This Moment is the Curriculum: Equity,Inclusion,and Collectivist Critical Curriculum Mapping for Study Abroad Programs in the COVID-19 Era

This moment has come to pass in the past: Susan on memory

COVID-19 has triggered or exacerbated our anxieties, fears, and paranoia, leaving a trail of death. It is a storm raging everywhere, touching every person, though not with equal force. The global-ness of its onslaught makes it difficult to imagine ourselves back to normality—there is even an informed assumption that we are moving toward a new normal. Our lives may be changing, yet we are beckoned to remember that humans have been here before, our memories “part and parcel of who we are and how we are in the world” (Dillard, 2012, p. 11), molding how we make meaning of ourselves.

I was lecturing at the University of Ghana when the Ebola virus struck West Africa. Although I found no mention of Ebola in my journals from then, I recall talking about it with my Ghanaian colleagues and the collective sense that “it” was “over there,” expressed out of a sense of acute hope. Greater uneasiness came from family and friends in New York City as they learned about the outbreak through media that has long gazed on Africa with skewed eyes that Wainaina (2006) described as follows:

Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West . . . She can have no past, no history; such. Diversions ruin the dramatic moment. (p. 93)

At the time, I was also anticipating a sister-friend’s arrival to Sierra Leone. The outbreak was a crushing blow to our plans for long weekends being on “the continent” together. The thousands of souls that perished from Ebola are extraordinarily sad; nevertheless, for us, the outbreak was also selfishly wrapped up in personal letdown.

I remembered this as our group was accepting that COVID-19 would define the parameters of our SAP engagement. I soon appreciated what initially felt like a familiar letdown as an opportunity: a gift of time to refine our curriculum and bond with participants. As a Ghana-phile who has led numerous SAPs for Black and Latinx youth throughout the Africa diaspora, I am constantly troubled by the strident misrepresentation of Africa in western media. Therefore, I wanted to draw out participants’ assumptions about the pandemic’s effects and what we could learn from Africa. Our western news outlets kept us updated with images of people living in squalor, their lives worsened by the pandemic, just as poor people everywhere; but where would our participants access news about Africa’s and diasporic Africans’ history of dealing with viral outbreaks and accrued expertise from which we could learn (e.g., Clarke, 2020; Mogoatlhe, 2020)? As the impacts of COVID-19 unfolded, I thought we might look at the West African Ebola outbreak or Hurricane Katrina closer to home to expand how we understand this moment.

Besides shaking up our participants’ assumptions about what their experiences in Ghana would offer, I wanted us to lean into our ideas and fears about the pandemic and our ancestors’ forbearance. This is a practice I used when taking youth to the slave fortresses along West Africa’s coast to help them reconcile the brutality and complete denial of their people’s humanness and step out of the women’s dungeon into the quotidian flow of street life still standing upright. I listened to young people’s anguish and reminded them that as a people, we have survived and healed, often by using storytelling to locate ourselves and “name our pain, our suffering and to seek healing” (hooks, 1993, p. 17).

When the pandemic hit, I sought to locate us—our participants and us as Black women educators, scholars, and ascendant African people (Dillard, 2012) who have experienced trauma in the past. I suggested that the next time we gathered, we should choose an Adinkra symbol that captured our spirit. Adinkra is a symbolic language of the Akan people of Ghana that imparts “parables, aphorisms, proverbs, popular sayings, historical events, traits of animal behavior or shapes of inanimate or [hu]man-made objects” (Willis, 1998, p. 1). Like material culture, Adinkra is “imbued with deep and sacred meanings” (Dillard, 2012, p. 41) through which we might recognize ourselves. Manifesting aspects of our African identities through Adinkra, we moved into remembering West Africa and New Orleans before and after the Ebola outbreak and Hurricane Katrina, to name our ancestral lineage that has tilled gardens, regardless (Walker, 1983). We widened our gaze across time and place, coalescing COVID-19 stories, including its effects on participants’ teaching, while harvesting hope from our kindred. In the pandemic’s wreckage (Roy, 2020), we remembered that we simultaneously stand on our ancestors’ soil as descendants, survivors, and tillers of our own narratives. The questions I asked of the curriculum planning group were as follows: How do we draw upon our memories of what has come before to help situate us in this moment? How can we engage temporally, shifting back and forth between the present and past to—paraphrasing Morrison (1993)—create radical narratives gathered from our individual stories about what the world has been to us in dark and light moments? How can these new narratives expand what we perceive as the curriculum of our program?

This moment makes visible the racialized politics of death: Esther on necropolitics

My blood boiled and veins bulged as I read the headline proclaiming, “2 top French doctors said on live TV that coronavirus vaccines should be tested on poor Africans, leaving viewers horrified” (Kossoff, 2020). Merely days later, a medical reporter for the British Broadcasting Company implied that should vaccine trials fail in the United Kingdom, Kenya would be a viable option for further testing (Samanga, 2020). I fumed as I read these news reports, angered by reminders that in a world dictated by the norms and needs of the West, Africa is a necropolitan cemetery for Black people. On this burial ground, Black African people live in a continual cycle of dying, raging, dying, raging—again and again. We have every right to roar unceasingly with rage because we can’t breathe in a necropolitical reality that imbues tools of the Western imperialist state with enough power to render us the “living dead” (Mbembe, 2003, p. 37).

