Out of Place

Front matter

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Table of Contents

Jordan Amirkhani, The Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, New Orleans LA

Foreword Tim Doud American University, Washington DC + Zoé Charlton American University, Washington DC | 'sindikit | Baltimore mo

Introduction

1. Artist-Scholars in Place

Alexandria Smith Royal College of Art, London, uk Ken Gonzales-Day Scripps College, Claremont Ca Lauren Frances Adams Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore MD Lisi Raskin Rhode Island School of Design, Providence RI

Michael Ray Charles University of Houston, Houston Tx

Patricia Nguyén Northwestern University, Evanston IL Axis Lab

Rudy Lemcke California College of the Arts, San Francisco CA + Tina Takemoto California College of the Arts, San Francisco CA

Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts

2. Inside-Out

Caroline Woolard Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY +

Susan |ahoda University of Massachusetts, Amherst MA BFAMFAPhD 107

Dan Devening School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago IL Devening Projects 127

Elliott P. Montgomery The New School, New York City NY Extrapolation Factory 141

Jen Delos Reyes University of Illinois, Chicago IL Open Engagement + Side by Side 149

Janelle Iglesias University of California, San Diego ca + Lisa Iglesias Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley MA Las Hermanas Iglesias 155

Roz Crews Portland State University, Portland OR The Center for Undisciplined Research 171

Wendy DesChene Auburn University, Auburn AL + Jeff Schmuki Georgia Southern University, Statesboro GA

PlantBot Genetics 181

Stephanie Dinkins New York State University, Stonybrook NY 191

3. Artists and Place

Alexis Granwell Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia Pa; University of Pennsylvania Tiger Strikes Asteroid 203

Pablo Guardiola San Juan, Puerto Rico + Tony Cruz San Juan, Puerto Rico Beta-Local 213

Heather Hart Rutgers University, New Brunswick Nj + Jina Valentine School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago IL Black Lunch Table

Carmen Papalia Vancouver Bc, Canada + Whitney Mashburn Boston MA

Kenneth Bailey Boston MA ds4si

Antoine Williams Guilford College, Greensboro nc +

Daniel Coleman University of North Carolina, Greensboro NC +

George Scheer Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans LA Elsewhere

Christopher Robbins Purchase College, State University of New York Ny + Maria del Carmen Montoya George Washington University, Washington DC

Ghana Think Tank farid rakun Jakarta, Indonesia +

Leonhard Bartolomeus Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Yamaguchi, Japan +

Marcellina Dwi Kencana Putri Jakarta, Indonesia Gudskul

Jaimes Mayhew Baltimore MD

Joseph Kunkel Santa Fe NM

Sustainable Native Communities Collaborative

Michele Carlson George Washington University, Washington DC Related Tactics + Art Practical

Noah Fischer New York City NY

Occupy Museums

Risé Wilson Brooklyn NY

The Laundromat Project

Ryan McCartney St. Louis MO The Icebox Project Space

Shani Peters New Orleans LA + Joseph Cuillier III New Orleans La The Black School

Bill Gaskins The Graduate Program in Photography + Media & Society Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore MD

Conclusion George Cicsle Baltimore MD + Tim Doud American University, Washington Dc + Zoé Charlton American University, Washington DC Afterwords Contributor Biographies

Figures

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the late Professor Ron Haynie and Glenna Haynie who, through their collective insight and friendship, brought us together as collaborators. Zoé has deep love and gratitude to her mother, Lucille Charlton, a life-long educator. She was her first teacher who gave with an open heart to her family and her students. Tim gives gratitude to his mother, Eleanor Doud, who supported his pursuits and made it possible for him to go to college. She never said no to anything.

And we want to acknowledge the generous art activators who made recommendations of people to research: Amy Sadao, Former Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania; Professors Christine Tarkowski and Diana Guerrero-Maciä of the Fiber Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Damien Davis, Purchase College, State University of New York; Ellie Buttrose, Curator, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia; Dr. Jeffreen Hayes, Executive Director of ThreeWalls; Jesse Harrod, Professor at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia; Kathe Albrecht, our former colleague at American University; Nicole Caruth, independent curator and social architect; Ruby Lerner, the founder of Creative Capital; and Sanjit Sethi, Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

To our dear colleagues at American University in the Art Office, |aylynn Saure and Fetlework Daley, who we value immensely for their insight, kindness, and expertise. Thank you, Joyce Scott and Michelle Grabner, for being exemplary models of artists with committed practices that extend beyond their studios into the communities.

