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Many social justice classrooms teach about queer issues. Many LGBTQAI+ students are adept at reading their environments and positioning their identities in relation to it. The experiences of living as queer identities with a heteronormative and gendernormative social context brings with it deep trauma and divides that need to be healed if we are really to interrupt these dominant paradigms about gender and sexuality. Many of these experiences emerge in our social justice classrooms, while still others remain invisible.
This article argues that integrating mindfulness practices into a queer anti-oppression pedagogy can enable a deeper wholeness and healing. What if we were as adept at acknowledging our own pain of oppression as we are about reading our external environments? What if we had empowering, mindful counter-narratives to invoke when faced with oppression? This article will offer both theoretical and practical ways to integrate mindful awareness and healing into a queer pedagogy.
What if a queer pedagogy puts into crisis what is known and how we come to know?' (Luhmann 1998:126).
'To acknowledge our pain is to recognise the complexities of our bodies as both the place in which we forge meaning in our lives, and the location within which we catalyse liberation' (Manuel 2015: 79).
How do we unlearn systems of oppression? How do we dismantle them not just on the surface but at their deepest roots? How do we cultivate healthy bodies, selves, and communities? Social justice courses, including those offered in Ethnic, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Departments, have long utilised antioppression pedagogy to do just that. Entire fields such as Feminist, Queer, Anti-Racist, and Anti-Oppression pedagogies speak to the recognition that HOW one learns about oppression plays a pivotal role in dismantling it. Feminist scholar bell hooks (1994: 14), drawing on the work of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh and Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, says that engaged pedagogy must be focused on both wellbeing and praxis, which she defines as 'action and reflection upon the world in order to change it'. Thus, it is no surprise that many of these fields recognise knowledge production as a political practice and the classroom space as embedded in power dynamics.
Running parallel to these trends is contemplative pedagogy, which integrates various mindfulness practices into...