Anti-Racist Teacher Well-Being and/as Curricular Praxis by MaryJohn R. Adkins Cartee A dissertation accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Critical and Sociocultural Studies in Education Dissertation Committee: Lisa A. Mazzei, Chair Jerry L. Rosiek, Core Member Jenefer Husman, Core Member Ellen McWhirter, Institutional Representative University of Oregon Summer 2024 2 © 2024 MaryJohn R. Adkins Cartee 3 DISSERTATION ABSTRACT MaryJohn R. Adkins Cartee Doctor of Philosophy in Critical and Sociocultural Studies in Education Title: Anti-Racist Teacher Well-Being and/as Curricular Praxis This dissertation explores the well-being of public K-12 teachers in the United States who explicitly identify as anti-racist and/or anti-colonial teachers. Well-being has traditionally been conceptualized as attached to single human individuals in most Western academic scholarship. However, drawing on insights from the posthumanisms, community psychology, Critical Race Theory, and Indigenous studies, this dissertation argues that these teachers’ well-being is not only influenced by the larger institutional, political, and environmental contexts in which they live and teach; it is co-constituted with them on the level of ontology. In order to explore these teachers’ well-being, this study draws on immersive cartography (Rousell, 2021), a posthuman methodology that centers affect (Gregg & Siegworth, 2010), process, and emergence. While methods were also borrowed from traditional, qualitative, humanistic methodologies (i.e. interviews and focus groups), process, relationality, and emergence were centered. Four interviews and one focus group were selected for the dissertation based on affective resonances. Together, these interviews and an instance from a focus group map a terrain of anti-racist, anti-colonial teacher well-ill-being which co-constitutes with multiple temporalities from teachers’ pasts, collective histories, and multiple environments. Many teachers had deep personal connections of many types to various forms of oppression, and these histories informed their willingness to question societal common sense—including their own. Furthermore, the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) teachers in the study found themselves resisting or circumventing the white, feminized position of “footsoldier of colonialism” (Leonardo & Boas, 2021) in the teaching profession by doing work outside the classroom, or by leaving the traditional classroom for other work in the broader field of education. Implications of this work 4 include a need to address the dividual—as opposed to individual—character of ongoing anti-racist, anti-colonial teacher education, particularly its hidden curriculum. The dividual substrate of the hidden curriculum of ongoing teacher education is aggregate, continuous, and pre-personal, and includes racist affects, gendered embodiment, and collective histories. Changing this dividual substrate is perhaps more challenging than changing individuals; nonetheless, anti-racist, anti- colonial teachers discussed being sustained in community with students and with other teachers similarly oriented. 5 CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: MaryJohn R. Adkins Cartee GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene University of British Columbia, Vancouver Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, Critical and Sociocultural Studies in Education, 2024, University of Oregon Master of Arts, Society, Culture, and Politics in Education, 2014, University of British Columbia Bachelor of Arts, English and Secondary Education, 2006, Furman University PUBLICATIONS: Adkins-Cartee, M. R. (forthcoming, 2024). Queer refusals: Walking away from curricular purities. In A. B. Pratt, K. Donley, S. Hatch, S. L. Tharp, & F. Calderon-Berumen, (Eds.), Walking away: Refusing and resisting reactionary curriculum movements (pp. 167-186). Information Age Publishing, Inc. Rosiek, J., Adkins-Cartee, M., Pratt, A. B., & Donley, K. (forthcoming, 2024). A review of posthumanist education research: Expanded conceptions of research possibility and responsibility. Review of Research in Education, 48, 1-28. Cohen Lissman, D., Adkins-Cartee, M. R., Rosiek, J., & Springer, S. (27 Jul, 2023). Moral injury and moral traps in teaching: Learning from the pandemic. Journal of Moral Education, DOI: 10.1080/03057240.2023.2237202 Thorpe, H., Newman, J., Adkins-Cartee, M., Bayley, A, Fullagar, S., Pavlidis, A., Nichols, N., Markula, P., Rosiek, J. & Zarabadi, S. (2023). The Special issue as diffractive process: A collaborative dialogue. Cultural Studies↔ Critical Methodologies, 23(2), 170–180. DOI: 10.1177/1532708623115430 Thorpe, H., Newman, J., Zarabadi, S., Pavlidis, A., Fullagar, S., Rosiek, J., Nichols, N., Markula, P. Bayley, A, & Adkins-Cartee, M. (2023). Diffractive respondings and cutting together- apart: Toward more-than-human academic community. Cultural Studies↔ Critical Methodologies, 23(2), 181–192. DOI: 15327086231154308 Rosiek, J. & Adkins-Cartee, M. (2023). Diffracting structure/agency dichotomies, wave/particle dualities, and the citational politics of settler colonial scholars engaging Indigenous studies literature. Cultural Studies↔ Critical Methodologies, 23(2), 157–169. DOI: 10.1177/15327086221147735 https://doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2023.2237202 https://doi.org/10.1177/15327086221147735 https://doi.org/10.1177/15327086221147735 6 Adkins-Cartee, M. R., Cohen Lissman, D., Rosiek, J., DeRosia, N., & Donley, K. (2023). Teacher mental health and well-being in a global pandemic. The Teacher Educators’ Journal, 16(1), 1–49. https://www.ateva.org/s/TTEJ-161-3223.pdf. DeRosia, N., Donley, K., Cohen Lissman, D., Rosiek, J., Adkins-Cartee, M. R., & Arbuckle, S. (2021). Collaborating to accommodate: Teacher insights about providing SPED and EL services during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thresholds in Education, 44(2), 127–144. Adkins-Cartee, M. R.1, & Bhati, K. P. (2018). On the path of friendship. In N. Banerjea, D. Dasgupta, R. K. Dasgupta, & J. M. Grant (Eds.), Friendship as social justice activism (pp. 219– 244). London: Seagull Books. 1 I choose to hyphenate my name when publishing although it is not legally hyphenated. https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/www.ateva.org/s/TTEJ-161-3223.pdf__;!!C5qS4YX3!GFimXRSQqDa3PBqfW23laPozY7nrmDsIidQ1W83mB_miwzbRpTa_6BK7vjNw2ykgN3dUoYdLFr0vc0NZ$ 7 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge the collective labor of a wonderful and dedicated committee: Drs. Lisa Mazzei, Jerry Rosiek, Jenefer Husman, and Ellen McWhirter. Each have shared intellectual resources with me, supported me, cheered me on, and held me up during personal challenges. I want to acknowledge especially the labor of Dr. Lisa Mazzei, who oversaw the completion of this dissertation—as well as my national job search during my own separation from my ex-husband— during her husband’s last year of life. She did not have to continue to read for me and advise me through such a time, but she did, out of care for me and out of passion for the work. Dr. Mazzei, you have truly gone so far above and beyond for me. Additionally, Dr. Jerry Rosiek oversaw multiple research projects in which I have had the privilege of taking part during the course of my Ph.D. work. Two of those projects began during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Dr. Rosiek’s close mentorship and co-authorship on multiple articles that went on to gain publication truly helped launch my scholarship career. We, along with our other co- authors, have shared many laughs—several over Zoom and several we have had the privilege to share in person after the worst of the pandemic. Dr. Rosiek, your zeal for the work is contagious and you have also gone far above and beyond for me. Dr. Husman encouraged my work early, during her grant writing course, which proved extremely valuable both in terms of my grant writing skills as well as my conceptualization of the work that turned into this dissertation. She let me know my work was valuable and exciting, and has supported me on a personal level both on the job market and as a person coming out as queer during graduate school. Dr. Ellen McWhirter shared the work of Dr. Isaac Prilleltensky with me early on, and her engagement with my work as external member of my committee has been superior. She has been encouraging and enthusiastic since our first encounter. 8 As one may see, I have been surrounded by personal and professional support by a caring, engaged, and hands-on committee, and I owe them so much. That said, I have had an equally astounding support network that has carried me here on a personal level. There are frankly too many people in my entire life history to name each by name, but I will name some key people here. My parents, Chester and Janet Adkins, raised me to be a compassionate, hardworking, loving, giving person who operates with integrity. I strive to live up to those ideals. They have supported me emotionally and have helped me financially where they could to help me achieve my educational dreams. This is a privilege and has made this accomplishment both possible and much more feasible for me than it would have been otherwise. They have shown me unconditional love in the face of a divorce that has been very hard on all of us, as well as in my coming out process. Their love has been unwavering, and I am stronger because of it. My ex-husband, Todd Cartee, deserves more accolades than I could write here. He left a career in financial advising to come with me to Vancouver, British Columbia while I pursued my master’s degree at the University of British Columbia during the first two years of our marriage. I will always cherish the experiences we shared there. We returned to South Carolina before I finished that degree, and we faced down financial hardship, career changes, serious mental health challenges, and much more during the seven years between our leaving Vancouver and my enrolling at the University of Oregon. We fought hard for our marriage and for each other, and no matter the outcome, I am and will continue to be proud of and immensely grateful for our fifteen years, and all the love and support we gave each other. We both completed multiple new educational degrees, renovated a house, and learned immense amounts about ourselves, about each other, about love, about relationships, and about life. I would not be here without fifteen years of support from Todd and his family. My partners, Jesse, Liz, and Graham have been incredible supports. Jesse saw me from 9 comprehensive exams all the way through the finishing of this dissertation. Liz has seen me through almost as much. And Graham joined my journey the last year of my Ph.D.