Thanks also to the artists: Anne Wilson; Ashley Minner; Carole Lung with Frau Fiber; Fritz Haeg at Salmon Creek Farm and Larry Rinder; Jeremy Chen at The Moving Company; |uliana Huxtable; Joseph Lopez at Convergent Media Collective; Juan William Chavez at North Side Workshop, St. Louis; Kimba Thompson at Blak Dot Gallery, Melbourne; Sergio Mufioz Sarmiento at The Art and Law Program, New York City; Vanessa German at ArtHouse; Xandra Ibarra; Zanele Muholi, and their collective Inkanyiso in South Africa. We are grateful for your work with us and your collegiality.

It has been a profoundly beautiful experience for us to co-edit Out of Place. This book would not have been realized if not for the trust, commitment, and unwavering support from Vincent W. |. van Gerven Oei and Eileen A. Fradenburg |oy at punctum books. Out of Place, like ourselves and all ofthe contributors, will take up space that has not always been made for us. Our personal and professional trajectories in academia contains proof that all folks must see themselves in the histories and narratives we are taught. Thank you punctum for including us in your family.

We appreciate the many people who helped us work on our book, with heartfelt gratitude to our spouses (and part-time editors/opinionated chefs) Ed Ingebretsen and Rick Delaney.

We also dedicate this book to our professors, the late Ed Love, Francoise Baudoin d'Ajoux, Lilian Garcia-Roig, Phil Hanson, Meg Olin, and the late Ray Yoshida. Through mentorship, they opened up the possibilities of what teaching could be, what it means to be collegial, and ways to give back.

Jordan Amirkhani, The Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, New Orleans LA

Foreword

“No Church in the Wild”: To Seize From It What We Can, What We Are Able

In the 2013 radical treatise The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, the academic-activists Fred Moten and Stefano Harney unpack in a series of seven essays the consequences of neoliberalism on contemporary academic work and invite scholars of all disciplines to overcome their complacency in service of a more just and equitable university culture. At the center of their thesis of subversion and emancipation, Moten and Harney enlist “the undercommons”—the “maroon communities of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visa-expired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologist professors, and feminist engineers,” or, those whose work within the university is often overlooked, undervalued, and thus deemed a threat to “business as usual” —to band together to create a university in active defiance against the forms of oppression that mark our current order. Anticolonialist, anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-hierarchical, a university run by the needs of the undercommons is a university working with a different set of pedagogical and research orientations where “improvisation and collaboration,” modes of “passionate refusal,” and, at times, abuse of the university’s hospitality, work in symphony with practices of resource-sharing, interdisciplinary squatting, and risk-taking, too. While Moten and Harney do not mention visual artists specifically in their definition of the university’s “undercommons,” the duo’s musically-informed language and spatial poetics points to their belief in the resistant power of aesthetic expression and the “creative impulses that collectively and trans-historically produce something else, anew” in order to shape a path forward for radical pedagogical and research-based work. Art’s philosophical foundations and processes have always been deeply connected to the arts of transformation, imagination, alternatives, and, in some cases, revolution, that is, the desire to create, interpret, and re-constitute anew is in many ways a priori to art-making. As John Berger once remarked, in an age marked by alienation and market values, art is a way of undoing the world of things [in order to construct a] world that we want, that we must see, even when that labor fails, ... for, art is action and ideas, not achievement.'

Understood in this way, not only are artists insistently engaging in forms of cultural resistance antagonistic to market values, but their work also aligns with a history of radical politics and world-building where the possibilities inherent in construction serve as conduits for a range of collective emancipatory struggles across time and space.

By mobilizing the demands of Moten and Harney to improvise new modalities and consequences for academic work, pedagogy, that is, the very methods and practices of teaching others, becomes the apex of imagining what this new, better ground upon which to thrive might require. For pedagogy is an inherently communal activity, created and enacted within the relations of a committed group of learners to make and share knowledge, question habits of thought, and render visible the ideological premises upon which this work is done. At its best and most potent, it becomes committed to what Christina Sharpe calls the “wake work,” or a kind of gathering of ruptures and caretaking of consciousness that continuously centers the continuing disasters of capitalism, transatlantic enslavement, and mass incarceration within it in order to ensure that the work remains not only in service of social justice and democratic ideals, but for and by those most vulnerable and precarious within the systems we live and work, namely, Black people.

