Critical University Pedagogy

Month: November 2022

  • Moving between constraints and possibilities of belonging and outsiderness

    Moving between constraints and possibilities of belonging and outsiderness

    Antonella Cuppari (PhD Student, University of Milano-Bicocca)

    I have waited three years for that moment
when I would take my last step to the top
carried on my shoulders together with vertigo
and now, looking up, only sky
full not cut out
and everything turns upside down again
the end becomes beginning
again I no longer know who I am anymore.
(My poem, “The End of a PhD path”)
    “The unpredictable is a value that must never be renounced,  emptiness must be welcomed and loved, to be amazed by reality is supremely energetic and therefore to be amazed it is necessary to be open to the unexpected, to be, within reality, a stranger.”
    Mariangela Gualtieri

    Inspired (in an irriverent way) by the multiplicative possibilities of meaning offered by duoetnography (Sawyer & Norris, 2013), I tried to relate two texts: on the one hand, a poem I wrote a few days ago in which I felt the need to give voice to my experience as a still-briefly-doctoral-student and, on the other hand, a thought by an Italian poet I love very much, Mariangela Gualtieri, who invites us to confront the unexpected as a stranger in reality.
    These different positionings make me wonder about the theme of belonging and outsideerness. Soon I will no longer be affiliated with the university and, at the same time, this workplace doctorate has changed the relationship with my colleagues and the organisation in which I work, in a way that I cannot fully understand today. During my three years as a PhD student, I experienced belonging and outsiderness in my relationship with both contexts and this allowed me to find a fluid and moving posture, despite the discomfort (Cuppari, 2022). Today, one of two contexts of this belonging is no longer taken for granted and I suddenly feel disoriented. A sense of alienation predominates, also in relation to the impossibility of accessing certain services and opportunities when I stop being a doctoral student. The outsiderness and disorientation generated by not belonging deeply questions my identity (“I no longer know who I am anymore”).
    These brief considerations on belonging question me. In my life as a student, belonging has guaranteed me access to rights and opportunities that I feel are being lost today. However, in other experiences it can also become a constraint when it risks becoming a prejudice, a stereotype and a social category that excludes, as in the case of a person with a disability, for example, which is the topic of my thesis.
    The evocative dialogue between the poet Gualtieri and myself questions belonging in its aspects of constraint and possibility and in its generative relationship with the complementary dimension, that of outsiderness.
    I finish by proposing the listening of a track and the words that accompanies it.

  • Exploring belonging and meaning:Lifescapes – Landscapes – Timescapes

    Exploring belonging and meaning:
    Lifescapes – Landscapes – Timescapes

    Where can one ‘be, become and belong’ and what are meaningful educational places? The Life History and Biography Network meeting 2023 will meet to collectively address these questions. As a point of departure, we will conceptualize belonging as relational and situated, embedded in lived power relations, social structures, and personal struggles; constantly felt, negotiated and contested. Belonging and meaning are conceived not as fixed and discrete, but embedded in fluid processes of being and becoming. We want to integrate ideas from lifescapes, landscapes and timescapes, to explore personal and imaginary learning life histories and narratives. We playfully conceive ‘scapes’ having the potential: to explore wide open vistas; as places to build and create; existing in ‘real’ or virtual escapes; and of course offering the opportunity to escape.

    The concept of lifescapes can help us to explore the synthesis between social interactions within political, economic and ecological contexts experienced sensitively across cultural boundaries and physical borders. Or, in other words how belonging and meaning are socially embedded and embodied in sensual ways of being within spatial practices that transform landscapes into lifescapes. While also acknowledging the dynamic, constantly evolving, and socially negotiated nature of life histories and narratives, we also would like to draw on the concept of timescape to help us consider the dis/continuous temporal rhythms that frame our experiences.

    We may want to consider the atmosphere (physical and feeling) of the space we shall create, what might be brought in and how we curate our offerings to make research more accessible and relevant. We may also wish to question where will the space be for indigenous voices, empirical research, art, fresh air, poetry, movement, daring to step out into a labyrinth and getting lost, dissent and conviviality?