—a bold time to undertake joining anyone’s life! While some question how a Ph.D. candidate has time for three partners, I have found myself asking how anyone makes it through a Ph.D. with any less than three partners’ support! Jesse and Liz and their families have seen me through oral surgery, sickness, divorce, multiple moves, and more. They have cooked for me, gotten me out of my apartment when I was holed up writing for too long, and have given me so many incredible memories. Graham and their partner Riki have come through for me at some crucial times—welcoming me, and giving me a place to stay when I needed it most. Graham helped me drive (basically drove me) from Oregon to Michigan so I could finish preparing for my defense on the road. I am profoundly grateful for the presence of these three wonderful humans, and my extended chosen family (Laurel, Marc, Sierra, etc.). Rosemarie Mason’s excellent teaching and continued friendship have helped carry me here. The mentorship and guidance of my master’s thesis advisor, Dr. P. Taylor Webb of the University of British Columbia, prepared me incredibly well for this step of my journey. I owe so many other thanks. To the friends, family members, former teachers, and mentors who have given me strength, skills, and who have held me up over the years, this work would not be possible without you. 10 DEDICATION To Todd—in deepest gratitude for the journey. May you be well. May we be well. May this world be well. May it be so. And to my parents, Chester and Janet Adkins. For giving me life, for giving me education, for loving me unconditionally the entire way. May this work honor all our ancestors, especially my late grandparents, Nellie and Bill Bodner and Irene and Walter Aszkiniewicz. To my cousin Rachel, my ride-or-die since birth. And to my brother Vince, for your support always. To Jesse and Liz. For diving right into the deep end of my life and swimming against the current with me towards freedom, peace, integrity, justice, and joy. You light my darkest days and shine in the sun with me. This dissertation has been curated by your love. To all my Bodner and Adkins and Aszkiniewicz cousins, aunts, and uncles, for forming my faith in larger community and kin early and often and with laughter and across differences. To Dana, Ariel, Ella, Inbar, and Ofir—your family’s love has carried me these last five years, and you will always be family to me. For many dinners and much writing and support. To Will, Kathy, Sara Liz, Adam, and Jen—my South Carolina friends who have all carried me for over ten or twenty years. To Lakisha, Amaria, Anya, and Lisa—my South Carolina neighbors whose friendship carried me through the pandemic. I treasure our connections. To Graham and Riki—for love and hospitality and a safe haven when I have deeply needed one. To Danny and Anna—you have both expanded the horizon of possibilities for queer and trans life for me through your examples, and I am so grateful for your presence in my life. To Jimmy, for a friendship that has helped get us both through, and for all the laughter. To Lauren, Sage, Brian, and Anthony—my thought partners since childhood and teenage years. And to Brian and Anthony for continued friendship, support, laugher, inspiration, and care. To Barbara Sneed, Rosemarie Mason, and P. Taylor Webb. Your teacherly love, mentorship, support, and friendship have formed me as a writer and thinker. To Rosemarie, with love, in particular—your friendship over the years continues to sustain me. To Lisa, for seeing this through during the loss of your life partner, and for such dedicated mentorship along the way. To Jerry, for five years of robust mentorship and personal support, and to Jenefer, for your enthusiastic support since the inception of this project, and for your personal support of my coming-out process. And to Karni Bhati. I owe so much of my academic journey to your intellect and care. Our many conversations continue in these pages, and in all I write. 11 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 14 Structure of the Dissertation ........................................................................................................ 21 Burnout, Trauma, and Racialization ............................................................................................ 22 (Super)Positionality ....................................................................................................................... 23 Definitional Orientations .............................................................................................................. 33 CHAPTER II: REVIEW OF LITERATURE ........................................................................................ 42 Relating vis à vis Relational Ontologies ...................................................................................... 42 Posthumanisms and New Materialisms.......................................................................... 43 Affect Theory ................................................................................................................... 45 Agency, Temporality, and Subjectivity in Traditional Humanist and Posthumanist Inquiry .................................................................................................................. 47 Implications for Teacher Education Research .............................................................. 50 Relationships with Indigenous Ways of Knowing ........................................................ 52 Indigenous Feminisms ..................................................................................................... 55 Critical Race Theory, Sociology of Race ........................................................................ 59 Community Psychology ................................................................................................... 61 Teacher Education and Professional Development as Anti-Racist and Anti-Colonial Movement and Bodying ..................................................................................... 62 Research Purpose and Questions ................................................................................................ 64 CHAPTER III: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY, METHODS, AND DESIGN ........................... 66 Case Studies ................................................................................................................................... 70 Immersive Cartography ................................................................................................................ 72 Immersive Cartography and Research-Creation ............................................................ 74 12 Writing ........................................................................................................................................... 75 Expected Contributions................................................................................................................ 75 CHAPTER IV: THE CASE STUDIES................................................................................................... 77 Azalea ........................................................................................................................................... 80 Emilia .........................................................................................................................................104 The Dividual Character of Changing the Hidden Curriculum of Ongoing Teacher Education ...........................................................................................................116 Dividual Embodiment ...................................................................................................120 Shifting the Dividual Teacher Education Hidden Curriculum...................................124 Tristan .........................................................................................................................................129 Poverty ............................................................................................................................138 Entangled Agencies ........................................................................................................139 Responsibility/Response-ability ....................................................................................142 Interlude .......................................................................................................................................152 Commentary ...................................................................................................................156 Kay .........................................................................................................................................163 CHAPTER V: CONNECTIONS: ANTI-RACIST TEACHER WELL-ILL-BEING AND/AS CURRICULAR PRAXIS ...........................................................................................................190 Beginning and Ending with Relational Accountability: Some Limitations Concerning White Supremacy and Affective Technologies .......................................................................190 The Dangers of Knowing and of Avoiding Knowledge Claims .............................................196 From Burnout and Pushout to Joy and Purpose and Back Again: Dreaming Immanent Futurities and Pasts-Present ..........................................................................................198 Anti-Racist, Anti-Colonial Teacher Well-Ill-Being and/as Curricular Praxis.........................202 Implications and Significance .....................................................................................................204 Future Work ................................................................................................................................206 13 Summary ......................................................................................................................................209 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................................211 14 CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION Toni Cade Bambara begins her novel The Salt Eaters with the question, "Are you sure that you want to be well?" And she is not just talking about physical well-being, she is talking about a well-being of the spirit. (hooks & West, 2017, p. 58) Wellness is not a state of being, but a state of action. (Nagoski & Nagoski, 2020, p. 29) This Ph.D. journey has traversed a global pandemic and personal upheaval. Before becoming a Ph.D. student, I taught for a total of ten years in public schools in South Carolina—three years prior to pursuing a master’s degree at the University of British Columbia, and seven additional years during and after finishing that degree. I first got involved with anti-racist work as an undergraduate student in 2003, during the years following 9/11. At the time, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and racism combined forces in the U.S. popular imagination (to an even greater degree than they had before), and many of my friends at the time and I felt that the U.S. could not be on a worse track. Of course, we didn’t know yet what more would be to come. When I was eight years old in 1992, my white, Eastern European family moved from rural southeastern Ohio to the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, following a move by my father’s company (National Cash Register [NCR]). I attended a high school in metro Atlanta, Georgia, where the student population had no racial or ethnic majority. In hindsight, the Advanced Placement classes I took were far more segregated than the school at large, and although there were many East and South Asian students in my classes, there were very few Black2 or Latinx students, and no Indigenous students that I knew of at the time. Nonetheless, being part of a larger school community that took a great deal of pride in its diversity was foundational to my understanding of 2 Throughout, I follow the capitalization conventions of Gotanda (1991, p. 4), who discusses ‘white’ as a term of racial domination, and therefore not deserving of capitalization, and ‘Black’ as a term of politically and socially liberatory identity. These conventions are also discussed in Rosiek & Kinslow (2016). I also therefore capitalize “Color” in referring to People of Color, Students of Color, etc.; however, when discussing color as a general category it is uncapitalized. I also retain original capitalization in quotations. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?cUYl7L https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?bH4i51 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?oA2kbP 15 the world. As was growing up in an increasingly racially integrated neighborhood. As was growing up with my father’s work friends in the electronics industry, some of whom were immigrants from Taiwan, Mexico, India, China, and the Philippines. After my undergraduate years, I was excited to be hired at a school on the west side of Greenville, South Carolina where the population of students was fairly evenly divided among Black, white, and Latinx. We had many Latinx students from Colombia and Mexico, and several from Honduras and other central American nations. I taught at that school for the first three years of my teaching career, and there were powerful and moving and unforgettable moments of taking students on service learning trips and field trips. There were also tragedies that included student suicide, fights, and administrative violence against and neglect of students. Our school was also subject to intense scrutiny from the state of South Carolina and the school district because of low standardized test scores, and the pressure to narrow curricula and teach to the test was intense. The high-pressure environment created during those years (under the No Child Left Behind policy of the George W. Bush administration) engendered cliquishness, back-biting, suspicion, judgment, self-protective posturing, and mistrust among colleagues and between teachers and administrators. I had the distinct feeling that I was being tasked not with educating young human beings but with creating cogs to fit into a capitalist machine—or worse. Things came to a head, perhaps, on a warm and sunny spring day toward the end of my second year in the classroom. I was still a relatively new teacher and had been overworking myself for nearly two years at that point, trying to organize everything from community service learning projects on weekends to a school recycling club to field trips to see Shakespeare plays in Atlanta. I was overwhelmed, over-tired, and not caught up on my grading. The students were antsy because it was spring, and, like most young people, they would much rather be outside. 