Unhoming Pedagogies is a digital magazine that gathers students’ and teachers’ stories about transformational, uncertain and vulnerable experiences of contemporary Higher Education. Created in 2020, the website aims to offer a place in which people can give voice to urgent, raw or troubling educational issues, and to open a space for ongoing conversations.
Since the website launched in 2020, staff and students have been telling powerful stories in and beyond the classroom, and narrating experiences of social and racial privilege. Authors have shared accounts of education, health and inequality during the pandemic. Some have reflected on wellbeing, individual achievement and the possibilities for ‘doing education differently’; others have questioned narratives of educational productivity and institutional ‘excellence’.
At times in these collections, the University is seen to provide a provocative and hopeful between space - a site of finding things out with others - and a creative, collective opportunity to fight for the overturning of accepted hierarchies. In other instances, education remains problematically an economy to be maximised and exploited. In this liminal place, at the bounds of the campus and our known worlds, we play and struggle: norm-bending, risk-taking, unhoming educational certainties.
What is Unhoming?
My relationship with the word ‘unhoming’ started back in 2019. I was looking for a way to talk about the feeling of being not-at-home in research and teaching, and how better to value moments of uncertainty, provisionality, struggle and insecurity in the classroom. I didn’t always want to put an end to those unsettling feelings: they seemed to be opening things up with others. I began to think about the correlation between unhoming and the uncanny; the shaky ground of the unfamiliar and the weirdly familiar in the ordinary. By unhoming familiar educational norms, accepted and unthinking structures and relations could be brought into question. For sure, this can provoke discomfort: perhaps fear, perhaps excitement. But at times, giving space to the edgy, disruptive and emergent helps to expose gaps in seemingly stable systems, and lets us glimpse something else. Unhoming pedagogy is also a response to today’s precarity and social injustice; and my hope is it continues to open up the myriad rifts in what is expected and known.
Unhoming Pedagogies is open to all teachers, students and alumni curious about fostering greater diversity in what constitutes knowledge, whether in education, research, creative practice, play, or beyond.
Dr. Natalie Pollard, Editor and Project Lead
Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literary Studies, University of Exeter (UK)
CONTACT: For inquiries, questions, collaborations, and to express your interest in submitting a story to Unhoming Pedagogies, please contact Natalie Pollard.