The future for this kind of radical pedagogy is difficult and requires an equal investment in creation, care, and, in some instances, complete fugitivity from the traditional demands of university culture. For the state of our world is in a kind of emergency, and it is the university itself that connects to many of our social and public crises, specifically, white supremacy and capitalism. Universities are now million-dollar businesses, students are now customers, and aggressive marketing strategies and branding campaigns that continue to espouse the university as a common good, accessible and available to everyone, functions now more as mythos than fact. Precarity runs wide and deep through these managerial organizations from rising tuitions that have not accompanied increases in wages, unprecedented accrual of student debt—most significant for Black women who hold the most student debt and those seeking to become professional artists—divestment in educational and faculty in-

I John Berger, Landscapes: John Berger on Art, ed. Tom Overton (London: Verso Press, 2018), 210.

FOREWORD frastructure for million-dollar administrative, leisure, entertainment, and sporting campaigns, the shattering of arts and humanities departments, and alarming rises in adjunct and zero-contract hour employment at the expense of benefits and job security. As Frederic Jameson reminds, the university is a bastion of “Enlightenmenttype critiques and de-mystification” projects, as a way to deflate true social transformation “in order to clear ground for unobstructed planning and development.” How to survive them, or to work within them and against them, requires a kind of cunning, secretive, even criminal-adjacent activity. Teaching, the university’s greatest commodity is where this work takes place, and the classroom and pedagogy is the battlefield by which the work of privileged professionalization is challenged and new equations for artistic pedagogical goals can be articulated.

The incredible constellation of voices and essays gathered into this tome, Out of Place: Artists, Pedagogy, and Purpose, is a critical reader for those who teach or have been taught in a university art program, for those who care about how art is transmitted into cultural and critical discourse, and for those who are eager to test what it means to place social justice in conversation or confrontation with the goals of a contemporary liberal arts education. | stress conversation and confrontation as a way to acknowledge the historical tension that being an artist in the university has always contained. Since the collapse of the atelier and conservatory systems for visual artists in the second half of the 20th century, the artist’s migration and assimilation into the traditional research, pedagogical, and professional demands of higher education have been one of negotiation and conflict. As in the past, these conflicts revealed themselves in the areas of one, research production: Is a painting like a peer-reviewed article? Can the making and production of a film be evaluated using the language and assumptions of academic originality and individual achievement?; two, politics: What does it mean to teach courses on Marxism in elite private universities? Can | be a radical and still depend upon adjunct labor? Is my labor being put to use to incur actual change, or sustain the status quo?; and three, pedagogy: Am | doing enough to critique the Western, white, patriarchal assumptions of my discipline? Am | creating a space where a diverse, underrepresented range of voices, geographies, and perspectives are centered? Am | interrogating my own assumptions as a teacher and meeting my students where they are at in the classroom, economically, culturally, geographically?

My own time in academia was fraught with these questions. Whether teaching and working in regional state universities or elite private academic institutions, in small cities or major metropolitan centers, the techniques of finding and shaping a pedagogical practice stayed very much the same. Across each iteration, what it took was finding a community both inside and outside the institution where risk-taking and critical questioning of how and through what means a more equitable space of learning could be enacted. It took saying no to patterns and inherited values in my discipline that perpetuate systems of exclusion and oppression, it required quietly refusing to negotiate historical truths in my classroom and in the conference room, it took a lot of listening to Black women and my students of color about their experiences in the university and the harms they have suffered, it took yearly and monthly revising and revisiting my pedagogy in communion with other stewards of change inside and outside the university. It took consistent and constant re-teaching of myself for the benefit of others. Sharing resources, power, and solidarities, creating avenues for exchange across disciplines and within my community; providing mentorship and care to fellow peers and students of color, my queer and non-binary academic network; acknowledging women toiling away in grand excess of their male peers across all university systems; figuring out how to split funding and grants seventeen-thousand ways; learning from generations that came before; figuring out how to do it in a rapidly collapsing architecture; and doing it together, but sometimes alone, and telling my students the truth. These pathways are present in abundant forms in this text. In order to shape a pedagogy of purpose, improvisation, and collectivity is required.

