Why a Teaching program?
Bailey Szustak’s original art, created for the 2024 Feminist Making philoSOPHIA conference
By Ada Jaarsma
Making a book can hold its own expansive and creative possibilities.
Even once a book has arrived in the world, having passed through all of the many processes (invitations to contributors; edits; two rounds of peer review; deeply enjoyable final edits), there are still so many ways to “make” a book.
This became salient to me and to Lauren (co-editors of Feminist Making Doing & Sensing), in compelling ways, when we discovered how Mimi Khúc expanded the reach of the stunningly readable and — importantly— teachable book, dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss, published by Duke University Press in 2024. On Mimi’s website, we came across an idea that has inspired us as avid readers of Mimi’s own book: a teaching program. The DEAR ELIA Teaching Program: Transforming the University through a Pedagogy of Unwellness is described in two key ways: it is “an evolving, co-created space with resources for engaging” the book dear elia, and it is also “an experiment in building care-focused classrooms.”
We love the example that Mimi and co-creators are modelling here — that a book’s ethos can extend beyond the content on its pages. And that there is something special (and especially motivating) when it comes to a question like how might a book translate into care-focused pedagogical practices? This is a motivating question to us in part because it seems closely in conversation with the chapters in Feminist Making, Doing and Sensing. Many of the chapters, for example, include prompts and suggestions (exercises, activities) for “making”-endeavours that extend the experiments found within the chapters’ own pages.
And so, with indebted thanks to Mimi Khúc, we invite readers of Feminist Making to explore our Teaching Program, which can be found here on our site as an homage to the examples and care-practices that sparked this project in the first place.
One resource is a set of curated writings and work by all of the contributors to Feminist Making, Doing and Sensing, as well as the fabulous and generous folks who blurbed the book. Our hope here is that readers can dive into more explorations of each feminist maker that they’ll find in the collection. (All of the work included in the curated set are open access and easily available).
Additional resources focus on specific chapters in the collection. Some of these arise out of our own teaching materials (Lauren has produced an array of materials related to Taylor Rogers’ chapter, for example, and I developed an interactive lesson related to Amy Marvin’s chapter). We’ll continue to produce and post additional resources in the Teaching Program.
Along these lines, an invitation! We’d love to hear from you, if you’d like to join us as a co-creator of the Teaching Program. We also welcome comments and feedback, as well as anything you might be willing to share about using the Teaching Program. (you can contact us here).
