(DEA1) Sharing Grief: Stories for Urgent Times

Grief is both emotion and construction, arriving in our bodyminds as a deeply felt shift in how we move through the world and as an affect mediated by contemporary understandings of loss. Much recent scholarship asserts that grief currently occupies a central role in western societies (Head, 2016; Poole & Galvan, 2021; Kumar, 2021; Frantzen, 2022). A constellation of emotions including, anger, anxiety, fear, confusion and despair, grief is often suppressed, individualized and medicalized in North America as evidenced through the recent inclusion of prolonged grief disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the neoliberal imperative of happiness and its equation with health (Davies, 2016; Hill et al., 2019). Entangled with systems and structures of power, such as white supremacy and settler colonialism, grief has become politicized (Granek, 2014) and medicalized (Lund, 2021) which curtails emotive responses to some forms of human and more-than-human loss. This session considers how the emotional and affective terrain of grief is intertwined with the educational, political and social structures which shape and sustain our present and collective futures. Taking up grief from four different vantage points; the theorizing ecological grief, critical grief pedagogy, grief, justice and policy, and activist-artist representations of disenfranchised grief during COVID-19, the session asks how might grief highlight alternative ways of being and knowing in the world together, how we might welcome and contend with grief in the classroom and how the arts can work to resist grief’s disenfranchisement. Following the presentations, space for audience and panel reflection via arts-based responses, such as drawing or writing, will be offered. In sum, this session will posit that grief is one way of highlighting the interconnectedness of human (and more-than-human) existence and is essential to addressing the intertwined crises of our times. Tags: Education, Environment, Grief

Organizers: Kim Collins, University of Toronto, Chelsea Jones, Brock University; Chairs: Kim Collins, University of Toronto, Chelsea Jones, Brock University

Presentations

Chelsea Jones, Brock University

The Need for Deep Rest: Stories of Critical Grief Pedagogy

This presentation is a gathering of critical grief pedagogy narratives by [TK] students, one faculty, and a doctoral candidate who met regularly to write following a digital death cafe that centered grief as a topic of teaching and learning in a Masters-level course about disability justice. As a method of gathering death in a justice-oriented way, the death cafe was a departure from our usual in-person seminar classes, largely because Jones was teaching from bed as she recovered from surgery. Being a course on disability justice, students were well versed in Leah Lakshami Piepzna-Samarasinha’s (2018) argument that sometimes community is made and work is done from bed, “and it counts just as much” (p. 200). Our narratives emerged following the tenets of critical grief pedagogy, including de-medicalizing grief and resisting its pathologization, as well as recognizing grief as a result of systems of power that “affect and reflect rules for grieving” such as ableism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy among others (Poole et al., 2022, p. 30). The third and fourth tenants call for embodied witnessing of grief narratives, and practicing compassionate communication in response rather than reproducing “proper” responses that uphold systems of power that stifle the unruliness of grief (p. 31). Through these narrative experiences, we engage in a mode of collaborative exploration and composition that follows both traditional and crip modes of co-creation, and we explore what it means to take teaching and learning as a “grief-facing” praxis that changes how we engage with embodiment in higher education, including by suggesting a fifth tenant: the deep need for rest. In this presentation, we offer our stories to demonstrate the entangled nature of critical grief pedagogy–from deeply personal experiences to wider conversations about shared experiences of ecological grief. Our entwined responses to the death cafe remind us that grief is ubiquitous and expansive in academic spaces, and that rest is essential and political.

Jennifer Poole, Toronto Metropolitan University

Towards grief justice: Making meaning ‘when grief comes to class’

