What We Carry In Public

As I was going through the new releases on the St. Catharines Public Library website as I do every week, I had a Gotye moment. There as author with a new book was the name of someone that I used to know. So of course I had to get the book and read it and of course it was really good and insightful. So this post is a nod to all the things that went through my head while I was reading, and also after in reflection.

So everyone should go and pick up Jay Pitter's new book, Black Public Joy and if you are in charge of collections at your library, or have the email of the collection librarian at your institution, you should tell them to order this book. It weaves stories that speak to concepts like the gaze in terms of race and class, to explore the kinds of performance, expectations, and "spatial entitlement" (p.23) as Jay calls it, that happens in public spaces. It is a text deeply interested in embodiment in public and how public spaces hold and witness, and in turn can be spaces that impact joy or where joy is shown. This would make a great book for any teaching and learning centre who wants to run a reading group to think about how spaces are used and defined institutionally, as well as institutional racism and classism. The book  also comes with reader questions and reflections at the end of the book that are also specific in guidance for all readers, as well as specifically for Black readers. 

One of the things that I also enjoyed about the book is modelling of accessibility in the typesetting of the book. There was something about the choice of spaces between paragraphs that made this book digestible and aware of the different types of readers. It really had me thinking about the kind of gaze I get in educational places when I am wearing my mask, or a tie for example - that disability and/or queer coded embodiment is often not welcome, that there are many expectations shared in unwritten ways about what is to be in public. But also for me it was how I could hear Jay's voice in the text, a voice I had not heard for more than a decade.

It was hearing that recognizable voice, reading the connections and examples given, that made me think about other folk I used to work with as colleagues, know as friends, or folk who simply are no longer with us. It made me think of how Elizabeth Effinger brought the word psychogeography into my life, again over 15 years ago, and it is a word that I embrace with gratitude and citational justice awareness that she was the one who first introduced me to that word and concept. You should also pick up Liz's book as well, which is a perfect example of the power of public humanities and the kinds of projects that can be done that span different kinds of spaces (educational, carceral, community).

Space and place is one of my favourite things to think and write about after touch, time, and accessibility. If you are interested in how those all play out in some of my work, here's an article I published in 2020, it is one of my favourite articles. Jay's book had me thinking about the concept of holding space and making space, and how that is literally reinforced by architecture, but also by the bodies that navigate those spaces, or the bodies that are allowed to navigate certain spaces due to their positionality. These are concepts that have real impact in education and pedagogy in 2026.

Because as Jay alludes to in her work, we also carry those spaces and places with us. I mention this when I do any land acknowledgement for workshops or presentations that I facilitate, where I come from, where I have lived, what I live now, informs and impacts the relationality that I carry, the stories that I know, the values that I hold. We learn so much as we navigate through the places where we live and work, from the people in those places and their lived experiences. This is why I emphasize how important it is to think of students' lived experiences in pedagogical choices, as the more we are aware of disabled lived experience for example, the more inclusive our pedagogical design can be. 

But it also had me thinking of the many colleagues and friends I have made over the years at different institutions and it had me thinking of people I have not talked to for more than a decade because of circumstances and life, but mostly because the space didn't allow for such connections to be really built and sustained. Yet from each of those encounters and people, I have learned something that I still carry in the work that I do and in the way that I approach things. Sometimes you learn things from people that you never forget ,and I could see those threads of things I learned from Jay in her book. 

The ghosts and learnings of educators (formal and informal) and colleagues were rattling a lot in my head today. And it made me think that in the age of KPIs we should actually have a metric that asks something like "how many people that you graduated with in your program do you still talk to at least once every 3 months?" And it has to be something more substantial than a Happy New Year text. The context to this question is also super important, because if the reason that you still talk to many of them is because you all work at the same institution where you graduated from that is probably bad because it suggests the place is too insular and doesn't like outside perspectives. 

So then I started thinking about other ways that connections can be shown. Questions like "How many resources or articles have you shared with people you know outside your institution this month?" Just this week I shared an article on moral injury that I read from Mays Imad to 3 different people at 3 different institutions. This is not an anomaly for me; many times in a week I will come across a resource or an article where I think, so and so would really like this and I email or message the citation to them. I feel that actions like this also say a lot about how well you get to connect with people at institutions, in associations, through conferences, that you know that they would like such a resource. The opportunities to connect that are fostered in those spaces, so that years later you are sending someone an article, says a lot more about those spaces than any nod to "belonging" could. Having opportunities to talk to students about this is important too, like how much knowledge mobilization happens outside of their classes or in an interdisciplinary way, can also demonstrate areas of curricular design that need more community input for sharing possibilities.

Because part of this sharing is the memory and citational justice that comes from that (which is really important in GenerativeAI times). But it is also something that is deeply connected to humility, and how academe doesn't necessarily readily give one the space to have the humility to acknowledge and recognize the threads of learning (I have written about this in this blog before) or to say you don't know something, or the reason why you do know something is because of someone you had the honour of meeting or working with many years ago. It is through this carrying of knowledge, stories, and applications that you actually get to know people or that people get to know who you really are, and not the random social media version of you that they think they know. For as Jay notes, we need to recognize the history of public spaces, how one feels they can or cannot be in public spaces, and to witness those spaces with new curiosity (234). The agora is shifting folks, and it is only through remembering and acknowledging what, where, and who has supported our learning, that we can make what we carry in public a real and not a hidden part of who we are.

Resources

Gagne, A. (2020). An Ethics of Simultaneity in The Hours: Bergson, Cunningham, Daldry. Response: The Journal of Popular and American Culture.

Effinger, E. (2024). Erasing Frankenstein: Remaking the Monster, A Public Humanities Prison Arts Project. Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Imad, M. (2026). On Witnessing and Wonder: Confronting Moral Injury in Higher Education. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 58 (1), 13-20. 

Pitter, J. (2026). Black Public Joy. Penguin.