The range of writers in these pages speak to pedagogy as a kind of testing ground in which play, provocation, and care are as crucial as political commitments and refusals—a timely set of conditions in light of the ongoing consequences of a worldwide pandemic and racial reckoning in which predominantly white institutions are being held to account to address, dismantle, and reform practices that perpetuate white supremacy, elitism, patriarchy, corporate greed, and hypocritical forms of solidarity with radical social movements. My own time in academia made visible to me that just as the “woke” work demands a kind of continual reminding and improvisational flexibility, so too does the work in our classrooms, studios, and in collaboration with one another inside and outside of the university’s domain. It is here, in these texts and assemblage of strategies, that teaching and pedagogy grow loose and mutate, bind together, connect with an outside, stretch and queer themselves, become wild.

—Dr. Jordan Amirkhani, Brooklyn, New York City, June 20, 2021

Tim Doud American University, Washington oc + Zoé Charlton American University, Washington DC

| 'sindikit | Baltimore MD

Introduction

The academic landscape is broad and fickle; academic fields, disciplines, and teaching perspectives always shift and change. In these academic places, identities, and communities overlap and work together. This book holds space for identities that are often undervoiced in academia. The perspectives of the contributors serve as models for how artists work within communities through solidarity, equity, and creativity. The editors, Zoé Charlton and Tim Doud, are faculty at American University in the Department of Art. Our current academic positions reflect the changing times in which we matured as educators and as artists. Our positions also reflect the generational expectations of families who did not gain entrance into this place, academia, because of the entwined pressures of gender, race, class, and educational background.

As individual faculty members and exhibiting artists, we found entry into academia marked by political struggle. We contended with socio-political structures that differed from our expectations and homelives. Our family backgrounds shaped our choices, and it is within those constraints we made our way into the academy. It is a truism about every contributor in this book. They speak to their experiences in the ways that best serve themselves and the communities in which they create, serve, and work, and speak to their relationships to pedagogy.

The essays in Out of Place: Artists, Pedagogy, and Purpose consider the different paths taken by artists as they navigated their way from formative experiences into pedagogy. Individual essays are meant to stand apart and have their own focus and interests. Each voice or set of voices is an entry into a pedagogical moment. The academy (the places and persons involved in post-secondary education) and pedagogy (practices of learning and instruction) are not fixed; instead, each adapts to meet the factors and historical conditions of the people and communities it serves.

With this critically, historicist approach in mind, The Academy, and what happens in it, is something to be historicized, studied, critiqued, revised, reframed, and questioned.

To reflect upon, and theorize, pedagogy itself, we cast a wide net in order to learn what artists were teaching, in what contexts, and what challenges they encountered. Our curiosity led us to artists working in the United States and in other countries and took us to interesting, and unexpected, places. Learning and teaching happens everywhere, and it was a difficult task to select the thirty-one essays in this volume from among so many. We developed three broad categories in which to invite participation: first, artists who challenge silos within academia; second, the artist-scholar who bridges communities with projects beyond their “school” responsibilities; and third, artists who engage pedagogy, in various forms, as initiatives separate from their private studio practices.

The first group of artists we considered for Out of Place reflect our own experiences as artists who work in academic institutions but whose social and pedagogical engagement extends beyond the walls of the academy, to build bridges between the divide of institutional schools and an evolving contemporary art scene. The artists, teachers, and pedagogists in this volume form an engaged community of artist-scholars. Some of the artists currently hold academic positions and maintain projects/pedagogical initiatives outside of their home institution. Elliott Montgomery, and his collaborator Chris Woebken, developed the Extrapolation Factory while working as an adjunct faculty member at Parsons School of Design. Elliott now has a full-time teaching job at The New School in New York. Wendy DesChene and Jeff Schmuki developed PlantBot ArtLab while holding faculty positions at different universities. Wendy and |eff developed their project while going up for tenure and now hold tenured positions at their respective universities. Their informative essay speaks to the benefits, as well as challenges, of working within institutional environments. They also speak about the varying levels of support received from their universities.

