered work “is certainly not a call for another “d” word: denial. It is not a call to paint everything as peachy, as fine, as over” (Tuck, 2009: 419). In weaving a path towards a curriculum of care, I embrace a pedagogy of “alongside-ness” (Krystalli, 2024), which carries the violence and vitality of this world in the same embrace.

Monika’s story

Growing up, I moved in and out of schools a lot, as my family travelled between India and overseas, thanks to my father’s job. There was excitement and adventure, but also much heartbreak and loss, alongside the fatigue of starting anew every few years and figuring out how I (un)belonged. As I was entering my final high school years, we moved from Delhi to Kampala, Uganda. I landed in an international school where the prevailing racialized, gendered, and class dynamics exhausted me.

The teachers at this school, however, surprised me. In Delhi, my teachers had been distant figures of authority, demanding absolute respect and obedience, and any perceived “deviance” usually meant verbal and/or physical punishment. Here, the teachers were mostly approachable, respected students, encouraged critical thinking, and handled student critique far better. Many attempted to foster a sense of community in class through dialogue, listening, and storytelling.

Mr G. was my “home room” and English teacher. He had an amazing ability to immerse us into our readings and illuminate their connections to us and our worlds. He also had a great, self-deprecating sense of humor, often sharing hilarious anecdotes from his life—glimmers of his “private” self that I did not expect to see in class. For the first time, I had a teacher that appeared to be a whole person.

One afternoon, as we sat reading, Mr G. lifted his head from his small, lamp-lit desk and, gesturing with one hand towards the window on his right, said: “just across the border, a few hundred kilometeres away, there are people dying, people being killed. . . and here we are, reading Shakespeare. . .” His voice tapered off, and his hands made a slow, deliberate gesture of hacking something with an invisible machete. He was, I realized, referring to the armed conflict raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Uganda’s neighbor to the west. Shocked, I saw in that moment a glimpse of Mr G.’s self that appeared tormented about his—our—proximity to the violence he described, and perhaps his complicity in keeping it obscured from our view; how he—we—carried on as if it were not happening at all. His gesture, his words, and his anguished face in the soft glow of his desk lamp, are all seared into my memory. In being so vulnerable, Mr G. had revealed a flash of a kind of knowledge-making and (re)learning that was not possible through books alone; that required a degree of vulnerability, and had to be dialogical, co-created in community, and rooted in care for one another.

Decades later, these themes of vulnerability, care, and community sit at the heart of my own pedagogy as a woman scholar-educator of color embedded in white western academia. I have embraced what Nagar calls “[a] relationality embedded in radical vulnerability [that] strives to internalize that our self is intensely co-constituted and entangled with the [student] other.” It posits that our learning and becoming relies deeply “on what each one of us is prepared to give to the collective journey that seeks to unite the I and we with the you and they” (2019: 31).

Embracing this form of relationality has/ does not come easily. As an Early Career Academic (ECA), I focused on how to “become” an “academic,” and my teaching approach reflected this. Onwuachi-Willig (2012: 142) highlights the conflict between a scholar’s sense of identity, and their sense of the identity they need to project, to be seen as “worthy” by their institutions, noting that this work is particularly onerous for women scholar-educators of color. As an ECA, I felt this burden acutely and prioritized acting “professional” with my students to project scholarly “authority.” My curriculums centered marginalized viewpoints in Security Studies, yet I hesitated from uttering the “R-Word” (Sen, 2021: 136), and refrained from making references to my “private” self in class—my motherhood, my young(er) kids, my immigrant condition, my experiences as a racialized woman scholar in the white-dominant and highly masculinized area of Security Studies/IR. I feared the risk of making myself “ultravisible” as a woman of color and of positioning myself as a representative of “my kind” (Barthwal-Datta, 2023; Onwuachi-Willig, 2012: 142). The complicity of my broader discipline/ institution(s) in their silence on race/racism further compounded these risks (Ibid).

These efforts left me depleted, dissatisfied, and somewhat lonely. I aspired to create a classroom where care and community were centered, and where the possibility to reflect on our personal-political experiences to explore (otherwise neglected) questions in/ about global politics, was nurtured. I worried about the potential impact of my aversion to saying the “R-word” in class on students, especially students of color, in relation to how they perceived their own experiences of and insights about IR/global politics. Sen notes that the teaching, researching and theorizing of global politics is a thoroughly positioned encounter, and requires acknowledging not only “the who but also how (i.e., under what conditions) the discipline is encountered and experienced.” By recognizing that mainstream IR theories are rooted in “the white, male lived experience and intuitive understanding of politics and society” (Lake in Sen, 2021: 137), it becomes possible to make room for and value “the efforts of non-white scholars and students to see themselves reflected in the teaching/learning of the discipline [. . .].”

My own education as a critical IR scholar-educator (still) meant I had very little to guide me on this front. What helped me enormously were the writings of Black and other women scholars of color, and their stories and visions of anti-racist, feminist pedagogies and lifeworlds in academia and global politics (e.g., Ahmed, 2007, 2017; Anzaldúa and Moraga, 1983; Hooks, 1994; Lorde, 1984; Mohanty, 1984). These powerful and illuminating texts/voices showed me how to overcome my hesitations and foreground questions of race, alongside gender, class, and caste in classroom discussions, towards illuminating (more effectively) their (inter)connections with global politics.