16 It made sense to me—to my own thinking—that day, that we all needed a break. I would take the class outside with perhaps a brief activity to complete. I don’t recall at this point exactly what. I would take my grading with me and sit in the shade while the students had some time in the sun. It would be the breather we all needed. At one point, I took a brief break from grading because my students wanted me to get up and participate in a game of pickup softball they were playing. We laughed, released momentarily from the stultifying constraints of school. For a moment, we were young people outside on a spring day (I was still only twenty-three at the time). Until one of our building administrators came outside and found us. She was livid, and we were ordered back inside. After a very stern talking-to by my administrator, principal, and department chair later that week, I was informed that I made two important and large mistakes: I did not have “bell-to-bell” instruction that clearly addressed the state standards for English Language Arts according to the State of South Carolina. I also was not supervising my students closely enough; a couple had wandered down to the benches in the softball field dugouts and could have theoretically left campus without being detected. This was a very big potential legal liability for the school. It was quite naïve of me at the time, but at age twenty-three, I assumed that 15- and 16-year-olds were old enough that they ought not need to be supervised like elementary school children. I hadn’t taught long enough at that point to understand how very different maturity levels can look from student to student at that age, or to understand the liability schools can face if students are not closely supervised at any age under eighteen. I never made these kinds of mistakes again in my teaching career; I was vigilant about supervision from then on, certainly not wanting to cause a lawsuit for the schools at which I worked. I was attentive to the demand for “bell-to-bell” instruction, always sure to have bellringers, exit tickets, and standards on the board, as well as standards-based, class-period-long activities if we ever 17 did have class outdoors again. I learned how to work within the system and did still manage to get students outside on spring days in future years. But there was a feeling at the pit of my stomach that stuck with me from that day, perhaps in the form of a question: could it be so wrong—so wrong—to simply value the collective desire to be outdoors, together, on a warm spring day after a long winter? And why was this not a valid curricular goal in itself—not even for a moment? Wasn’t there more to education than merely meeting state standards? Wasn’t this a good in itself? After that moment, I decided I needed to move on (for the first time), go to graduate school, try to figure out what was going on in the world and in society so that just such a moment became profligate in the material-discursive arrangement of schooling. If I am honest, I half-checked out mentally during my third year in the classroom, and I put my efforts toward getting into graduate school. I took a moonlighting job at a tutoring agency to pay off what was left of undergraduate credit card debt. I did what I needed to pass my portfolio evaluations at work. I left after my third year of teaching to attend the University of British Columbia’s master’s program in Society, Culture, and Politics in Education. I left, at the time, for the west coast of Canada—as far from South Carolina as I could manage. I did come back. I returned and taught seven more school years at two additional schools in South Carolina, bringing with me lessons learned while in Canada. I learned to question my positionality during my time on unceded Musqueam territory (Vancouver, BC). I learned an immense amount by spending time around Indigenous and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) community organizers and other graduate students and professors. I learned about structural white supremacy and white saviorism for the first time. I learned the history of residential boarding schools in Canada and the U.S. I learned about Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous 18 ways of knowing. This did not mean that every bit of this learning immediately translated into my classroom practice upon my return. White supremacy is a lifelong unlearning. I did try. I tried to teach inclusive history, to incorporate parts of the Zinn education project into teaching the history of Indigenous peoples in North America. We looked at excerpts from Christopher Columbus’s journals and tribal maps of North America. We staged class “protests” when we read works by Emerson and Thoreau. We discussed gender norms and beauty standards when we read Kate Chopin. We investigated contemporary white supremacy when we read Frederick Douglass or Olaudah Equiano or Harriett Tubman or Langston Hughes or Zora Neale Hurston. We discussed wealth disparities when we read The Great Gatsby and discussed McCarthyism and mass hysteria when we read The Crucible. I was proud to support some of our first out trans and non-binary students and student activists in South Carolina public schools in the twenty-teens (2012- 2019). Following the Charleston AME Church massacre in June 2015, a Black colleague and I initiated anti-racist faculty conversations between the English faculty at our two respective district high schools, and we planned curriculum to discuss race and racism with our students upon our return to school in the fall. We wanted to scale the project up to become district-level professional developments, but we were informed by our school district that if our professional development sessions were not designed by the state department, they could not be used for teachers to gain recertification credits (for which most professional developments counted). In 2017, I switched to teaching middle school, and when I taught seventh grade, I got “in trouble” again (another stern talking to) for trying to include the It Gets Better project and Black Lives Matter in my curriculum, and for trying to bring a Jewish speaker to school during a unit studying Holocaust literature (it’s a long story, but suffice to say here that it was a heavily evangelical Christian community). I had some successes, and I had good moments, and I had failed relationships with certain students, some that I 19 still regret. After my 10th year in the classroom, I planned a more permanent exit to higher education. All of this has led me here. All of this,3 and more. The COVID-19 pandemic broke out six months into the first year of my Ph.D. program. At the time, I packed up my things in Oregon (where I had only been for six months at that time) and drove back across the country (during a pandemic outbreak, a snowstorm on the upper great plains, and an earthquake in Utah). At the time, we were told the university would function remotely for at least the first three weeks of spring term; I ended up staying back in South Carolina for 18 months of shutdown before returning to Oregon in fall of 2021. I also returned to South Carolina to see my (now-ex) husband every summer, winter, and spring break of the years I was in Oregon from 2021- 2024. COVID-19 magnified the prominence of the idea that we must care for those caring for the sick and dying. Relational work kept people alive and provided care for the loved ones of the dead and dying. Indeed, “Care work, both paid and unpaid, is at the heart of humanity and our societies” (International Labour Organization, 2018). Teaching, likewise, is and has often been framed as both a caregiving and a feminized profession (Grumet, 1981); however, such framing draws on material- discursive arrangements of performative gendered expectations (Butler, 2006) and racialized emotional labor (Woody, 2021). While teaching certainly involves caring, part of the goal of this research is to trouble taken-for-granted understandings and valuations of care work. 3 Phrase inspired by Woolf (2022). Woolf’s autobiography, All of This, describes her husband’s cancer diagnosis and rapid decline the week following their verbal agreement to get divorced (which they canceled after his diagnosis). It is a beautifully written, deeply human exploration of the complexities of relationships with others and medical systems and family and self and existence. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?uLmID9 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?mOysm3 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?33cXtL https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?G45jy7 20 Bahn et al. (Bahn et al., 2020) state that in a society focused on production of more, care work (often done by womxn)4 that sustains life is devalued, and “women’s physical and mental health, and the societies that rely on them, are at stake” (p. 695). In the teaching profession, there is much discussion of individual “stress-management” and “self-care” in teacher professional development (Aguilar, 2018; Boogren, 2019; Kanold & Boogren, 2021), yet such “self-care” is recommended in larger contexts of over-work, under-payment, and feminized, racialized, and colonial expectations of unpaid, tacitly expected emotional and “invisible” labor. Tellingly, approximately 8% of teachers leave the classroom each year (Loewus, 2021). However, teacher attrition is a more complicated phenomenon not entirely representable by statistics because teachers also come and go from the profession (Lindqvist et al., 2014), sometimes returning to the classroom after hiatuses. I left the classroom for three years and returned for seven, and I personally struggled significantly with well-being during my K-12 tenure. Now, even more teachers are considering leaving the profession than before the pandemic (Loewus, 2021). Furthermore, educators in minoritized communities tend to experience “marginalization by association” (Stapleton, 2021), and teacher turnover tends to be significantly higher in “historically underserved communities” (Simon & Johnson, 2015). As early as 2001, Ingersoll found that teacher turnover was annually 15.2% at high poverty schools and 10.5% at low poverty schools (Ingersoll, 2001). Yet teacher well-being continues to be an under-studied area of teacher retention, particularly in the retention of teachers oriented toward social justice education practices. And, even when it is studied, teacher well-being is framed as an individual phenomenon (Harding et al., 2019; McLean & Connor, 2015); the problem is located in and attached to an individual 4 “‘Womxn’ is an intersectional concept that seeks to include transgender womxn, womxn of color, womxn of Third World countries, and every personal identity of womxn. It an antithesis to the daily micro-aggressions that subtly, but systematically work to undermine the value of womxn and enforce their secondary social status.” (Kunz, 2019, p. 2) I will, likewise, use this term throughout this dissertation to indicate womxn as an expansive category that includes trans- and non-binary womxn, womxn of Color, womxn of “Third World” countries, and all possible positionalities of womxn. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?9obA0q https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?D3gDo5 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yvbnP1 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?cjGFLe https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjSEWY https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?JlPpon https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?18QR22 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?G1Zrgs 21 human teacher. Instead, this dissertation assumes that teacher well- and ill-being are very often imbricated in—are in relation with larger structures, institutions, environments, and material arrangements (Mcphie, 2019). As Noddings (2012) states, “In care ethics, relation is ontologically basic, and the caring relation is ethically (morally) basic. Every human life starts in relation, and it is through relations that a human individual emerges” (p. 771). This research, however, also aims to honor more-than-human relations as ontologically basic, as will be discussed more thoroughly later. Structure of the Dissertation The remainder of this introductory chapter will give an overview of the literature on burnout, trauma, and how processes of racialization impact and co-constitute these phenomena in the teaching profession. I will provide a more thorough introduction to my positionality as well as a series of definitions of terms that are important to the conceptual orientation of the dissertation. Chapter two provides a more in-depth exploration of the concepts and literature informing this work, and chapter three provides a brief methodological overview. Then, four case studies have been developed out of the nine initial semi-structured interviews conducted. These four were chosen in part because the stories of these particular teachers discussed many phenomena that were common to most or all of the teachers who participated (although the specificities of each teacher’s story are distinct), or because they contained unique insights not present in other teachers stories but which are important to anti-racist, anti-colonial teaching praxis. There is also one interlude chapter between the third and fourth case study drawn from the second focus group. It contains a conversation between the teachers whose stories appear in case studies two and three and explores a complex moment of emergent anti-racist/anti-colonial teacher praxis. Following the case studies is a conclusion chapter with analysis, implications, and possible directions for future work. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?nJG1Uy https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?KVp8jw 22 Burnout, Trauma, and Racialization In literature on trauma (Fern, 2020), and particularly in emerging work on healing “racialized trauma” in the U.S. (Menakem, 2017), trauma has begun to be understood both as generational (Walters et al., 2011) as well as structural. According to Menakem (2017), Most of us think of trauma as something that occurs in an individual body, like a toothache or a broken arm. But trauma also routinely spreads between bodies like a contagious disease…. What we don’t often consider is how trauma can spread from body to body in any relationship…. Whenever one group oppresses, victimizes, brutalizes, or marginalizes another, many of the victimized people may suffer trauma and then pass on that trauma response to their children as standard operating procedure…. The result is a soul-wound, or intergenerational trauma. When the trauma continues for generation after generation, it is called historical trauma. (0:33) Menakem explains that racialized historical trauma has been passed down over generations in the United States, but it manifests differently for differently racialized groups of people. For example, while one trauma response for BIPOC may be to “over-function” and not take or even acknowledge the need for rest, Menakem explains that for white people, trauma responses include unreasonable fear of BIPOC (seen in actions ranging from “purse clutching” and “car door locking” to police officers’ frequently over-zealous “fear for their lives” when confronting POC). Importantly, Menakem does not use this framing as a means to equalize racialized trauma for BIPOC and white people, nor does he excuse white people for violence inflicted out of inherited racialized trauma responses. Rather, he uses this framing to draw attention to the way that trauma lives not only in individuals’ minds, but also in and across multiple bodies and in the material-discursive arrangements of racialized societies. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?CnarHj https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?G8xTry https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?mNvnHn 23 In other words, trauma functions vis à vis embodiment, affect, and cognition in racist, settler colonial, white supremacist, patriarchal, ableist, and heterosexist societies. Furthermore, within such societies, “racialized emotional labor is not limited to specific jobs, places, or interactional dynamics, but derives from deeper, enduring systems that orient the emotions of marginalized groups” (Woody, 2021). It is not surprising, then, that teachers of Color in particular report increased uncompensated (but tacitly expected) emotional labor (Cormier et al., 2021). Inequitable unpaid (and often unrecognized) emotional labor becomes a flow of affective tension, which shapes bodies and the embodiment of well- and ill-being via “allostatic load” (Kelly-Irving, 2019), or the toll of cumulative stress--including via stress responses such as the body’s production of cortisol--on the body. Therefore, teacher well-being must be understood as thoroughly racialized and embodied across bodies within the white supremacist settler colonial institution of schooling as well. (Super)Positionality There is a tradition within qualitative research to position “oneself” in the research, as the instrument of the research, because we (researchers) are all embedded within the social fabric which we study. There is, as many say, no “position from nowhere” from which to write about the human social world. However, “I” have been influenced by studying a few key philosophical traditions throughout both of my graduate degrees, which include posthumanisms and Barad’s (2007) physics- philosophy. In these traditions, it is not simply that there is an “I” to position within “the research,” as if the “I” and the “research” do not always already co-constitute each other. As if they are separable entities in the first place. And as if the “author” and the “writing” are also separate, separable entities (Foucault, 1998). Writing does things. This may seem, at first glance, to be a most obvious statement. However, in unpacking this short statement, the elements of an ontology that drives this dissertation https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?76tfQs https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?bvYvid https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?TIqhFD https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?69KVE3 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?3GPf9k 24 project begins to unfold itself. This work is situated5 as part of the “ontological turn” in the social sciences and humanities, and as such, this work is also concerned with the constitutions of categories, things, and concepts—concepts which include author, research/inquiry, findings, writing, and, in this case, anti-racism and well-being. As Jackson and Mazzei (2023) state: “Scholars occupying [the ontological turn] share a departure from epistemology and method to enactments of inquiry. In other words, “things” (i.e. method, objects, subjects, knowledge) do not pre-exist inquiry, ready to be represented; rather, they are constituted (and entangled) in particular conditions” (p. 134). Writing thus becomes an act of thought—a thought which is pre-personal, pre-individual, and not attached to a sole human/humanist author. Thought organizes writing organizes thought moves affect touches matter constitutes bodies, both human and other-than-human--which is also not binary. Because writing does things, moves affect, can compose thought differently, it is important that form will sometimes look slightly different in this work than in a traditional dissertation, though many elements of traditional dissertations have already informed thought and pre-composed its conduit (“author”). There will be elements of both the familiar and the strange, and what is familiar and strange may also co-compose one another. To return to the concept of positionality, then, my positionality has already begun writing itself, not only in the dissertation, but also in the job interviews leading up to it and taking place during its composition; the diversity, teaching, and research statements written as parts of job applications; the processual performances of “a” subjectivity entailed in those writings. The contrasts among performances of subjectivity can, at times, be jarring, and the way in which writing thinks a subjectivity into being at a particular juncture can and does change. Which is 5 The use of the passive voice is purposeful here; in accordance with process ontologies that underpin this research, if author and work co-constitute, and also co-constitute the possible consequences of this research, then it is not as if it is only that “I chose” this ontological orientation; it has also “chosen” me, or it and I have entangled long before this project became in its current instantiation. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?nTXyS0 25 the “real” researcher’s positionality, then? The narrative is not so linear. To give an example that highlights some of the disjunctures and juxtapositions, I include the next part side-by-side: the original positionality statement written as part of the dissertation proposal (left), and excerpts of job application documents from my 2023-2024 job search (right). The questions raised, the gaps and aporia constituted, the silences that speak (Mazzei, 2011), all become part of the thought that unfolds vis à vis this and “my” other academic writing. As a white, queer, non-binary womxn and middle-class settler scholar, I benefit from a multitude of privileges even as I experience degrees of marginalization along several axes. While this research troubles the ontology of individuals as discreet beings in the first place, positionality is nonetheless an important starting point, as research is always produced in relation with “apparatuses6” (Barad, 2007), and those include the becoming- subjectivity of the researcher. Mazzei et al., drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, trouble the concept of authorship, stating, “If all utterances are of a collective nature, the possibility of inquiry that emanates from a unique, essentialist subject is no longer thinkable, which is, of course, the assumption that grounds conventional qualitative methodology” Excerpt from the cover letter that ultimately landed the job I will take next: As a former K-12 teacher who has worked with diverse populations and learned culturally relevant and sustaining curricular practices, teaching in the Department of Literacy, Educational Foundations, and Technology would be a wonderful opportunity to continue to collaborate with scholars and teacher educators who share strong commitments to educational equity and social justice in Educational Foundations. I am currently a doctoral candidate (ABD) in Critical and Sociocultural Studies in Education (CSSE) within the Educational Studies 6 In her explanation of apparatus, “The basic idea,” states Barad, “is to understand that it is not merely the case that human concepts are embodied in apparatuses, but rather that apparatuses are discursive practices, where the latter are understood as specific material reconfigurings through which “objects” and “subjects” are produced” (2007, p. 148). https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?dpQJ6B 26 (Mazzei et al., 2020). Thus, in writing about “my” positionality, I also bring “my” relations explicitly into the research, not as a means of simply “describing me” but as a means of honoring that any “standpoint” (Harding, 1997; Moreton-Robinson, 2013) is already an imbricated set of relations, and those relations impact all further relations that emerge in, with, and through the research. Thus, it is important to note that the ways in which I will discuss subjectivity, standpoint, and well-being in this work will borrow a good bit of language from Western enlightenment Humanism (Braidotti, 2013) for the sake of “shorthand” at times (and because even the grammar of the English language contains implicit assumptions about the ontological separability of doer and deed (Derrida, 1995)), even while “I” seek to undermine and set loose different “enactments” (Mazzei et al., 2020) of subjectivity, resilience, resistance, and research as the project, and the writing, continue. I have been raised in the Western tradition of education, and in a white supremacist, settler- colonial, bellicose, capitalist, patriarchal, gender- Department at the University of Oregon and expect to complete my Ph.D. degree requirements by the end of June 2024.9 I meet all required and preferred qualifications for the position. I bring evidence of a robust developing program of research and publication in philosophical, social, and cultural foundations of education, teacher preparation, curriculum studies, and qualitative and posthumanist research methodologies. My research focus on teacher retention and well-being for anti- racist and anti-colonial educators comes out of my ten years’ experience teaching middle and high school English Language Arts (ELA) and four years’ experience (including the 2023-2024 school year) teaching at the undergraduate and master’s levels, including courses in Educational Foundations and elementary and secondary culturally sustaining literacy practices. I have worked with and 9 Well, it became August 2024. Which is fine. