Hello! I’m Dr. Caitlin Gunn, and I’m the Pedagogy Lab Director at the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, and your guide for the weekend’s conference “Cyborg Pedagogies.” I must admit—I find something productive and playful about imagining taking on the label of a cyborg, which requires being built, shaped, taken apart, and re-imagined in the face of oppression.
In her Manifesto for Cyborgs, Donna Haraway posits the cyborg is at once a futurist thought experiment, a description of the way beings actually operate in the world, and an opportunity to break free from the restrictions that socially constructed dualisms have imposed. (1)
Other scholars have had different approaches:
La paperson imagines a scyborg (spelled, “S-C-Y-B-O-R-G,” in a move to distance from Haraway’s conceptualization), “as the agentive body within the institutional machinery,” a source of both colonial desire and colonial anxiety; a technological reality rather than an ontological question. (2)
Part divine and part machine, the Black cyborgs that feminist scholar Joy James describes are rebellious moral agents who “demand not democracy, but freedom.” (3) This demand for freedom is not simply the desire to move freely between worlds without fear or restraint: the angelic Black cyborg is equipped to tear down the systems that demand it be super-human simply to be read as human.
With this intellectual history in mind, I situate the cyborg as a disruptive, trouble-making, transgressive entity. Black, brown, and queer cyborg pedagogies seek to disrupt and dismantle oppressive systems that create, reify, and teach white supremacy. The cyborg can decode and transform a hidden curriculum, receive downloads from co-conspirators— do anything to get free.
We’ve been experiencing both the pleasures and pains of a cyborg reality when forced to operate in digital worlds maintained and controlled by oppressive structures. But there are moments we can use our teaching and mentorship to sabotage white normative power structures in education. These creative technological efforts are acts of cyborg pedagogy, a term I coined to describe the tensions and opportunities of this pedagogical landscape of online crisis teaching, digital community building, and liberatory open education.
We have shifted societally into a new way of experiencing our own humanness and subjectivity, and it is an experience that fundamentally weaves our physical selves with our digital experiences. It offers us an alternative way of thinking about definitions of technology, and it advocates a reassessment of what technology is, can be, and has been in the hands of Black, brown, and queer people. Most crucially, cyborg theory by and for Black, brown, and queer people must resist the assumption that technology is the province of white ingenuity and intelligence, uncovering the way that assumption is built into our teaching, educational materials, and theorizing.
This conference is designed to be a space of curiosity and respite where we can come together to discuss strategies, share resources, and take pedagogical craft seriously during such a challenging, varied, and dynamic time for teachers and learners. Thank you so much for joining us—I hope you enjoy the next two days of programming. We have an exciting range of panels and events, many of which feature our pedagogy fellows who spent the summer creating open educational materials for high school and college students. Their audio projects combine storytelling, lecture, meditation, and oral history for dynamic projects that address race, colonialism, gender, and queerness.
We have panels and roundtables that address cyborg pedagogies through a variety of topics: cyberfeminism, afrofuturism, digital space-making, cyborg theory, online teaching, and academic labor are all up for consideration.
Our keynote speaker, Dr. Nicole Truesdell, is delivering a fiery lecture on Monday afternoon that will push us to reimagine emotional technologies and our own humanity.
You can follow along on our Facebook and Instagram, or drop in using the zoom link provided to see how our wide range of scholars and teachers have interpreted our theme. Thank you again for joining us at the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies.
(1) Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fictionnownarrativemediaandtheoryinthe21stcentury/manifestly_haraway_—-_a_cyborg_manifesto_science_technology_and_socialist-feminism_in_the_….pdf
(2) La Paperson, “You, A Scyborg.” In A Third University Is Possible. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. https://manifold.umn.edu/read/7ba69a54-7131-4598-9fec-815890725d91/section/077623ea-87c7-4a27-8c83-bf7f2e69b0ea#ch04
(3) Joy James and João Costa Vargas, “Refusing Blackness-as-Victimization: Trayvon Martin and the Black Cyborgs.” In Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics, 193-205. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. http://bcrw.barnard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/VargasandJames_RefusingBlacknessAsVictimization.pdf