Nusair, Isis, and Shaw, Barbara L., Eds. Pedagogies of Interconnectedness: Feminist-Queer Collaborative Transformation. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2025. 248 pp. Paperback ISBN: 978-0-252-08856-8.
Pedagogies of Interconnectedness: Feminist-Queer Collaborative Transformation offers a collection of feminist-queer approaches that illustrate and inspire more collaborative, relational forms of teaching that are particularly timely amid escalating political attacks on equity-centered curricula and instruction. The collection situates itself in critical pedagogy scholarship, drawing on seminal works from Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, centering intersectionality, care, and collaboration as central teaching values. Through queer and transnational lenses, the editors and contributors argue for feminist-queer praxis as an anti-oppositional response to institutional conditions that fragment community, and as work strengthened by building partnerships and knowledge with colleagues and students.
Organized into three thematic sections, “Community Building and Queering Bodies of Knowledge,” “Intersecting the Transnational,” and “Organic Collaborations and Collective Feminist Transformation,” the book balances theoretical grounding with examples of practical application across various disciplines. Seeking to address the central question, “How does feminist–queer praxis transform knowledge production and students’ educational experiences?” (11), the book’s most compelling chapters model transformative faculty-student partnerships that position students as knowledge creators and co-designers of their own learning experiences.
In Part I, “Community Building and Queering Bodies of Knowledge,” contributors critique disembodied academic norms and argue for embodied, caring, relational pedagogy. These chapters demonstrate how collaborative practices and anti-hierarchical classroom dynamics can queer what counts as knowledge or learning design and who gets to contribute to each. For example, in “Radical Feminist Transgressions in Teaching/Learning,” Linh U. Hua and K. Melchor Quick Hall build on Knowles’s emphasis on honoring adult learners’ experiential knowledge and Freire’s, hooks’s, and Moraga’s arguments for liberatory, caring education. They propose a liberatory feminist andragogy that values the experience adult learners bring to the classroom and embraces “messy” collaboration as necessary for collective meaning-making. Practices throughout these chapters, such as collaborative teaching, peace circles, and inviting students to design their own learning experiences disrupt traditional classroom power dynamics and reorient the class toward more shared authority. This section maintains a consistent argument for care and collaboration not just as teaching strategies, but as feminist, queer, and transnational praxis that can facilitate shifts in power and meaning-making.
Part 2, “Intersecting the Transnational” expands sites for knowledge-making beyond the classroom and academy. Chapters in this section are anchored in transnational feminist theories and explore how such frameworks can transform relationships and epistemes beyond the classroom through practices like decentering Western curricula, fostering transnational collaborations through digital technologies, and feminist-praxis centered experiential learning and study-abroad/away programs. For instance, in “Engaged Global Pedagogy: Moving from Study Abroad to Transnational Scholar/Activism,” Luisa Bieri uses Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” to reconceptualize students’ study abroad experiences, moving them from a “feminist explorer” model where Western centrism is maintained to a model of feminist solidarity, where students practice reflexivity, reciprocity, and connectivity. The main strength of the second section is the authors’ abilities to walk readers through their processes of applying transnational feminist theory to courses, programs, and relationships, so that even readers with little familiarity with designing study abroad programs or teaching a transnational feminisms course can appreciate the significance of transformations in such spaces.
The book’s third section, “Organic Collaborations and Collective Feminist Transformation” may be its most impressive demonstration of bridging theory and practice, thanks particularly to the inclusion of student co-authors throughout the chapters. The chapters in this section offer a focus on cultivating, navigating, and nurturing collaborations within and outside of the classroom through exposing and sharing hidden labor and co-designing and creating with students. In one of the chapters featuring student co-authors, “The Most Real Experience I’ve Had in a Course,” Emily Fairchild, Leen Alfatafta, Sara Youngblood Gregory, and Carolyn Beer share their experience collaboratively designing a course on marginalized identities in higher education, and ultimately, through writing the chapter, extending their collaborative learning to collaborative knowledge-production. Chapters in this section expose institutional norms that privatize labor and concentrate authority, and ultimately best exemplify the volume’s argument for collaboration as transformative.
The volume’s integration of embodied, queer, and transnational feminist pedagogies and its illustration of the power of faculty/student partnerships make it a valuable contribution to teaching scholarship. Its focus on how knowledge is constructed, not just what is taught, provides readers with strategies that could be applied in any discipline. Therefore, the list of readers who would benefit from this collection is long: faculty and students, particularly in women’s and gender studies, queer studies, and transnational studies; faculty developers working to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion or championing students-as-partners programs; and faculty and staff leading study abroad or experiential learning programs. Although the book may resonate most immediately with humanities faculty already familiar with feminist, queer, and critical pedagogies, its chapters still offer insights for STEM instructors, as illustrated most directly (but not exclusively) in Barbara L. Shaw and Rebecca Dawson’s chapter, “Beyond Critique: Building a Feministqueerpublichealth Classroom.” Despite its broad relevance and many chapters that helpfully provide a process-based narrative that outlines authors’ moves between theory and practice, the collection is nonetheless not particularly beginner-friendly—authors trust readers to come to chapters with knowledge of critical, feminist, and decolonial pedagogies focused on transformation.
The theories and goals driving the chapters are reliably radical and transformational, but at times the practice seems less so. Teaching and learning strategies like co-creating class ground rules or reflective dialogue are inclusive and valuable, but perhaps not radical. Without accompanying changes to curriculum, assessment, and institutional power, these practices can improve inclusion without otherwise challenging the university’s existing hierarchies. Their radicality depends on whether they truly redistribute authority or simply make oppressive academic systems more livable. However, even these potential gaps are generative, leading to a contextual understanding of transformation and radicality, and guiding readers to ask, “Transformative for whom?”
Pedagogies of Interconnectedness proposes that care, relationship-building, and collaboration should be intrinsic parts of teaching and learning, but for many educators and students, particularly those marginalized in academic systems, they are not. Transformation, then, constitutes more than inclusive teaching strategies. It requires centering marginalized voices, recognizing hidden labor, and redistributing authority. Ultimately, the volume enacts its call to reconceptualize critical and feminist pedagogical canons, centering collaborations between teachers and learners as they strive to challenge and change oppressive systems. The book is at its strongest when it demonstrates transformation in practice. For educators seeking a more interconnected approach to teaching or a sense of community with like-minded instructors during a time of heightened political scrutiny and isolation, this volume offers a practical resource and a sense of possibility. It reminds us of the many ways in which teaching can be an act of hope and solidarity.
Lindsay Onufer, University of Pittsburgh
Josie Rush, University of Pittsburgh