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?r4WABf https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?KVynYE https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?KVynYE https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?3xSAn0 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?A6Uv7v 27 binary, ableist, heteronormative culture. It is therefore necessary to continuously interrogate and dismantle the ways in which acculturation in such a violent society shaped and shapes my subjectivity as formed in relation. To begin this, I will discuss a contradiction in my family’s history7: my people came to Turtle Island8 to escape potential violence in eastern Europe in the early 20th Century and experienced ethnicity-based discrimination during the first two generations they lived here, yet they assimilated into white supremacist society and thereby reaped its benefits via the dispossession of Indigenous, Black, and other People of Color. My father’s father gave his blessing for his sons to change their name from Aszkiniewicz to Adkins (two out of three of them did) because he had faced workplace ethnicity-based discrimination met the needs of underrepresented student populations at the K-12, undergraduate, and master’s levels (including but not limited to Spanish- speaking populations; I also speak intermediate-level Spanish). I have also supervised teacher candidates certifying in ESOL10 in addition to their content areas. In addition, I have taught both remotely and in person over the last four years. … Excerpt from a teaching statement: To create the most trauma-informed, anti-racist, anti-colonial classroom possible, I center relationship building from day one, and I give students opportunities to share their writing and 7 Here I seek to begin (and only to begin) something akin to what Christine Sleeter (Sleeter, 2014) has accomplished in her “critical family history” projects, in the aspiration of working continuously towards justice and reparations. 8 I specifically use the term “Turtle Island” rather than “North America” here as part of a practice of “naming beyond the white settler colonial gaze” (Paris, 2019). Paris states, “The naming of people and places has been a violent practice of control and erasure against Indigenous peoples and lands across the centuries of White settlement on Turtle Island (currently most commonly referred to as the nation-states of the United States, Canada, and Mexico)…. Research often participates in and perpetuates such namings of deficiency and erasure….. What would and does it look like to refuse these regimes of representation, to name beyond erasures, to engage in a desire-based naming, to name as part of an educational research and practice that sustains communities and their lifeways?” (p. 219) This use does not assume I have ownership over the use of the term “Turtle Island;” as a settler, I am mindful that I am still learning its proper uses. However, I will refer to the United States as the U.S. when relevant, and to Turtle Island when it is the continent usually called “North America” in its settler societies in question. 10 English for Speakers of Other Languages 28 himself; however, from then on, our family has benefitted from unimpeded white privilege. My maternal grandfather went to college on the GI bill following World War II (a benefit that, while supposed to be available to all returning soldiers, was denied to most returning Black veterans). He became an 8th grade English teacher and basketball coach and bought a house for his family of 10 with my grandmother—a house in which my generation was also partially raised. It took me 36 years to learn that I was born on Algonquin, Shawnee, and Tuscarora land; previously, it took my going across Turtle Island and across a colonial border (into Canada) for two years for me to learn that I’d made home on Eastern Cherokee, Yuchi, Eastern Catawba, and Saluda land. I continuously work to undo some of the legacies of colonial Catholicism in my Catholic school upbringing; I have learned, also, in my adulthood, about residential schools that attempted to strip entire generations of Indigenous peoples of their cultures and languages after stealing, abusing, and murdering many of their lands, languages and bodies. experiences with one another early and often in order to build communities of learning while increasing group trust. While I am keenly aware that “there is no such thing as a safe space for People of Color in a white supremacist society” (Leonardo & Porter, 2010), I seek to build accountable spaces (Ahenkorah, 2022) with students. Furthermore, I have learned that trauma-informed teaching also involves Canvas/virtual platform design that stays consistent week-to-week and assignment- to-assignment throughout the term. I utilize Universal Design for Learning and Accessible Assignment templates (as well as consistent use of closed-captioning, microphones, and other classroom technology) to ensure that accessibility and regularity are built into the structures of my courses. I also ensure that I offer office hours on Zoom, which is generally more accessible to students who may work part time or be https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?ifs7hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?6VKosh 29 I seek to be in solidarity with all those who have been victims of historical and present trauma, dispossession, genocide, murder, and psychic and spiritual violence. I do not condone my ancestors’ assimilation into whiteness, but I do have a sense of the multiple types of violence they were themselves attempting to escape, likely not thinking at all about who else they were harming or dispossessing in that process—which is itself a manifestation of privilege. Telling this history is crucial to begin this work because, in the words of Aileen Moreton- Robinson, “Feminist standpoint theory accepts that political interests and moral values are part of knowledge production and they shape our research” (Moreton-Robinson, 2013, p. 335). My political interests and moral values have been shaped both by settler colonialism and by an understanding that, in the words of Murri Aboriginal activist, artist, and theorist Lilla J. Watson, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together” (Watson, 1988). While white saviorism was certainly a force taking care of family needs while in school. I always make space for students to let me know if they would like to meet with me outside these hours (including for on-campus coffee if they would like an opportunity to talk), but I find that some students who are hesitant to reach out to request a meeting will come to drop-in style office hours. I also ensure that I follow up on email with students who miss my classes, not to pry, but to let them know that they were missed and to give them the opportunity to let me know how I can best support them. I find that this practice generally keeps students on track better than assuming that they should be the ones to reach out to me first if they miss class, especially for students who may be dealing with some level of overwhelm in their lives. I openly let my students know that I, too, utilize the university’s counseling center as part of my effort to continue to de- https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?t3hoSb https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?t3hoSb 30 that shaped me early in my teaching career and for which I am continuously accountable, I have grown to understand that the same forces (settler colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, etc.) that do the most immediate, violent harm to BIPOC bodies ultimately harm all, including more-than-human communities. My standpoint then, is not the “outsider within” status that Hill Collins describes as the foundation of Black feminist standpoint knowledge (Hill Collins, 1986), but instead aims at becoming (always a process) a “traitor” to whiteness who “occup[ies] the center but whose way of seeing (at least by insider standards) is off-center” (Bailey, 1998, p. 288). Importantly, Bailey notes that “anti-racist” is not just an individual standpoint but “is a political position achieved through collective struggle” (p. 288, my emphasis). It is, in other words, also a moving, growing, changing set of relations. It requires that those with white body privilege learn from the outsider-within knowledge generated by BIPOC and “interalize” and think critically about such knowledge stigmatize seeking mental health care. I also advocate for food assistance resources, medical resources, textbook subsidies, etc. that the university offers to ensure my students know these supports are available to them. Via these multiple means, I strive to create accountable spaces of learning that decenter whiteness, examine multiple systemic forms of oppression, and create accessible, caring, consistent, and trauma- informed opportunities for creative resistance and imaginative resilience for my students as scholars, leaders, and global community members. … From a service statement: In my service both as a graduate and undergraduate student and as a K-12 teacher, I have continued over many years to learn from and support the leadership of BIPOC people, particularly women of Color. I was trained as a National https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?Xi7w5j https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?PGWvSG https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?PGWvSG 31 in order to honor its intellectualism and brilliance (Muhammad, 2020). “My” ability and desire to move to an “off- center” standpoint within whiteness has been formed by elements of subjectivity that come to be, in relation, in off-center ways: experiences being fat- shamed as an assigned-female-at-birth (AFAB) child, a gradual embrace of omnisexuality and non-binary gender/gender fluidity, polyamory, diagnoses of OCD and panic disorder, and the inattention that was given to all these throughout my childhood such that I only came to understand certain early experiences (for example, what might be called panic attacks) much later in life. In these domains I came to identify, or at least experience affinity with/attunement to others who experience other types of marginalization, even if not along the same lines or for the same reasons. I have sought out the company of other “Others” (Fanon, 2008; Said, 1979) and in turn I have learned, and continue to learn, much from them. I become with them. For me, then, to research