Pandemic Spectres in the Classroom

Описание: Outside of the classroom, many students and educators confront relational, economic, and mental precarity and the reality of COVID-19 as “the greatest mass disabling event in human history,” in the words of Long COVID patient and activist Charlie McCone. Students and educators work in institutions pursuing “a return to normal,” as though “normal” was shared and desired, not despised (Brand, 2020). In this session, I’ll offer some thoughts about what I’ve learned from the courageous ways I’ve seen students and colleagues refuse the violence of “normal,” and how understanding learning as an experience of loss and loneliness offers an interpretive framework for thinking with the pandemic spectres haunting the classroom.

About the Presenter

Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst is Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Her research is concerned with the relationships between power, embodiment, and (visual) culture, from the perspectives of psychoanalysis and decolonial thought. She is author of Surface Imaginations: Cosmetic Surgery, Photography, and Skin (MQUP, 2015), editor of Representing Abortion (Routledge, 2021), and co-editor of Skin, Culture, and Psychoanalysis (Palgrave, 2013) as well as a special section of Atlantis (41.1). Her most recent essays have been published in History of Photography, Feminist Studies, Configurations, and Body & Society.