Stephanie Dinkins developed Project al-Khwarizmi while teaching at The State University of New York at Stony Brook. Although at different points of their careers, Caroline Woolard and Susan jahoda were jointly committed to pedagogy and to studying the efficacy of their own teaching and studio habits. Susan, a full professor, co-founded BFAMFAPhD with Caroline who has a BFA, her highest terminal degree. Caroline is now a tenure-track professor at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. Devening Projects, founded by Dan Devening, operates in the framework of a traditional commercial gallery. Dan has taught in academia for his entire career. Jen Delos Reyes founded Open Engagement as a project in graduate school. She credits this project turned national conference in helping to secure her full-time teaching position at the University of Illinois, Chicago. |en’s new initiative, Side by Side, considers the possibilities and impact of local, community-forward, and integrative approaches to art, culture, and living in support of communities. Las Hermanas Iglesias’s collaboration explores hybridity, social participation, and transnational

INTRODUCTION identities. Their collective has fluidly evolved to include regular collaborations with their mother who never studied art. Theirs is a collaboration and an art project, but not in the traditional sense.

The second category of artists engage in pedagogical initiatives or forms of institutional critique that were established outside of an art school or university setting. For instance, Ghana ThinkTank, Black Lunch Table, The Black School, Design Studio for Social Intervention (ds4si), the Laundromat Project, Beta Local, Art Practical, Sustainable Native Communities Collaborative, Gudskul, and Related Tactics, are among the projects that utilize cooperative learning models to offer alternatives to traditional educational structures. Interestingly, some of the artists who started these projects now hold academic positions. This is not surprising as academia tends to institutionalize, even co-op or colonize, independent pedagogical initiatives.

Some contributors established their programs and initiatives as forms of institutional critique of museums, university systems, and the professionalization of art. Occupy Museum and Roz Crew’s Center for Undisciplined Research fall into this category. Extending the practice of creative research beyond a traditional studio space—a “post-studio” space—is the focus of Jaimes Mayhew’s LAB Studios (Life After Boring Studios). In his residency program, he provides artists with material, social, and emotional support to relearn and evaluate their participation in art world expectations and form new methods for engaging communities in their artistic practice. Finally, Tiger Strikes Asteroid and The Icebox Project Space were not founded as pedagogical initiatives. But nonetheless, each of these places have called into question the mechanisms and expectations of gallery and museum culture. Whitney Mashburn and Carmen Papalia address access, care, and ableist policies within institutions. Their essay functions as a manifesto and a pedagogical call to action. Elsewhere is a living museum and artist residency set in a three-floor, former thrift store grounded in research, exploration, and pedagogical impact.

The third category of artists in Out of Place are artist-scholars who are doing transformative and inter/transdisciplinary work within their respective institutions. Artists discuss practices and projects that redefine the academy, praxis, or their communities. Many of those artists commit themselves to working outside of traditional siloed departments. We invited Ken Gonzales-Day, a Professor at Scripps College, to recommend participants for this volume. We were so taken by his engaged response to our query that we invited him to write about his experiences in academia. Like Gonzales-Day, Lauren Frances Adams, Michael Ray Charles, Alexandria Smith, and Lisi Raskin all shape their pedagogy through inclusive practices and trans-and interdisciplinary research. Importantly, each critically questions the heteronormative, Eurocentric models of learning prevalent in university structures. Tina Takemoto, dean of Humanities and Sciences at the California College of the Arts (CCA) and artist Rudy Lemcke developed Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts to address the lack of inclusion for queer-identifying students at CCA. Patricia Nguyén’s

Axis Lab community activism and studio practice within immigrant Chicago communities makes her a valuable, and crucial, voice that is needed in academia.

Artists enter the academy at different ranks, different contractual obligations, or job protections. Some artists hold BFA and MFA degrees. Some artists are tenure-track assistant professors, and others are tenured associate professors and full professors. Out of Place includes artists who hold three- to five-year renewable contracts, artists who are adjunct professors that teach at multiple institutions within a single semester, while others are adjuncts who hold rank but no tenure. Ranking systems and titles vary in each institution and so does job security. The hierarchies within academic institutions have similarities and differences. Artists may enter as adjunct faculty and have to navigate maintaining their positions. Dan Devening, for instance, is a Full Adjunct Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in a non-tenured position with no guarantee of the number of classes available to him each term.