teacher well-being is deeply “personal,” but not in an “atomizing” sense of the word “person.” It Coalition Building Institute trainer by women of Color as an undergraduate, and I later co-facilitated professional development concerning anti-racism in Anderson, SC with a colleague of Color. I currently serve as junior graduate student representative in Division B of the American Educational Research Association. Here, I continue to learn from the leadership of the women of Color on the graduate student executive committee and the women of Color who comprise the leadership of the larger division. They have taught me much about centering our humanity and committing to doing a few things well rather than overcommitting. My commitment to anti-racist and anti- colonial work stems from my experiences as a high school student at a highly racially and ethnically diverse high school. I went on to a predominantly white, predominantly upper-class, protestant https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?sEvJM5 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?sEvJM5 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?sEvJM5 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?byOZVM 32 is also the only ethical standpoint I can conceive of taking to attempt to map how teacher well-being might become differently along different domains of marginalization: well-being for teachers with non- white identities, well-being for teachers with other types of disabilities, well-being for teachers who identify as LGBTQIA+, well-being for any teachers whose bodies do not fit the white, able-bodied, thin, younger, male, normative body ideal (Taylor, 2018). And in these ways, well-being is not merely “personal,” it is deeply, irrevocably political, structural, protean, and affective--not contained within the boundaries of individual bodies, although the impacts are thoroughly embodied. Christian undergraduate university; the stark contrast between high school and college, and the contrast between assumptions that operated in both places, propelled me into diversity work beginning in my undergraduate years. As I have gradually come to terms with my own queer identities, I have built an increasingly healthier integrity in this work. I would look forward to using my research, teaching, and service to continue to work and partner with colleagues, teacher candidates, practicing teachers, and local schools surrounding XXXXXXX in XXXXXXXX.11 The disjunctures produced in comparing these narratives side-by-side highlight the ways in which we are often expected to perform a kind of critical interrogation of subjectivity that is not so self-assured in our research, yet expected to exude a certain level of confidence and competence when we enter the market for academic employment. This is only one possible reading of one of the contradictions raised here, and the reader may find many others. We both curate and constitute our “selves” vis à vis writing. 11 The XXXXX marks were placeholders for me to fill in the school’s name and location. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?fSY0Ln 33 All of this brings me to the concept of “self-care” (self-curation?) in teacher education, as well as concepts that will be related to teacher “self-care” in the course of this dissertation. The next section will provide some definitional orientations.12 Before beginning, however, it is important to note three things: 1. These definitions draw on various readings that go on to inform the literature review for the dissertation. Some are quoted directly from sources and others are amalgamations of definitions I have gleaned from these, and other, readings, discussions, and listenings. 2. Many/most of the concepts at play cut against the grain of positivist research that avers that there is a stable, “real” world that is fundamentally knowable. Therefore, these definitions are provided as orientations to thinking--as starting points, not end points--so as to provide entry into the literature review and the analysis to come. These definitions are not final arbiters of what these concepts might do or become in other contexts. And, 3. These are a selection of definitions of some of the foundational concepts for this dissertation. I could have included many more related concepts. However, the hope is that this list is extensive enough to orient the reader in the work, and as other concepts become necessary to include and/or explain, this definitional orientation will provide enough conceptual entry into the work to lay a foundation for other concepts to be incorporated as necessary. Definitional Orientations Ontology: Study of the nature of reality, or nature of being. Epistemology: Study of the nature of knowledge, or how we come to know things. Axiology: Study of the nature of ethics or values. 12 I draw on Springer (2024) for the inspiration to provide definitional orientations into this work both for an academic and, potentially, for non-academic and equally important audiences--particularly for a dissertation defense audience. I also draw on the work of Jackson and Mazzei (2012, 2023), who provide definitions at the beginning of each chapter of their work, Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research. These definitions also serve to provide entree for those less familiar with the terminology of this field of study. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?ZmrBnl 34 Methodology: Study of how techniques, apparatuses, thought, concepts, and/or research methods come to produce both knowledge (episteme) and reality (ontology). Also interweaves axiology throughout. Well-being: This work builds on a few key definitions of well-being, which begin with more individualistic definitions but grow into more expansive definitions. McCormick et al.’s framework (2021) for Early Childhood Professional well-being included “nine, interrelated ‘senses of well-being’: comfort, security, affinity, self-respect, communication, engagement, contribution, efficacy, and agency” (p. 3). Giving a more expansive definition in the field of community psychology, Prilleltensky (2005) states: My claim is that the well-being of any one person is highly dependent on the well-being of her/ his relationships and on the community in which she/he resides [4]. Well-being may be defined as a positive state of affairs in which the personal, relational, and collective needs and aspirations of individuals and communities are fulfilled [5]. This definition subsumes narrow conceptions of physical and mental health, for they are a part of well-being and not the whole of well-being [6]. Well-being refers to a satisfactory state of affairs for individuals and communities that encompasses more than the absence of disease. There are many aspects of the psychosocial, economic, political, and physical environment that influence the state of well-being; and there are many aspects of well-being that reach far beyond health and encroach into the realm of values, thriving, meaning, and spirituality. My definition of well-being is in line with comprehensive conceptualizations of health promotion put forth by the WHO [7], by the Canadian government [8], and by the new public health paradigm [9– 11], all of which emphasize the values of self-determination, participation, community capacity-building, structural determinants, and social justice. (p. 54) Mcphie’s (2019) “Extended Body Hypothesis” (EBH), based in posthumanism, expands an understanding of well-being even further: The Extended Body Hypothesis (EBH) that I put forward in this book claims that mental health and wellbeing is not bounded solely within a brain or even within a body. ‘It’ is not merely a thing that can be isolated, categorised or essentialised [sic] within a subjective self in order to fix, mend or normalise [sic]. Mental health and wellbeing is introduced in this book as a process spread in the environment—an emic-etic process that weaves through a permeable, a-centred self—hence the need to create a new concept: environ(mental) health. If mental health and wellbeing is conceived in this way, it begs the question, where should we look for it? Or indeed when? It has ethical ramifications if we begin to conceive of our mental health as immanently placed of environments as opposed to transcendently placed from or in static ones. It becomes political, cultural, social, racial, ecological, posthuman and most definitely physical. (p. vi) In other words, it is not just a matter of the well-being of the individual being part of community well-being and vice-versa; it is that these are imbricated on an ontological level. It is also not just that the well-being of individuals and communities depend on participation, structural determinants, and social justice in the human realms; well-being of individuals and communities are ontologically entangled with one another and with ecologies, biospheres, and more. Burnout: According to Nagoski and Nagoski (2020), burnout’s original and technical definition draws on the work of Freudenberger, and includes the following three elements: https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?UA1AUY https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?Ohexnf https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?xzaY8o https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?at82Ll 35 1. emotional exhaustion—the fatigue that comes from caring too much, for too long; 2. depersonalization—the depletion of empathy, caring, and compassion; and 3. decreased sense of accomplishment—an unconquerable sense of futility: feeling that nothing you do makes any difference. And, [they state,] here’s an understatement: Burnout is highly prevalent. Twenty to thirty percent of teachers in America have moderately high to high levels of burnout. (p. 6) Anti-racism vs. abolitionism: According to the Abolitionist Teaching Network (ATN) (2024): If teachers are not well, how can we expect the students to be well? Radical self-care must be communal. ATN puts the wellness and healing of teachers at the center of educational justice and collective liberation. ATN also makes an important and useful distinction between anti-racist work vs. abolitionist teaching: ● antiracist education: a teaching approach that centers on acknowledging racism, whiteness, and how racist ideas become policy, creating inequities ● abolitionist education: a teaching approach that centers on abolishing oppressive educational systems, while loving, protecting, remembering, and healing children of color and their communities The definitions of anti-racist education that this work draws upon contains elements of both anti- racist and abolitionist definitions. Racialization: The material-discursive processes by which bodies become read and treated as “raced” and “otherized” in white supremacist societies. Racial projects: According to Omi and Winant (2015), A racial project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial identities and meanings, and an effort to organize and distribute resources (economic, political, cultural) along particular racial lines. Racial projects connect what race means in a particular discursive or ideological practice and the ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences are racially organized, based upon that meaning. Racial projects are attempts both to shape the ways in which social structures are racially signified and the ways that racial meanings are embedded in social structures. Racial projects occur at varying scales, both large and small. (p. 125) Decolonization: The actual event of returning land to Indigenous peoples (Tuck & Yang, 2012). De-weaponization: In “The precarious position of the Black settler pedagogue: Decolonizing (De- weaponizing) our praxis through the critical reading of native feminist texts” (Cherry-McDaniel, 2016), Cherry-McDaniel asks: Is the work I do with my students decolonizing? Absolutely not. I am not empowered to, nor have I empowered future teachers to, return land to anyone robbed of it. I have not changed the power dynamics and economic inequalities present between the colonized and their colonizers. I would, however, call my work de-weaponizing. As teacher educators, preservice teachers, and currently practicing teachers, we have the choice to continue