Algorithm of love: insights from immigrant literacies and narratives

Preface

This issue, “Algorithm of Love: Insights from Immigrant Literacies and Narratives,” aims to develop an algorithm of love by locating love as a function of narrative research in literacy research conducted with immigrant populations. Specifically, the purpose of this issue is to illustrate how to love—coalitional love, compassionate love, (responsive) pedagogical love, a pedagogy of love, beyond love—as a theoretical construct can be empirically examined through narrative research (Razfar & Yona, 2021). Over the last three decades, there has been growing interest in how affect and emotion can be empirically studied. A significant body of research has focused on the linguistic markers of particular emotions, such as shame and anger (Retzinger, 1991) or more generally positive and negative self-feelings (Bloch, 1996). The focus on specific emotions is a methodological problem in that it isolates human experiences to particular moments in time and emotions. While there have been attempts to develop a more embedded and inclusive framework, such as Lieblich et al.’s (1998) focus on emotionality, our conceptions and methodologies for studying love (e.g. Gibbs-Grey, 2020; Griffin, 2020; Hooks, 2018; Sealey-Ruiz, 2021), affect (e.g. Boldt & Leander, 2020; Ehret & Rowsell, 2021), and empathy (Warren, 2018) in literacy hold further opportunity for analytical access. In this issue, we ask: “How can we systematically analyze love, affect, and empathy through narrative research? Moreover, how can we conceptualize connotations of love that offer frameworks for qualitative access to how human beings, and immigrants in particular, negotiate traumatic experiences?”

In her newly released book, The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy: Centering Trauma as Powerful Pedagogy, Elizabeth Dutro argues for centering traumatic experiences in literacy education (Dutro, 2019). Narrative analysis has historically been a methodology par excellence for studying how human beings navigate the turbulence of everyday life (Bruner, 2004; Razfar, 2012). John Wilce’s comprehensive review of the history of emotion in linguistic anthropology offers a starting point for how the ideas of love, affect, empathy, and solidarity are represented linguistically over a span of three decades (Wilce, 2009). Another important component of these studies is how love, affect, empathy, and solidarity are situated within traumatic experiences. In this issue, we develop an algorithm of love through narrative, demonstrating how participants move through various forms of traumatic experiences. The papers in this issue are positioned within a particular type of traumatic experience, namely immigration, where literacies emerging from the immigrant experience (e.g. Nalubega-Booker & Willis, 2020; Skerrett & Omogun, 2020; Smith, 2020) function as the basis for the story. Across the articles, the algorithm of love moves through five distinct stages: (1) Demonstrating fear, apprehension, and uncertainty of the “other” or unfamiliar; (2) Responding to and connecting with the “other” through affective displays; (3) Developing empathy by taking an emic point of view; (4) Developing a stance of solidarity by engaging in social practices that advocate for the “other” (Razfar & Rumeanpp, 2013); and (5) Engaging in shared lived experience (perezhivanie) (Vygotsky, 1971) through which participants achieve synchronous relations and experience cathartic purification of their initial fears and apprehensions (Coward, 1996).

The first set of papers examines pedagogical love and how teachers and immigrant students of literacy collectively respond to a climate of fear, hate, and apprehension of non-dominant forms of expression and being. Eliza Braden and Gloria Boutte show how the teachers, Jared and Rashad, actualize pedagogical love through culturally informed African principles via narrative to advance pedagogical spaces that help Black immigrant children reflect their literate identities and reach their fullest potential. Through the lenses of Afrocentric praxis and counterstorying via Critical Race Theory, Braden and Boutte demonstrate how self-identifying Black male teachers engaged with Yandi, a fourth-grade nine-year-old Black immigrant participant enrolled in a school within a metropolitan city in the southeast. They discuss how eldering, locating students (where they are), multiple ways of knowing, question-driven pedagogy, culturally authentic assessment, and communal responsibility function as avenues for pedagogical love.

Vaughn Watson and colleagues illustrate how constructions of knowledge about a pedagogy of love through literacy are relational, synchronic, and sustained over time through narrative for African immigrant communities. The authors examine complex meanings of locating a pedagogy of love in popular-media narratives of African immigrant communities through the interplay of three themes: eldering and communal responsibility, language as a colonial modality of loss, and envisioning a pedagogy of love as speculative seeing. Their article responds to the prevalence and persistence of popularized deficit narratives of African immigrant youth, and contemporary contexts of migration, demonstrating the need for a pedagogy of love through analysis of the (named and unnamed) cultural and linguistic strengths of African immigrant communities in popular media narratives of African immigrant communities.