Many of the contributor’s concerns, particularly regarding white, hetero-normative, and Eurocentric pedagogical approaches, have touched our (the editors”) experiences in academia. We are aligned with our institution’s commitment to anti-bias, anti-racist, and decolonized curricula. Along with our students, colleagues, and coworkers, we are transforming the MFA Studio Art Program at the American University (AU) into a more inclusive place to study and teach. Through our collaborative art project 'sindikit, we form a bridge between what we do in our respective studios, in our communities, and at Au. We develop curriculum, jointly teach courses, and organize visiting artists programs in our Studio Art program. We realize the work that we do with 'sindikit can serve as an example of one way, not exclusively, that collaborative work within and beyond the academia shapes a relationship to The Academy. In 2016, we created 'sindikit to engage our creative research, which in our case has been impacted by gender, sexuality, and race. Our interest in the intersections of art, community, and education made it crucial for us to work both in and outside of the University system.

Not one of these essays is alike. And a value exists in their differences. Not everyone has the same access or life experiences. Even within a book about pedagogy, a narrow framework can frame what constitutes pedagogy or pedagogical thinking.

We provided contributors with four prompts to consider their relationship to pedagogy or academia. Each contributor had different strategies and energies around those prompts. Some artists talked more biographically, others emphasized their initiatives or artwork. Different lives make for different choices. Biographies are important; they help us understand the different paths each artist has taken. We asked contributors how their lives impacted their choices as artists and teachers and how those choices, in some cases, contributed to their projects. Through the facts of their lives, contributors convey how their philosophies of learning were shaped.

INTRODUCTION

Some spent time to unpack their relationship to and experiences in their academic positions; while others gave institutional critique. We knew this specific topic, pedagogy, would generate broad responses, and we welcomed them. Teaching happens in many ways. For example, Ryan McCartney’s essay lays out how his philosophy and pedagogical thinking was formed through his life experiences and his creative work with The Icebox Project Space. His role as an adjunct teacher did not include curriculum-building or shaping programs where he taught. His pedagogy was shaped elsewhere, as most good learning often is. He was inside and outside ofthe academy at the same time.

Pedagogy often happens when we are not expecting it. In the structure of the essays themselves, the contributors engage in forms of it. The reader gains insights into each contributor in the way their essays are approached. We see what leads each person or collaboration. Did they arrive at their pedagogical philosophy through biography, through community action, through recognizing what was missing in their education? Gudskul, the Black School, and BFAMFAPhD are good examples of the variety of approaches to these essays.

The essays in this book were written and edited between 2019 and 2021. During this time our communities were impacted by Covid-19, systemic racism, trans/ homophobia, sexism, and the presidential election in November 2020. Life and job circumstances have changed for many of the contributors. For instance, Roz Crews now teaches high school in Florida; Lisa Iglesias is an Associate Professor at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts; Noah Fischer is living in Brooklyn again after teaching in Ohio for a year; and Ryan McCartney relocated to St. Louis, Missouri. The Black School moved from Harlem, New York to New Orleans, Louisiana where they will build their first brick and mortar school.

We elaborate on our work together in a conversational essay with George Ciscle. George is a curator, educator, and founder of The Contemporary in Baltimore, Maryland. Bill Gaskins, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art, contributed the conclusion in Out of Place. He takes a meta-approach, framing the questions of pedagogy in a wider context of personal and institutional memory. It is fitting that Bill Gaskins brings closure to our conversations. Gaskins’s essay looks beyond the politics of a contemporary, consumer-based educational model, while calling out many of the important social and political issues that animate academic discourse today.

We are at a crossroads in academia; the reader will see the struggle in some of these essays. There is no one pedagogical approach. Readers will gain insight to the spaces between what the contributors were trained to think and do versus how their life experiences shaped their teaching. This brings us back to the Commons—where people meet. The Undercommons, made visible by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013) has been essential for many people in these conversations to engage academic institutions and trans/gress them. The energy to move—beyond, beneath, around, across boundaries that stifle, trap, and eliminate—joins the contributors in this volume. Out of Place recognizes and values that pedagogical strategies emerge from specific communities, their experiences, and at times, moves them out of one place of learning into another.