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The COVID-19 pandemic has had disproportionate impacts on communities that already bear disparate burdens of environmental and climate injustice. Migrant communities and those that have been historically marginalized are especially vulnerable. Building and maintaining relationships that serve as community support is challenged by the distance mandated by the virus. In this article, research partners from neighborhood and academic communities explore ways that we have navigated related challenges. Using the organizing and research methodology of legislative theatre, our collaborative harnessed virtual space to maintain connection and further our research goals. Zoom became our virtual gathering space, which was enriched by incorporating embodied practices into our processes to deepen intimacy. We found that responsivity and consistency of connection served to support relationships in the absence of physical presence. While these practices and approaches allowed us to move our work forward while prioritizing equitable relationships, challenges remain. Accessibility is a key barrier, as both technology and internet connection are unreliable in many communities. Equity work, regardless of the form of engagement, requires time and engagement with place. Yet, we found that storytelling combined with embodied practices, responsivity, and consistency of connection, can transcend virtual space to promote healing and change.

In this article, I enter into a poetic engagement with scholars Audre Lorde, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, and Cynthia Dillard and to explore the ways in which I seek to “rupture” normative understandings and representations of teaching and research praxis in higher education. It is an unapologetic reclamation of Lorde’s concept of the Erotic as an act of what Dillard calls (re)membering, and Sullivan’s working of queer reading practices that encourage us to expand our scholarly vocabulary beyond the “whitespace”—beyond what English prose is able to capture. In this work, I offer my own body as data as well as a framework for assessing praxis alignment through embodied analysis, answering Lorde’s call to privilege the rightness of “feeling” as true knowledge. This article is a love letter to Black feminist cultural production and a radical reimagining of the metrics of oppression that have historically been used to disconnect our bodies and minds in the name of science and best practice. It is a call to celebrate the liminal spaces that we occupy with the fullness of ourselves, and to trust our own authoring of knowledge, experience, and wisdom as educators, researchers, and scholars.

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