Provocations, Perspectives, and Possibilities of Chicana/Latina Feminist Pedagogies

Chicana/Latina feminist thought and pedagogies offer interdisciplinary contributions that reimagine family, community, liberation, teaching, and learning rooted in de-colonial praxis. Chicana/Latina feminist thought and pedagogies have cultivated theoretical, methodological, and epistemological cartographies that map questions such as: what are the evolving conditions that shape the oppression Chicanas face in their daily lives?; how do Chicanas cultivate multiple subjectivities that strive for embodied wholeness rather than partiality?; in what ways can intersectionality as a theory of oppression not difference dismantle systems of privilege and inequality that are pervasive within institutions such as education, healthcare, the prison industrial complex, the military, religion, families, and mass media?; and how can theories of the flesh which emerge through the lived experiences of Chicanas’ lives offer new pathways to coalition building, activism, scholarship, and teaching and learning that remain bridged to equity, and to justice as praxis not place? Chicana feminist thought includes themes of the history and material conditions of Chicanas as the basis for feminist consciousness, reclaiming malinchismo and marianismo, sexuality (Chicanas as sexual subjects), a commitment to political action, coalition building and recognition of difference among Chicanas, and challenging the vendida logic within Chicano culture. Chicana/Latina feminist pedagogies are insistent that everyday experiences of Chicanas are worth studying because they serve as key sources of knowledge that are necessary to theorize new de-colonial visions of life, family, labor, community, and education. Chicana/Latina feminist pedagogies are multidisciplinary in their approach and are culturally specific ways of organizing teaching and learning in informal sites such as the home and community, ways that embrace Chicana ways of knowing and creating knowledge that point to schooling spaces as full of creativity, agency, movement, and coalition building.

If God Is with Us

This article uses the metaphor of the U.S. Air Force as religion to provide a fresh perspective in understanding a technologically-based culture built on matters of life-and-death. The United States Air Force is the youngest military service of the United States, just recently celebrating its 70th anniversary of independent existence. The U.S. Air Force has venerated traditions, hallowed rituals, sacred myths, and holy doctrine. Its culture also has a strong respect for the well-established hierarchy, a deeply instilled reverence for senior members, a bureaucracy famous for resistance to change, and beliefs about salvation from very real, mortal danger. All of these characteristics have counterparts in religions and will be used to describe a model of a “military religion” with particular focus on the U.S. Air Force. Using this model, the Air Force’s organizational resistance to change, approach to technology and technological change, integration with other military services, and systemic cultural issues can be considered in a new light. The religious narrative—with the organizational roles of actors such as priests, prophets, and laity, and the institutional connotations of theological terms such as sacredness—provides a richer understanding of the sublimity of the U.S. Air Force and what it means to be an airman.

Borrowed PATH verbs in Middle English

Chapter 9 analyses the use of the path verbs enter, ish/issue, descend, avale, ascend, mount, and amount in Middle English autonomous texts and translations from French and Latin, focusing on their recurrent contexts and their complementation patterns. It shows that these verbs are borrowed predominantly in specific, often non-literal or manner-enriched senses relating to discourse domains such as administration, military, religion, and the like, rather than being borrowed as verbs for describing general literal motion events. Their application for general literal motion events is shown to be less restricted in translations from French and Latin, in which translators often react to the presence of a path verb in the original by using the same verb in its Middle English form. This and the continued influence of French and Latin after Middle English may eventually have led to a wider application of the verbs in later stages of the language.