The concept of the living dead is theorized in Mbembe’s (2003) interrelated notions of necropolitics and necropower, which extend Foucault’s scholarship on biopower. Whereas Foucault dissects how social and political power are leveraged in the management of the lives of huge swathes of people, Mbembe delves into how these forms of power are used to group and sort bodies, effectively trapping some—those deemed worthless—in the interstice between life and death. In this case, sovereignty does not gesture toward submission to the rule of law as Foucault (1997) suggests, but toward “the capacity to define . . . who is disposable and who is not” (Mbembe, 2003, p. 27). A necropolitical analysis of the preceding dialogue between two White French doctors illuminates that through Western eyes, Black people are perceived as inherently deserving of death and extinction.

The knowledge that the West views Black Africans as disposable is not novel to me. I spent my youth in Kenya during the 1980s and 1990s. Then—and now, arguably—my homeland was steeped in the residue of British colonialism. In Kenya, legacies of colonialism shape/d nearly every aspect of social/political life. These legacies were pronounced in my schooling, where for years, I memorized trivia about members of the British monarchy while learning nothing of Gor Mahia, Luanda Magere, and other warriors who walked among my people, the Luos (National Museums of Kenya, n.d.; Ohito, 2016). Observing Western(ers’) responses to COVID-19 reminded me that for Black people, necropolitics—the sociopolitical sorting of people into two categories: those deemed worthy of life (those who may live) and those marked for death (those who must die)—are both woven into and invisibilized in everyday Black life. Recognizing this triggered memory of my educational experience in Kenya, which, overall, validated Wynter’s contention that

[i]f you look at the system of “knowledge,” in the [sanctioned] curriculum, it’s set up to motivate every white student and to de-motivate every Black student. The system of “knowledge” itself is what functions to motivate and to de-motivate. Notice, it motivates those who are to be at the top and it de-motivates those who are to be at the bottom. (as cited in Thomas, 2006, para. 32)

In other words, I reached the self-realization that my miseducation in Kenyan schools primed me not only to comprehend but also to use my lived experience as a text for teaching others how curriculum functions as a necropolitical apparatus. “Decolonial education for a pluriversal world is inevitably linked to the politics of knowledge production in modern/colonial times” (Stanek, 2019, p. 4). Thus, the questions that I raised for our curriculum planning team were as follows: How do we disengage from curriculum as a necropolitical knowledge system that reinforces the state’s right to hierarchize humans and determine which racialized, classed, sexed, gendered, and otherwise marked bodies may live and which must die? How do we use our SAP curiculum to meaningfully engage—and visibilize—the politics of life and death playing out in this moment? Moreover, how might we design SAP curriculum that beckons us to attend to the knowledge of the politics of life and death—knowledge that swirls in the depths of the inner currents of our collective cultural memory (Doll, 2017)?

This moment demands presence and gifts stillness: Jamila on spirituality

On April 4, 2020, as reports of COVID-19-related deaths became a continual aspect of the daily U.S. news cycle, I posted the following on my Twitter social media account:

A lot of ppl want this quarantine to be over to get back to escaping themselves. [We’ve] been conditioned to use distractions to avoid our inner world, our own thoughts, habits, histories. There’s a lot to grieve rn but there is a gift in the stillness & the stripping away the noise. (Lyiscott, 2020)

Undergirding this message is my conviction that within our increasingly digitally mediated and over-medicated society, the aversion to stillness that characterizes our lives in the United States is the by-product of Western ideologies, steeped in capitalism. Within this cultural milieu, success is measured along the lines of mass production, forward movement, competition, and an unending quest to mitigate discomfort quickly. For many, the 2020 pandemic’s disruption of business as usual imposed the foreignness of stillness, presence, and uncertainty in ways that rattled how we have been socialized to navigate the western world. School, as we know it, has been stripped away. Social life has been stripped away. Job loss. Gym closures. Too many bodies in the hospitals. Wear masks. You don’t need masks. Wear gloves. Stay inside but get out for some sun. Across social media, the rising anxiety of being quarantined unfolds daily. The moment was forced upon us; our autonomy has been stripped away. Our month-long SAP has been stripped away.

Because incessant production and capital-driven progress measures are essential to the fabric of western thought, I assert stillness as a practice of disruption and resistance. Stillness is not the absence of movement. It is an opportunity to be present in the ever-ness of now. Thus, it is precisely within the space of stillness that we have opportunities to attune to the present moment’s power. Normative American schooling (Frankena et al., 2002), having its roots in industrial-era factory practices focused on rigid outcomes, has long been established as a dehumanization and suffering site, particularly for Black youth (e.g., Irizarry & Brown, 2014). Rather than honor the full and present humanity of each student in the power of their individualism and nuanced cultures, industrial “college and career prep” ideologies view students as objects to be measured and primed for long-term capital production. Alongside this, Patel (2016) teaches us that the formal school processes are consistently at odds with what is necessary for true learning, which requires “departing from known automatic practices, venturing into experiences that aren’t wholly predictable, and experiencing temporary, productive failure” (p. 397). The 2020 pandemic-related school closures have catapulted us away from the automatic practices of schooling. Stillness as an act of disruption and resistance creates opportunities for us to be present in the moment’s debris as its own curriculum. The moment is a teacher.

