The Need for Deep Rest: Stories of Critical Grief Pedagogy


Chelsea Jones, Brock University; Sarah Pierson, Brock University

This presentation is a gathering of critical grief pedagogy narratives by [TK] students, one faculty, and a doctoral candidate who met regularly to write following a digital death cafe that centered grief as a topic of teaching and learning in a Masters-level course about disability justice. As a method of gathering death in a justice-oriented way, the death cafe was a departure from our usual in-person seminar classes, largely because Jones was teaching from bed as she recovered from surgery. Being a course on disability justice, students were well versed in Leah Lakshami Piepzna-Samarasinha’s (2018) argument that sometimes community is made and work is done from bed, “and it counts just as much” (p. 200). Our narratives emerged following the tenets of critical grief pedagogy, including de-medicalizing grief and resisting its pathologization, as well as recognizing grief as a result of systems of power that “affect and reflect rules for grieving” such as ableism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy among others (Poole et al., 2022, p. 30). The third and fourth tenants call for embodied witnessing of grief narratives, and practicing compassionate communication in response rather than reproducing “proper” responses that uphold systems of power that stifle the unruliness of grief (p. 31). Through these narrative experiences, we engage in a mode of collaborative exploration and composition that follows both traditional and crip modes of co-creation, and we explore what it means to take teaching and learning as a “grief-facing” praxis that changes how we engage with embodiment in higher education, including by suggesting a fifth tenant: the deep need for rest. In this presentation, we offer our stories to demonstrate the entangled nature of critical grief pedagogy–from deeply personal experiences to wider conversations about shared experiences of ecological grief. Our entwined responses to the death cafe remind us that grief is ubiquitous and expansive in academic spaces, and that rest is essential and political.

This paper will be presented at the following session: