Dispatch: Belonging, Dialogue, and Co-Learning

I. Participation as Privilege: A Reflexive Account

This reflexive account examines my participation in the School of Common Knowledge through the lens of critical pedagogy, attending to how participation, belonging, and dialogue are unevenly constituted within co-learning environments. Writing as an immigrant artist, educator, and doctoral researcher, I understand participation not as a neutral act but as a form of privilege shaped by institutional affiliation, geopolitical mobility, and colonial histories of access. This awareness echoes Sara Ahmed’s (2012) assertion that inclusion within progressive institutions often operates conditionally, allowing presence while regulating the terms under which one may speak, disrupt, or be heard.

Becoming reflexively attentive to my own participation as privilege did not produce a shared recognition within the group. Instead, my willingness to name this privilege appeared to unsettle some participants. In collective discussions, I encountered moments of misrecognition in which my positionality was not fully understood or was affectively resisted. Ahmed (2012) describes this dynamic as the ‘non-performative’ nature of inclusion, where institutional commitments to openness do not necessarily translate into lived experiences of belonging. Despite being formally included, I experienced an affective withdrawal of belonging – an embodied sense that my presence no longer comfortably fitted the space.

This experience compelled me to differentiate sharply between inclusion and belonging. Inclusion granted me access and visibility; belonging required relational openness and dialogical reciprocity. When my reflexive engagement with privilege was received as disturbance rather than invitation, participation ceased to function as recognition. Instead, it exposed the fragile and conditional nature of belonging within learning environments that aspire to horizontality yet remain structured by unspoken affective norms.

From a Freirean perspective, this rupture illuminates the limits of dialogue in spaces where discomfort is not collectively held. For Paulo Freire (1970), dialogue is not merely conversation, but a praxis grounded in humility, mutual recognition, and an ethical commitment to becoming-with others. Dialogue cannot exist where participants fear losing affective comfort or where certain forms of speech are quietly discouraged. In the absence of belonging, dialogue collapses into silence or parallel monologues – conditions I experienced firsthand during moments when relational openness withdrew.

As an immigrant scholar familiar with occupying spaces of partial belonging, this experience was not entirely new. However, it was newly disorienting within a program explicitly framed around co-learning, common knowledge, and collective inquiry. This dissonance sharpened my understanding that critical language alone does not guarantee critical pedagogy. As bell hooks (1994) reminds us, engaged pedagogy demands not only intellectual rigor but emotional presence and care. Without these, learning spaces risk reproducing the very exclusions they seek to contest.

This moment of non-belonging became analytically significant for my dissertation. It revealed how co-learning environments, even when grounded in emancipatory intent, can reproduce subtle forms of othering. Othering here did not manifest as overt exclusion but as an affective boundary – marking whose discomfort is accommodated, whose reflexivity is welcomed, and whose presence becomes difficult to hold. Critical pedagogy, in this sense, requires ongoing reflexivity not only from participants but from the structures that shape participation itself.

Re-framing this experience through critical pedagogy also reshaped my understanding of togetherness. Togetherness cannot be assumed as a natural outcome of co-presence or shared political commitments. Rather, it must be cultivated as an ethical and relational practice attentive to asymmetry, power, and vulnerability. Togetherness, as I now understand it, is enacted through sustained listening, a willingness to remain with discomfort, and a collective responsibility to repair moments of mis-recognition.

Ultimately, this reflexive engagement clarified that co-learning is not inherently just by virtue of its intentions. It becomes a meaningful pedagogical practice only when belonging is treated as a prerequisite for dialogue rather than its byproduct. Without belonging, dialogue cannot take place; without dialogue, togetherness remains aspirational rather than lived. Carrying this insight into my dissertation, I position reflexivity not as self-disclosure but as a critical pedagogical responsibility – one that demands attentiveness to how learning spaces include, exclude, and shape who can speak, who is heard, and who belongs.

II. Belonging as Image, Belonging as Practice

To accompany this reflection, I read an image visually and performatively:

A monumental mural rises above a temporary fence. Painted bodies are enlarged, fragmented, patterned – faces crossed with stripes, torsos tiled like architecture, a heart lifted outside the body, exposed and held. Words curve across the wall: LIBRES, TOTALMENTE. Freedom appears as declaration, not condition.

Below the mural, real bodies pass such smaller, darker, partially obscured. Heads turn, conversations continue, movement does not stop. The fence quietly reorganizes space. Above: symbolism, permanence. Below: transience, negotiation. The mural performs belonging as image; the street performs belonging as practice. Ahmed reminds us that walls do not simply block; they orient.

The painted heart—fixed, exposed—suggests care and vulnerability but cannot respond. Below it, people carry their own hearts differently: guarded, folded inward, moving through the city. Liberation is not announced; it is enacted collectively. The mural names freedom; belonging emerges in the slow, relational work of presence, attention, and care.

This image mirrors co-learning: inclusion invites us in, but belonging must be nurtured, enacted, and continually attended to. Dialogue, participation, and relational openness flourish when guided by ethical attentiveness, generosity, and love.

III. Belonging Before Dialogue

What remains after analysis is bodily.

I arrive carrying a passport, a grant letter, a name on a list.
I sit in the circle.
I speak.

Participation looks like presence.
It looks like a chair pulled close to the table, a badge, a shared meal.
But participation is also weight—
the weight of access, of mobility, of permission.

At the School of Common Knowledge, I begin to notice how my ability to be here is not neutral.
To travel.
To listen.
To speak without translation.
To be recognized.

Naming this does not open the room.
It tightens it.

I feel it in the air before I understand it intellectually:
a pause that stretches too long,
eyes that drift,
bodies that turn slightly away.

I am still included.
But I am no longer held.

Sara Ahmed writes that inclusion often asks us to be present without disturbing the space.
You may enter,
but do not rearrange the furniture.
Do not name the cracks in the floor.

When I speak of participation as privilege, the circle holds its breath.
Dialogue falters.

Paulo Freire reminds us that dialogue is not talk—it is relation.
It requires humility, trust, and a shared willingness to stay with discomfort.
Without these, words fall flat.
They land, but they do not meet.

Belonging is felt before it is spoken.
It lives in the body:
in how long silence lasts,
in whether interruption is care or erasure,
in whether difference is met with curiosity or containment.

As an immigrant scholar, I know this choreography well.
I have learned how to read rooms.
How to soften my edges.
How to decide when to speak and when silence will cost less.

Still, it unsettles me to feel othering emerge in a space committed to co-learning.
Not through refusal,
but through withdrawal.

Othering here is subtle.
It looks like politeness.
It sounds like moving on.

Togetherness, I realize, is not agreement.
It is not shared language or common politics.
It is a practice—fragile, unfinished—
of staying with each other when things become uncomfortable.

Belonging does not follow dialogue.
Belonging makes dialogue possible.

Without it, we speak near one another,
not with one another.

This dispatch is not a conclusion.
It is a gesture—
a hand extended,
asking how co-learning might look if belonging were treated not as an outcome,
but as a responsibility.

References

Sara Ahmed, On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life, Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.), London and New York: Continuum, 1979.

bell hooks, Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom, London: Routledge, 1994.