What moves in the stillness of the moment? If stillness is indeed not the absence of movement, the question becomes, what moves in the stillness of the moment? As a Black woman scholar, I present stillness as a disruption from the normative because it can invite transcendence and spirituality in crucial ways. Stillness is the choice to quiet the noise of our material reality to access transcendence and spirit. Spirituality—attending to the self that exists beyond the physical and material world that is ever before us—has long played a central role in my ability to exist beyond while navigating the uncertainty, violence, and constraints of western institutions. James Cone (1975), the father of Black Liberation Theology, asserts that across both secular and religious Black communities, spirituality is always tethered to our cultural and liberatory practices. To be still is to activate spirituality through a reliance on the intangible and uncertain. It is to walk by faith, not by sight.

Thus, I invited our group to utilize stillness to activate transcendence and spirituality. To do this is to rely on the movement of the moment. I invited the group to join a long history of sustaining access to our spiritual selves in a society where Black folk’s souls are constantly under threat. In this way, “as challengers to Eurocentric hegemony in the academy, we . . . come with alternative offerings of ‘truth’” (Dillard et al., 2000, p. 447). That is, knowledge practices and ways of knowing become available when western ways of knowing are rejected and decentered. This shows up prominently in the history and present of Black culture, where the extemporaneous is lauded. You must rely on the stillness of this place, space, and time for the rhetorical modes of call and response to move the Spirit in the Black church; you must lean into the uncertainty of the moment for the vocal improvisation of scat to show out in jazz; to engage in the traditions of extemporaneous calypso, freestyle in hip-hop, and viral social media dances featuring bodily improvisations. What could such spiritual practices mean for curriculum mapping in our SAP?

This moment unfolds in place: Keisha on geography

For many during this global pandemic, notions of home, place, and space are troubled. For Black folks—women, in particular—what does it mean to shelter in place during such a time? Transient and transcendent, ours is a history of fugitivity and marronage, surviving, planting, nurturing, seeding, growing, and sowing even in a fixed place. Each of us has always had a relationship to land, movement, migration, and place. As such, Black women scholars attuned to emplacement

. . . treat geography not only as human and social landscapes, but also as systems of thought that move across, move through, and span space and bodies. These women are rethinking human-spatial dynamics to explore and combat social inequalities [and] to identify practices of liberation from gendered and racially oppressive forces. In so doing, they are re-examining the shifting political and social terrain of gender and race and bringing women’s voices, specifically, into national, international, and transnational forums. (Henery, 2011, p. 88)

Sheltering in place means many things for different people. How we have used webinars with Black women participants from across the country has been a sort of critical and cultural pedagogy toward developing a collective kinship and praxis. Although once strangers, there is a knowing in all of us women and all the geographies we carry identifying in and with Blackness at home and abroad. Still, we know enough about the nuance of geography regarding race, space, and place to pause and ask the question: How do we claim a place (or kinship) we do not yet know much about? Our geographies, our relationship to all these questions are racialized, classed, and gendered.

When we come to a place and space, we bring our lived experiences, storied narratives, familial histories, and (African) diasporic cultures. Our movement across place, space, and land is a mapping of and grappling with how we have come to be and know. We bring these Black spatial identities—our Black geographies—with us here and there. As our project planning phase overlapped with Ghana’s campaign to attract African Americans to “return” home (Paquette, 2020), I remember novelist Jacqueline Woodson’s (2019) reflection of her journey to Ghana. As a South Carolinian with a heritage line running from the Lowcountry to the West Coast of Africa, the tensions Woodson felt navigating her sense of belonging or connection to a place framed to be her (and our) ancestral home resonate with me. What will it mean to be at “home” for the first time in Ghana? The “welcome back” campaign implies African Americans belong in Ghana; however, others view it as a marketing plea. The attraction to the plea is in tension with our awareness that some of us have yet to belong but are seeking a (re)integration of our roots.

McKittrick (2006) writes, “[t]he history of Black subjects in the diaspora is a geographic story that is, at least in part, a story of material and conceptual placements and displacements, segregations and integrations, margins and centers, and migrations and settlements” (p. 14). If geography seeks to understand where things are, why they are there, and how they develop and change over time, what might know about Ghana by knowing ourselves and our geographies? What might we know and bring from our various respective places of origin? How might we apply the tools we use for knowing ourselves in familiar geographies to our knowledge generation about Ghana and each other? In short, I wondered, as a group of Black women from across the country coming together to return to a place of our cultural and historical past, what did this moment of pause in our program grant us?

Although we now have time to collaborate in our teaching and learning, in so many spaces, we are taught to be individualistic. The more we share and transcend tightly knitted ideas of place as fixed as we shelter in place, the more we are unbound in our spatial identities, and the more we are free to be pedagogical influences on each other as together we create a new geography on a virtual landscape.