Learning is Such Sweet Sorrow

Abstract

We learn by returning. To our classrooms, our publics, our bodies. This performance text returns us to these places which remain the relics of affective encounters, the sticky sites of emotional residue, historical fragments that tell us what we can bear to remember about ourselves. These histories rely on ‘the moving, the deja-felt in all of its uncanniness’, (Manning, 2013, p. 84), a now which coagulates the push and pull of memory, interiority, and external struggle in time and space or spacetime. We return by building, commemorating, protesting, and then tearing down. Research, activism, education, and love intersect in lives of engaged social action and through a sometimes-reluctant return to sites of consciousness-raising with one common aim: Let us learn.