New imaginations of difference: on teaching, writing, and culturing

Abstract

In this essay, we address emerging tensions that are increasingly facing persons, such as ourselves, who choose to reside in borderlands both inside and outside pedagogical settings. Such tensions include matters of location and dislocation, rootedness and uprootedness, diversity and commonality, space and place, time and distance, and so on. The first author enacts her own negotiations of these tensions and offers possible pathways of envisioning human diversity in more heuristic ways. In dialogue, personal narrative, personal history, and classroom re-enactments, we offer a different framework for envisioning difference. Ultimately, our goal is to show one way that we can create the possibility of new imaginations of difference, commonality, diversity, and culture in the college classroom.

Notes

1. By referring to this essay as an ‘autoethnographic amalgamation’, I specifically address the ‘autoethnographic stance’ that I take in the writing of this essay, whereby I use my personal reflections and observations as critical tools to explore the class environment. Alongside these, I engage with conversations, dialogue, theoretical stances, and so on, thus making this piece autoethnographic in orientation.

2. This paper was conceptualized, theorized, stylized, and revised equally by both authors. For reasons of coherence and clarity, we have made a deliberate creative decision for the paper to be narrativized by the first author. Given this, it is her own experience of being from South Asia that has been explored. At the same time, the experiences that I describe and reconstruct have been shared between us in resonating conversations as we move along in our intellectual lives. The first and second author share similar experiences as immigrants in the US, as people who are positioned as ‘people of color’, but resist this labeling, as persons who have chosen to reside in between categories, who have chosen to use brown not as a category, but as a metaphor for the ambiguity of human relations.

3. All names, locations, and identifying information of persons referred to in this essay have been changed.