Bryan Hotchkins applies responsive pedagogical love to explain how students of African descent benefitted from interacting with Black professors who prepared participants to navigate White professor performances of anti-Blackness in academic, social, and organizational spaces while attending college, allowing these students to use their literacies to identify, navigate, and avoid racial traumas associated with sustained immersion in White dominant educational spaces. Hotchkins shows that responsive pedagogical love facilitated the development of two distinct cultural love literacy practices—trauma acknowledgment and trauma resistance—each enacted as responsive strategies to combat hegemonic conditions.

Tala Karkar Esperat expands the algorithm of love through the narrative by discussing how the integration of compassionate love, social presence, and the dual-level new literacies form the basis for addressing the literate needs of international students. Given the continued prevalence of online teaching as a popular source of learning at educational institutions, especially during the COVID-19 global pandemic in which international students around the world were greatly affected by changes in higher education, Karkar Esperat proposes an interactive online teaching (IOT) model through which online instructors can show their commitment to their students an act of love (Freire, 1970) and build engagement in the online community by being accessible, accountable, and adaptative—the “triple A” concept. Karkar Esperat demonstrates how international students found online instructors’ uses of audio, visual, spatial, linguistic meaning-making opportunities to be influential in their learning and satisfaction in online classes. She views new literacies and its intersection with compassionate love as a key basis for advancing social presence in online learning communities. This first group of papers emphasizes pedagogical responsiveness through love to a climate of fear, hate, and dissonance experienced by students and teachers of literacy.

The second set of papers examines how the algorithm of love moves, via its enactment through literacies, toward higher degrees of empathy, solidarity with non-dominant communities, and ultimately, cathartic purification of fears and apprehensions. Lenny Sánchez and Eurydice Bauer offer an empirical example of how we can go “beyond love.” They describe how schools, and society at large, must take direct action to reduce xenophobia and retract how immigrant students and their families are pushed beyond love as they present the narratives of a Latinx immigrant mother and daughter who worked to alter particular boundaries of “beyond love” and developed what we reference as spaces of love to counter the deprivation of love they experienced in various spaces of their lives. In other words, they emphasize a notion of love that goes beyond personal affect and emotion and moves toward measurable forms of empathy and advocacy. This is visible in the parallel narratives from the literacies of immigrant youth and her mother who had to maneuver continual and abrupt interruptions in family cohesiveness due to immigration policies. The authors also weave their own family immigration narratives into the stories of these two individuals to shed light on how stories of resemblance and variance open up opportunities for moving beyond love as simply affect to consciously “read” the other and have an ability to notice what there is to be noticed (Greene, 2001). This paper offers a clear example of a complete cycle of healing or the cathartic narrative.

Finally, Rahat Zaidi and colleagues demonstrate how a cathartic narrative evolved based on the literate experiences of refugee parents with their immigrant youth. Determining the role pedagogical love can play in the emotional experience of Arabic-speaking refugee families in Calgary, Canada, the authors show how immigrant communities engaged with the public education system at the Grade 4–12 level. They adeptly demonstrate how refugee parents moved from feelings of hatred, struggle, defeat, and conflict to develop an empathetic stance and solidarity with the dominant “other.” Through this narrative, the immigrants reached better understandings of their new context, and more importantly, they were better understood by those who cultivated fear and hate of the “other.” The conversations and narratives generated by parents, teachers, and settlement workers provided a tool for this cathartic love to develop and transform relationships.

In this issue, based on these papers, our development of an algorithm of love suggests that love can be empirically studied as a narrative process that moves from initial fear, apprehension, and uncertainty of the “other” toward achieving synchronous relations, practicing solidarity, and ultimately, experiencing cathartic purification of fear and apprehension of the stranger. This algorithm of love can be qualitatively used to examine how teachers of immigrant youth and adults use literacies to adopt a pedagogy of love that helps facilitate a transition through racial trauma and xenophobia and develop empathy, solidarity, and purification of trauma through catharsis within and across groups that have historically been marginalized in education. This collection of papers can provide a valuable framework for how “love is sustained by action, a pattern of devotion in the things we do for each other every day” (Sparks, 2013).