our https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?w1fgBD https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?n8zN5p https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?LGoKGW https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?WAEAiS https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?WAEAiS 36 work in potentially dangerous ways, or resist assuming the position of cultural foot soldier for the colonizing state. (p. 44) De-weaponizing work, then, resists “the position of cultural foot soldier for the colonizing state” in a number of ways that can include more expansive curricula, non-violent and less coercive relationships with students and communities, deeper listening, learning about the histories of settler colonialism, etc. Anti-colonialism: Education and/or activism that works against the manifestations of colonialism. This can include both decolonizing and de-weaponizing praxis. Hidden curriculum: The curriculum not taught explicitly but which shapes who and how teachers and students become in educational institutions and in society. Draws on the work of Anyon (1981) and others (see Kentli, 2009) who explore how social class and other aspects of social positioning (such as race, gender, etc.) are reinforced via norms and expectations for speech, behavior, comportment, cognitive and intellectual and embodied expectations, institutional building structures, daily routines and schedules, type of curricula and learning activities offered, etc. Standpoint: Describes theories that consider the “relations between power and knowledge” (Harding, 1997) and aver that those who occupy marginalized positions within society have better access to understanding the operations of power and oppression because they must understand these operations in order to survive, whereas those with more privilege are shielded from needing these understandings. Intersectionality: Intersectionality is a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences. The events and conditions of social and political life and the self can seldom be understood as shaped by one factor. They are generally shaped by many factors in diverse and mutually influencing ways. When it comes to social inequality, people’s lives and the organization of power in a given society are better understood as being shaped not by a single axis of social division, be it race or gender or class, but by many axes that work together and influence each other. Intersectionality as an analytic tool gives people better access to the complexity of the world and of themselves. (Hill Collins & Bilge, 2016, p. 2) Intersectionality theory considers how “individuals typically express varying combinations of their multiple identities of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and religion across different situations. Social context matters in how people use identity to create space for personal freedom” (p. 125). Thus, intersectionality theory considers how multiple identities and multiple social contexts and geographies inform one another and create one another. Immanence: Based in Deleuzian philosophy. “Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence emphasises [sic] connections over forms of separation. But this connection must itself be a connectivity between relations and not between different identities. This is because an external principle would be needed to ground those identities (for example, identity depended on the human mind--thereby setting it up as transcendent)” (Williams, 2010, p. 129) Transcendence: Ontologies of transcendence are considered opposite of ontologies of immanence, this is a concept of God, or the Ideal, or a realm outside of the current reality that gives reality its form and meaning. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?JiF59C https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?XwvZ1Q https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?wh3lgD https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?Ta8A1V https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?Ta8A1V https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?Ta8A1V https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hJxaDG 37 Affect: While affect theory (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010) is a wide and ever-burgeoning field of theory and therefore impossible to give a complete definition in a brief format, it is generally understood as flows of energy or force that are transpersonal and/or trans-subjective; they impacts bodies while not being attached to or originating from only one body or phenomenon. Repetition: A Deleuzian concept. According to Deleuze, To repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent. And perhaps this repetition at the level of external conduct echoes, for its own part, a more secret vibration which animates it, a more profound, internal repetition within the singular. This is the apparent paradox of festivals: they repeat an ‘unrepeatable’. They do not add a second and third time to the first, but carry the first time to the ‘nth’ power. With respect to this power, repetition interiorizes and thereby reverses itself… Monet’s first water lily… repeats all the others. Generality, as generality of the particular, thus stands opposed to repetition as universality of the singular. (Deleuze, 1994, p. 1) Repetition is something like a style of behavior, a mode (Rabinow, 2003), and/or an intervention in temporality. Repetition is an “agential cut” (Barad, 2007) that shapes reality via a code, something akin to the kind of mathematical code that forms fractals. It is abstract but its effects are real and material. Difference: Another Deleuzian concept; Deleuze states: Difference is the state in which one can speak of determination as such…. Instead of something distinguished from something else, imagine something which distinguishes itself-- and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it. Lightning, for example, distinguishes itself from the black sky but must also trail it behind, as though it were distinguishing itself from that which does not distinguish itself from it…. Difference is this state in which determination takes the form of unilateral distinction. We must therefore say that difference is made, or makes itself, as in the expression ‘make the difference.’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 28) If repetition is an intervention in reality that carries forward a code or style, difference is the creation of a new singularity. It could also be the creation of a new code, or it could be the creation of a new singularity with a repeating code. Which brings us to our next concept. Refrain: Jackson (2016) writes of refrains, also drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s work: Deleuze and Guattari explained that everywhere in nature, there are gestural, visual, and postural refrains: repetitious and rhythmic patterns of sound and movement that stake out a territory. Because refrains are repeatable, they are portable and can be carried into various places and circumstances. Refrains draw us in; they are compelling in their expression--think of the chorus to your favorite song that you hum or sing over and over again, either aloud or in your mind, as you go about your day. Finally, refrains have a catalytic function to make something new, such as when music takes hold of a refrain and releases into an improvisational creative expression…. The refrain is an ontological force of territorialization and deterritorialization. (p. 1) Refrains, then, as ontological forces, can be conceived of as that which carries forward repetition-- they are never exact copies, but they are repeatable and portable and catalytic. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?q0B5KX https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?uwkevA https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?Sfyxtd https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?y6VHqr https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?d6hJgD 38 Assemblage: According to Buchanan (2021), “a multidimensional concept that holds it all [Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic philosophy] together” (p. 22). It is based in the French word agencement, which implies not merely a collection of pre-established objects, but a moving, morphing, concatenation and specific arrangement of agencies, affects, subjects, environments, and more. As Buchanan (2021) puts it: “Concepts should bring about a new way of seeing something and not simply fix a label to something we think we already know about…. Given a specific situation what kind of assemblage would be required to produce it?” (p. 22) Molar: In Deleuze and Guattari’s immanent ontology, molar lines are “rigid line[s] that uphold the status quo. These might be institutional structures (such as a school bell schedule) or internalized discourses (what it means to be a ‘good’ teacher or student)” (Strom, 2018, p. 109). Molecular: Deleuze studies objects not as they seem to be before the naked eye but as dynamic masses of molecules…. The molecular sensibility is found… in the tiny perception or inclinations that destabilise [sic] perception as a whole…. The microscopic perspective has a political dimension as well. All societies are rent through by molar and molecular segmentarities. They are interrelated to the degree that all action is conceivably political if politics are understood to be of both molar and molecular orders. The former, a governmental superstructure, does not disallow the presence of the latter, ‘a whole world of unconscious micropercepts, unconscious affects, rarefied divisions’ that operate differently from civic and political arenas. Molecularity is tied to a ‘micropolitics’ of perception, affect, and even errant conversation. (Conley, 2010, pp. 177-178) Pre-personal: In a Deleuzian, and in posthumanist ontology, the realm of forces, affects, repetition, and difference--the realm of the abstract but real. Things are “pre-personal” not in the sense of temporally before, but as ontologically a-priori. In her article “Rethinking agency: A phenomenological approach to embodiment and agentic capacities,” Coole (2005) conceptualizes agency on a spectrum from “pre-personal, non-cognitive bodily processes [at one pole]; at the other, transpersonal, intersubjective processes that instantiate an interworld. Between them are singularities: phenomena with a relatively individual or collective identity whose provisional forms and activities come closer to modernity’s sense of agency without coinciding with it” (p. 128). This conception of agency also helps to think the pre-personal as the non-cognitive. Non-cognitive activities and processes are all around us both in bodily processes (the circulation of blood, the regulation of digestion) and in the processes of the earth (volcanism, the carbon cycle, erosion), the solar system, the galaxy, the cosmos (black holes, gravitation, star death, etc.). Transpersonal: Drawing on Coole’s same definition, then, the transpersonal is “intersubjective” (p. 128) in the sense of being between (inter) singularities (subjects). Subjects might be conceptualized as a sub-category of phenomena. Phenomena are that which differentiate themselves (e.g., via Deleuze’s concept of difference) from a background, which, as Deleuze puts it, does not differentiate itself from the phenomenon. However, for agency to be transpersonal, then, it must cross or connect multiple phenomena. Part of the argument of this dissertation is that teacher well- being is both constituted of pre-personal affects and also so thoroughly transpersonal that conceiving of it as attached only or primarily to the singularity part of the agency spectrum (where https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?83770r https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?ujhc7E https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?Ip0Chk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?Jb8juz 39 teachers’ subjectivities live) fairly well misses the mark, and misses also the opportunity to act to improve well-being. Posthumanism: As has been stated by Rosiek et al. (2024) : Posthumanist philosophies refuse the binary of direct realism and social constructionism, both