We are living in grief-saturated times (Perreault et al, 2010), intensified by pandemics, conflict, disaster and the weaponization of white, capitalist and human supremacies. Those who do not serve these supremacies are disenfranchised, as is any grief for their loss. In this so-called country of Canada, we are not supposed to grieve that which does not perpetuate colonialism and its related projects of domination, but we do, and we carry that grief with us wherever we go. This kind of disenfranchised grief (Doka, 1999), produced in part by what we have previously named as grief supremacy (Poole & Galvan, 2021), predominates in so-called higher education, where grief is often ignored, refused or disciplined. In 2022, we began an inquiry into these practices called, ‘When grief comes to class’, inviting learners, staff and educators at Toronto Metropolitan University to story the grief they carried on campus. Grounded in a decolonizing approach to re-Search (Absolon, 2022), we created spaces for grief story sharing and then, instead of coding, invited story tellers to highlight messages they wanted us to share more widely. Those messages are both practical and pressing, the stuff of policy, research and curriculum change. Those messages also shaped what we are calling grief justice. In this session, we share our theorizing so far, outlining the meaning making that brought us to grief justice. We share how we are connecting it to disability justice. We detail how it is both a call for a conversation about grief in all forms of justice work as well as a call for justice in grief work. Indeed, much of grief ‘education’ and literacy is often apolitical, another white space (Anderson, 2015) saturated with various forms of grief supremacy. By sharing our understanding so far, we invite a collective and just reimagining of grief practice, policy and education and a grief activism that makes space for it all.

Kim Collins, University of Toronto

Onto-epistemic entanglements and ecological grief: Toward a Theory of Crip Posthumanism

Climate change is a systemic set of issues challenging humans to rethink relationality and emotionality. The unrelenting urgency of these systemic issues can elicit emotional, embodied, and affective reactions. While there is an ever-growing lexicon of ecological emotions, experiences of loss and grief are central. This presentation posits that entangling crip theory and critical posthumanism offers a generative framework for rethinking ecological grief and radical relationality in the wake of environmental degradation and climate change. Grounded in a politics of location, a rejection of compulsory able-bodiedness/able-mindedness, crip posthumanism, offers possibilities for interdependent and relational ways of being and knowing in the world together. Emerging from the convergence of these theoretical traditions, crip posthumanism challenges humanistic traditions, is attentive to difference and understands the dynamic co-constituted emotion of relationality. Through this framing, crip posthumanism enables a consideration of the felt aspect of becoming as a needed and necessary disruption rather than a medicalized, pathologized, or disenfranchised emotional state. This argument is made in three parts: first a discussion of politicization and medicalization of grief is offered followed by linkages to ecological grief. Next, cartographies of critical posthumanism and crip theory are entangled and applied as a generative theoretical framework for rethinking ecological grief. Lastly, crip posthumanism is employed to offer a reframing–or a cripping–of ecological grief. As we–humans and more-than-humans–are currently living through and are differentially implicated in the climate crisis, research on ecological grief as an emotional and affective response to climate change requires attention to emotionality without defaulting to pathologization or medicalization. Crip posthumanism offers a novel approach through which to explore emotional and affective responses to climate change. In sum, applying crip posthumanism as a framework for understanding ecological grief works across scales and offers possibilities for engaging with human-more-than-human relationality through the generative disruption that affective intra-actions engender.

Hannah Fowlie, University of Guelph

Grief Refracted: Digital Storytelling as Liberatory Praxis

This presentation emerges from a research inquiry into the ways collaborative story-making about grief and loss illuminate possibilities for liberatory praxis. Rather than the traditional scholarly form of a book-length dissertation, this dissertation centres a feature-length film, weaving together the digital stories and interviews with poetic, visual, and sonic explorations of grief and loss. Part of the film’s title, “Grief Refracted,” was a gift from a storyteller, in conversation about the process. The storyteller spoke about digital storytelling as a prism for grief, a refraction that reveals a spectrum of colour. Grief is not a monolithic entity; it is highly nuanced and contextual. The myriad of emotional experiences that accompany grief, death, and dying are ineffable, and as our colonial, capitalistic society demands maximum productivity—and a quick return to work—grief is often obliviated, leaving us truly bereft. Although many of us may have our own traditions when it comes to grieving, we are living “within a broader culture whose mainstream norms impact their own subjectivity and understanding of the grieving process” (Granek, 2008, p. 3). We are further alienated from our expressions of grief by the psychological professions with their categorizing and pathologizing, such as the diagnosis of Complicated Grief and other Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) classifications, and social practices that hide grief away, and socialize us to express ourselves mainly in private or professional settings (Granek, 2008; Poole & Galvan, 2021; Willer et al., 2021). This presentation includes a clip from the film exploring grief and loss during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Collective storytelling strives to resist the neo-liberal denial of grief and loss and bear witness to experiences that are typically hidden away or ignored. This presentation  interrogates why some lives are grieved and others ignored, integrates mourning back into life to properly acknowledge grief and loss, and contributes to advancing knowledge and praxis in the emergent field of social practice and transformational change.