Held by these writings, I began exploring ways to co-weave a relationality rooted in vulnerability, care and community with students. In introductory lectures, I began incorporating references to my racialized, mother-immigrant-of-color, upper-caste-Hindu settler status in the settler-colony of Australia, the academic institution, and Security Studies/IR. I invited students to consider their own positionalities in these lands as they engaged with issues such as migration and refugees, climate change, food security, humanitarian intervention, and more. In seminars, I became more vocal about the role of race and other intersecting systems of oppression, and how they create and fuel injustices and inequalities in global politics. Where relevant, I brought in insights from my own experiences in different contexts, as an invitation to students to reflect on, and share, any insights that might open up for them, through their own experiences in and beyond the classroom.

Radical vulnerability is “a collectively embraced mode in search of the shared creative power it has the potential to enable. . .[where] the singular relearns to breathe and grow differently in the plural.” (Nagar, 2019: 31, 30). Before long, I witnessed (more) students open up in class, in ways that I had not previously (e.g., sharing anecdotes from family life/ experiences in community and institutional settings, including those of being negatively racialized; vocally reaching out to one another in recognition and solidarity across different issues and experiences; connecting readings to local/ global issues or their own contexts etc.) In such moments, the scope to care about, and for, one another appeared to have become heightened. Encouraged, I began to more directly incorporate discussions of vulnerability and care as vectors for community-building in the classroom, embedding them in broader efforts to illuminate relationality alongside the diversity of our experiences. For instance, in introductory lectures, I ask students to share in pairs one key experience/ life aspect they believe will shape their engagement in class on issues of global politics. In subsequent seminars (approx. 25–30 students), I invite students to deepen their reflections, and share them at their table groups, and if willing, with the rest of the class. When they do so, students often find others with whom their thoughts and feelings resonate. At other times, contrasting views generate collective mediations and reflections. I then invite students to consider how in and through these moments, we build community, and emphasize the shared responsibility to contribute and engage with one another respectfully and in/with care, towards an enriching co-learning experience. I layer this with weekly in-class “check-ins” in pairs or small groups, and remind students they are able to switch tables and work with a student/group they have not yet worked with.

At the start of every teaching encounter, I still feel a measure of anxiety as I hope that students will reciprocate these efforts. I recognize that regardless of my efforts, classrooms do not feel uniformly safe to all, and that there are differing degrees of “safety” (Schemenauer in Parisi et al. 2012: 418). I (re)iterate to students that it is up to them what, and how much, they wish to give to their shared journey. The practice of radical vulnerability, after all, is “not a one-way street of endless generosity and openness; it is equally about understanding the simultaneous coexistence of inhumanity and humanity within each one of us. It is about reminding ourselves and one another of the violent histories and geographies that we inherit and embody despite our desires to disown them” (Nagar, 2019: 43). To this extent, centring vulnerability in my pedagogy as a way of caring for my students—and myself—is also a pedagogy of hope.

Towards a theory and praxis of care in/through/as pedagogy

As we passed drafts of this essay back and forth across continents and time zones, we asked each other: “How are you, dear one? What has brought you joy today? How is your heart?” There have been times when ill health, fatigue, or caring responsibilities have caused one or more of us to step away from this project and leave the other(s) to carry it forward; we have enacted care through our collaboration as we have reflected on care in our pedagogy and as always the work we have co-produced feels richer and more meaningful for it. As we have become interwoven, as a thinking-feeling-writing collective, it is not so surprising that the themes that arise from each of our reflections resonate so clearly and powerfully with each other. In this brief concluding section, we sit with—and invite you to sit with—the themes that we think animate our theory and praxis of pedagogy as care: themes of belonging, of being in community alongside and with plural others, and of radical vulnerability.

Pedagogy as care animates ideas of belonging because learning is communal, relational. Experiencing (un)belonging opens worlds—of wonder and of pain. As a practice of care or a care-full encounter, pedagogy can create hospitable spaces in which to collaborate and co-produce learning about our selves, our many others, and the relations between the subjects who inhabit our worlds. But even with care as a guide and an outcome, pedagogy can exclude and marginalize: belonging cannot be willed but must be felt, and the burdens of feeling unbelonging are unevenly distributed in any community. Attention to the ways that belonging rests on and reproduces power keeps us accountable to the communities that hold us and which we hope to nourish.

Illuminating relationality through vulnerability has affective power—it “compels us to not just understand the world as relational, but feel the world as kin.” (Tynan, 2021: 600, emphasis added). Radical vulnerability is rooted in trust and honesty, and is guided by a shared belief that while this path is uncertain and risky, the enrichment and meaning along the way makes it worthwhile; it takes time to foster, and cannot be demanded or taken for granted (Nagar, 2019: 38, 31). Care is implicated in complex ways here, both as a premise for radical vulnerability to be a possibility in the first place, and as as something that emerges and is co-fostered in and through this shared journey.

A pedagogy of alongside-ness comes with its own dilemmas (Krystalli, 2023). One of them is about the work that caveats do. Noticing and practicing care alongside suffering and documenting violence alongside vitality, helps the students and us remain attentive to the workings of power and the persistence of harms. At the same time, we wonder about whether that is the only context in which we can consider care in the classroom. Must it sit alongside violence for it to be worthy of study? This is a question that is very much alive for us, unsettled, pointing the way for future care-ful engagement in the classroom and beyond.