Vol. 1 No. 1 (2022): Post-Conference Issue: Re:

We—all of us on Terra—live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response. Mixed-up times are overflowing with both pain and joy—with vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy, with unnecessary killing of ongoingness but also with necessary resurgence. [...] Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. [...] In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings. (Haraway, 2016, p.1)

We need to ruin what ruins. (Ahmed, 2017, p. 40)

To build from the ruin, our building might seem ruined; when we build, we ruin (Ahmed, 2017, p. 232).

The pandemic has left a mark on all of us in disproportionate ways. The prospect of  re:opening from the pandemic, with all of its assumptions, complexities and uncertainties, has caused us to pause and consider what re:opening actually means. 

We offer the prefix re:, meaning both “again” and “back” (Oxford University Press, 2021), as a way to consider our relations with/in histories and futures. The : after re intensifies this relationality by “amplifying what has come before it” (histories) and “directing us to the information following it” (futures) (Grammarly, 2021). The preposition re:, meaning “in the matter of,” “concerning” (Oxford University Press, 2021) draws us to the urgency of what matters and what concerns us in the now. Thus, we conceptualize re: as a liminal space/time between pasts and futures, a bumpy space where disaggregated research practices, theoretical frameworks and methodologies meet, resist and transform. Taking the preposition re: as a proposition, we engage Donna Haraway’s provocation to stay with the trouble of what concerns us and of what matters in conversation with Sara Ahmed’s incitement to build and ruin from/with/in this liminal space/time of re:.

What does it mean then to re:open from a pandemic, “to build from the ruin” (Ahmed, 2017)? What histories are entangled with our futures, what do we ruin when we build? What risks do we take and what vulnerabilities do we expose? How do we work in situated ways that do not erase histories or smooth out futures? How do we “ruin what ruins”?

As we move toward what is being called a re:opening, we ask the question - as re:searchers, educators, thinkers, scholars, storytellers, makers, and creators - what is our re:spons-ability to come together in a conference space? We invite you to think with re: as an intersection of histories and a re:membering of ethical orientations toward futurities and how this brings us to our current dwellings in this liminal space/ time of re:.

re: calls us to situate our work in the ruins, thinking with and through the following questions:

1. What does it mean to re:engage in a world that is built on the foundations of oppression?
2. How do we re:imagine education (pedagogies, practices, teaching/learning) in the ruins and deliberate ethical possibilities for livable futures?
3. How can we re:envision our notions of and relations with “community” in pasts, presents and otherwise futures?