As a theologian with particular interest in the public dimensions of pastoral theology, much of my scholarship, writing, and teaching focuses on ways to discern, analyze, and resist forms of difference treated oppressively in church and culture such as race, gender, sexuality, and class. My participation in programs sponsored by the Wabash Center provided me with opportunities to collaborate with colleagues in theological education to identify and develop pedagogical resources that enhance the effectiveness of our teaching. These pedagogies help faculty and students to recognize, resist, and transform interlocking systems of advantage that give rise to marginalizing practices. However, until recently, the theoretical grounding for those resources was shaped by modernist understandings of social identities as additive rather than simultaneous. This additive approach limited any analysis of the constructivist and intersecting nature of identity shaped by asymmetries of power.

Although I am trained as a practical theologian and much of my scholarly research and interest therefore tends to express itself as theological construction and imagination, I am currently teaching in a religious studies setting at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC. While all campuses are sites of diversity and intersectionality in identity markers, Gallaudet University presents teachers with a unique layer of identity formation. We are the only free-standing four-year liberal arts university in the world specifically designed for Deaf and hard of hearing students. Therefore our mission statement expresses our desire to be a bilingual institution committed to providing the best educational opportunities possible in both American Sign Language (ASL) and written English.

We are bodies, and we engage with the world as such. In the classroom, to bodily engage with our peers, instructors, and the course content is neither simply a possibility nor an interesting method. We are bodies learning. And the crucial question presented to me then is how to consider bodies in our classroom space as the essential element of our pedagogical practice and teaching of critical analysis. Resources on practices for critical, social justice-orientated pedagogies take embodied diversity in the classroom seriously, though it seems to me that there is an underlying assumption that embodied identity markers—my race, my gender, my abilities, for example—will always be perceived in the same, or at least similar and somewhat predictable, ways.