of which center a humanist spectator subject as the sole agent of inquiry. Instead, they frame research as ontologically generative, but not freely so. Social and material conditions limit what it is possible to do and desire. In some cases, objects of study are regarded as active participants in inquiries and the world’s ongoing metaphysical becoming. (p. 1) Elsewhere, posthumanism has been discussed in a variety of ways. In Braidotti’s (now foundational) text, The Posthuman (Braidotti, 2013), Braidotti discusses the ways in which posthumanism is a response to entrenched Eurocentric Humanistic thought, which has become a doctrine that combines the biological, discursive and moral expansion of human capabilities into an idea of teleologically ordained, rational progress. Faith in the unique, self- regulating and intrinsically moral powers of human reason forms an integral part of this high-humanistic creed, which was essentially predicated on eighteenth- and nineteenth- century renditions of classical Antiquity and Italian Renaissance ideals (p. 13). She goes on to explain: “Central to this universalistic posture and its binary logic is the notion of ‘difference’ as pejoration. Subjectivity is equated with consciousness, universal rationality, and self- regulating ethical behavior, whereas Otherness is defined as its negative and specular counterpart” (p. 15). Posthumanism, then, avers that there is no such thing as “natural” teleological progress, and reason only gets us so far in the pursuit of the knowledge of reality. Humans are not the most--or the only--moral actors in the entire ecology of the earth and the universe, and materiality as well as pre-personal and trans-personal agents, both human and other-than-human, matter. Agencies across the spectrum co-constitute one another and co-constitute an ever-changing realit(ies). In beginning to understand the ways in which Eurocentric philosophies have produced Otherness--and dangerous and damaging Otherization and oppression--it also becomes necessary to focus on an “expanded sense of responsibility… that includes accountability for the ontological, ethical, and political effects of the ways of knowing employed in research projects” (Rosiek et al., 2024, p. 2). As colleagues and I have written, this means continuing to be in conversation with Indigenous and Black studies scholarship that call for responsibility for the ways in which Eurocentric philosophies have ignored, erased, co-opted, appropriated, or assimilated ideas from Black and Indigenous intellectual traditions without due respect and recognition, particularly as concerns concepts such as non-human agency, temporality, and ethical reciprocity and responsibility. Response-ability: The hyphenation of this term draws originally on Harraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016), and is also discussed extensively by Springgay et al. (2020). Springgay et al. describe “anarchiving as response-ability” and base their anarchiving research practice in the values of “tending and reciprocity” (p. 904). Importantly, they emphasize that Tending and reciprocity embody a way of being in the world “with” others--or what Stacy Alaimo (2016) calls transcorporeal relations. Withness is informed by Indigenous scholars Juanita Sundburg (2014), Bonnie Freeman (2015), and Jon Johnson (2015), who articulate with as a “more than” orientation (Springgay & Truman, 2018). Withness is not simply about collaboration but rather emphasizes complicated relations and entanglements with humans, nonhumans, and land, and an ethics of situatedness, solidarity, and resistance. (p. 904) Response-ability in research is, quite literally, the ability to respond, to be with, to enter and sustain relations, and to be ethically accountable. It is important that, like Springgay and colleagues, this work also recognizes the ways in which Indigenous principles (particularly, drawing on Archibald https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?SWuSNV https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?Llkitq https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?p8NvDu https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?EmbCqA https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?vPe07P 40 (2008)) those of “respect, responsibility, reverence, reciprocity, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy,” which also inform the ethos of response-ability. While this work is conducted by a white settler academic without the expertise or insider positionality to give situated accounts of these principles, it is informed by the concept that “each principle has a separateness that is like a long flat piece of cedar bark used for weaving a basket. As each piece is woven together, it may lose its separateness and become the in-between space that creates the background for a beautiful design” (p. 153). As work that aspires to be in good relation with Indigenous philosophies as well as with Black studies and Critical Race Theory scholarship, response-ability is a principle that is woven into the design of this dissertation--the reader will be the judge as to whether poorly or deftly--and is an ethos that has informed the methodology next described as immersive cartography, which in turn has informed the way in which I approached the doing of the interviews and the writing of the dissertation. Cartography: This work draws on others who use posthuman cartography (not to be confused with cartography in the field of geography) as a methodology of immanent becoming in response-able relations. Rousell (2021) begins his explanation of immersive cartography this way: Perhaps these are the opening propositions for an immersive cartography: Begin in the middle. Explore your milieus. Experiment with making maps of them. Stay in place and keep moving at the same time. (p. 2) He continues: Deleuze (1997) describes how… initial forays into immersive cartography involved two kinds of mappings: a mapping of extensions, as external relations between bodies, space, time, matter, and form; and a mapping of intensities, as “affective constellations” comprised of intensive relations, events, and becomings. (p. 5) Immersive cartography, as will be explored in the next chapter, is a methodology of process. It is a methodology that honors both the more-than and the withness that happen in relation with people, their milieus, their extensive and intensive environments, with affects generated in relation and in- the-moment during research. It is a process-oriented methodology that also honors the more-than of research temporality--the ways in which personal, collective, and political histories are always already folded into the phenomena that emerge in what is officially deemed the research moment(s) and effects. As a process-oriented methodology that dwells in the creation and mapping of relations- -both extensive and intensive--it is a way into research response-ability that is accountable to what emerges as a result of entering unanticipatable relations rather than what is established as knowable a-priori. Last, but certainly not least: a note on the ethics of knowledge/knowing. Lather once stated that “Embracing not knowing is the condition of a less dangerous doing” (Lather, 2009, p. 346). Western Enlightenment epistemology has traditionally been founded on principles of there being a “knowable” world, accessible through reason and practices of “falsification” (Popper, 1965). However, as the Western academy is also a settler colonial institution, many of its knowledge- claiming practices have proven violent, coercive, assimilationist, erasing, and/or co-opting. This dissertation’s orientation to knowledge is also partially inspired by Snyder (2022), who spoke in his dissertation defense on Indigenous Commonsense about “knew” knowledge instead of “new” knowledge. Snyder’s context was Indigenizing education and Indigenous knowledge; however, he stated, “‘knew’ knowledge invites us into a different relationship. I don't know what to tell you, but I do have some questions that may be generative” (2022). This dissertation, while not doing either decolonizing or Indigenizing work, does aspire to de-weaponizing and anti-colonial research that attempts to lessen and/or eliminate some of the worst, most harmful practices of the settler colonial https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?vjcabG https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?O39KjT https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?muOgjP https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?ODk2WF https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?PSvgl5 41 academy. It does not hold a prescription for anti-racist/anti-colonial13 teacher well-being, but it hopes to generate questions that may, in turn, generate more just possible futurities. I take up a tradition with which I have greater familiarity (posthumanist immersive cartography), and I use it to orient toward immanent becomings in response-able relations that share a commitment to less violent knowledge practices. In doing so, I do risk assimilation and appropriation of the Indigenous and Black theories also cited. I do not assume that this work will necessarily achieve its aim of de- weaponization, although I continue to believe that part of the response-able work of white settler scholars is to continue to learn, and to be willing to “learn publicly” (Tallbear, 2021). In this way, this dissertation is a manifestation of where the thinking has taken me, and this work, thus far. And, in continued response-able relations following the finishing of this phase of the work, I hope to learn how to continue to do even better, understanding that this is and will be a never-finished project. 13 Throughout this work, I retain both anti-racist and anti-colonial as the primary orientations of the teachers who participated in this study. For most teachers, anti-racism was both more familiar and also more prevalent throughout our conversations. Some conversations applied broadly to equity-focused teaching practices, but insights were still relevant to specifically anti-racist and/or anti-colonial praxis. I retained both in the writing of the dissertation because anti-racism and anti-colonialism are also conceptualized, in this dissertation, as distinct but also entangled in settler colonial, white supremacist contexts such as Turtle Island. I retain only anti-racist in the title of the entire work because of the heavier explicit focus on anti-racist teacher praxis. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?Hx1IHk 42 CHAPTER II: REVIEW OF LITERATURE Relating vis à vis Relational Ontologies This work draws upon four main strands of literature in order to conceptualize teacher well- being. Critical Race Theory (Bell, 2018) allows me to conceive of teacher well-being as permanently and thoroughly racialized; Indigenous studies (Calderon, 2014; Moreton-Robinson, 2000) allows me to understand teacher well-being as a relation with/in settler colonial logics and violence, including temporal logics and arrangements (Jacob, 2021; Rifkin, 2017); feminist new materialisms (Barad, 2003; Braidotti, 2013) and community psychology (Prilleltensky, 2005, 2008, 2012, 2020; Prilleltensky et al., 2016) allow me to conceptualize teacher well-being as material, embodied, and transpersonal (Mcphie, 2019). While it is important to honor the nuanced differences among the onto-epistemologies of each of these literature bases, I draw them together in conversation in order to conceptualize teacher well-being as relational, embodied, and entwined with larger institutional ecologies and power networks in society and on the planet. Therefore, part of the methodology of this work also entails “plugging in” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) to various theories and literature bases in order to foreground particular aspects of teacher well-being in process and in specific contexts. It is an enactment of “thinking with theor[ies]” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), of “thinking without method” (Jackson, 2017), and of thinking where the thought takes (off). In this conceptual literature review, I will offer an overview of important concepts from the posthumanisms and new materialisms and dis