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This chapter follows the proposal, planning, implementation, and subsequent reflection on an interdisciplinary, team-taught seminar on gender-based violence in a humanities college of a medium-sized private university. A retrospective analysis provides a lens through which to evaluate the tension between progressive thinking and progressive pedagogy. Expert knowledge and feminist texts do not make a pedagogy trauma-informed nor radical. In a reverse of hierarchy and patriarchy, Skibba posits that facilitating agency, sharing vulnerability, and prioritizing emotional intelligence are key in engaging with students such that their learning and growth move beyond the confines the classroom, university, and job preparation.

This edited volume brings feminist theory, critical pedagogy, and trauma theory in conversation with one another in order to analyze how gender-based violence is being discussed in educational settings. Lines of inquiry include how and why this topic is being carried out, suggestions for the future, as well as recognition and respect for the emotional toll embedded within these important conversations. In the introduction to the volume, the editors lay the foundation for understanding how the genres and topics communicate with one another to contextualize learning as intellectual, emotional, reciprocal, and ever-changing.

The conclusion highlights the vulnerability necessary to engage in this analysis and reminds the reader that this work is being shared in an effort to open, share, and enrich. This volume has created spaces in which mutual aid and understanding within the concepts presented, the intellectuality suggested, and the actual teamwork needed to write it are prioritized. In so doing, it suggests that we must continue this work collectively, in concert with one another, and in resistance to the standards of oppression that have molded the institutions in which we exist.

Julia Rose Sutherland details a 2021 installation project featuring a series of sugar-casted ambered bodies. The collaborative exhibition reflects upon the relationship between BIPOC people, sex work, fetishization, and community care. By creating edible sugar casts from specifically BIPOC women and trans folk, the work references the exoticization of diverse people to fulfill colonial appetites, reducing human identity to an object of desire. This body of work addresses loss but at the same time showcases care, ancestry, and a taking back of both the body and sexual agency – taking back our bodies – no shame, just perfection in each pose.

The central theme of this suite of poems concerns the ideas of trauma, survivorship, and the nature of memory. Specifically, how we choose to move forward from trauma and how that will look different on any given day. Healing is a completely singular experience, and it colors how a survivor interacts with the world, with potential loves, and with themselves. This is further complicated by the dynamics of family and how trauma can become twisted within those relationships – creating and breaking trust in the process.

Julia Rose Sutherland highlights the heart of her feminist practice as an indigenous artist: Feminism for everyone and feminism every day. From detailing her mixed media usage to collaborative project dynamics, Sutherland reemphasizes the urgent need to continue to highlight and address ongoing settler violence forced upon the land, women, and communities. By keeping histories and the work of knowledge keepers close to her individual work and pieces created with others, Sutherland demonstrates the complex and layered steps vital for navigating patriarchal institutions and questioning multiple systems of oppression through art in order for everyone to be “heard in their entirety.”