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Engaging with the interconnected dynamics of the classroom, this chapter draws from Audre Lorde's “Uses of Anger” to consider how empathy may be cultivated as a soft skill for stronger interpersonal relationships. Jocelyn E. Marshall highlights the need for mutual vulnerability between instructor and student, where vulnerability is understood to be a mode of resistance in regards to patriarchal and hegemonic higher education institutions and learning standards. By braiding queer feminisms with interdisciplinary approaches, the trauma-informed pedagogy upholds radical empathy as the linchpin to Lorde's advocating of articulating anger with precision, listening intensely, gaining new insight, and enacting change. In creating spaces to practice and further develop empathy, the trauma-informed pedagogical approach aims to empower students with agency and equip them with skills for self-accountability and holding others accountable.

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.

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.”

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.

This chapter focuses on an early British female writer's course offered at Ripon College, a small liberal arts institution in Ripon, Wisconsin, USA. The course was first offered during the spring of 2017 as Donald J. Trump began his term as president of the United States. The students and instructor aimed to make their classroom a place for honest and open discussions about the difficult socio-political environment as they continually sought connections between their own social concerns and those of the early women writers they studied. The essay focuses specifically on the group's study of eighteenth-century British author Eliza Haywood, her novella Fantomina, and her periodical The Female Spectator. Through their study of these texts, the group came to understand how their own stories mattered. They saw that their creativity was a tool with which they could navigate and resist political change. This realization manifested itself in the creative capstone project for the course – a student-author periodical based on The Female Spectator. The essay explains the instructor's pedagogical approach toward this project and features samples of the students' writing from both the periodical and their end-of-term reflective writings.