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Good morning, good morning. My deep thanks. All right, so I want us to channel that wonderful music that we heard about 5 minutes ago. Cielito Lindo, I can guarantee you that Gloria Anzaldua would have heard that song many times, many times.

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I was going to play you some Little Joey La Familia, which is a very popular band from South Texas. But I discovered that Yoan is such an incredible musician. I said, no, can you play some Mexican ranchera corrida music? He said, yeah, I'll do it.

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So that's why we had Yoan. So thank you again, Yoan. So let's dive into it. As I said yesterday, this is really a two-part series.

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What we did yesterday was to look at the theme of reimagining spirituality. with the idea that we should think about spirituality not only as a noun, but also as a verb. Then we talk about some of the other things that you see up there. Today, we're moving and we're going to try to apply that theme to this amazing thinker from South Texas, Gloria Anzaldua.

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And the parallel here is her move from what we will call spiritual realism, right, the question, are spirits real, moving in her mature work, in her later work, to this idea of social function or spiritual activism. That the real question, the question that matters most is how we use our spirituality in her later works. So that's where we're going. And I'm going to start with some biographical notes, and then we'll move on to a more textual analysis of her work.

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Sound good? All right. Gloria Anzaldua has been hailed as one of the most important cultural theorists of the past 50 years. Her work continues to animate many contemporary discourses, especially those concerned with cultural and linguistic hybridity, intersectionality, and women of color feminism.

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Yet, one may ask, what is Anzaldua's distinctive contribution to contemporary discourses of spirituality and religion? In A 1993 interview, Anzaldua herself lays bare the relative inattention that critics have given to her understanding of spirituality. And she writes in those interviews, one of the things that critics don't talk about my work, is the connection between body, mind, and spirit.

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Anything that has to do with the sacred, anything that has to do with the spirit. As long as it's theoretical and about history, about borders, that's fine. Borders are a concern that everybody has. But when I start talking about Nepantla, a border between the spirit, the psyche, and the mind, or as a process,

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The critics resist. So for today's lecture, we will ask, what does Anzaldua understand by the words spirit and spirituality? As I will show over the course of her career, Anzaldua wrestles with the question, are spirits real? Before the publication of Light in the Dark, her posthumous work published in 2015, in that work, Anzaldua often subscribes to one of two positions.

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a realist position, which assumes that spirits are indeed real, and a pluralist position, which affirms that spirits are both literally and imaginally present. While Light in the Dark continues to echo both positions, my aim today is to show that Ansal Dua entertains an important third option, which I would describe as functionalist and deeply pragmatic. As Ansal Dua argues, What ultimately matters is whether or not the spiritual journey makes positive changes in one's life.

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As I will show, this functionalist position meshes best with Anzaldua's underlying commitment to spiritual activism and social healing. So who was Gloria Anzaldua? Gloria Evangelina Anzaldua was born a seventh-generation Mexican-American in 1942 in the South Texas border town of Raymondville. For the first seven years of her life, Anzaldua lived in a ranch settlement that had no electricity or running water.

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She learned at an early age how difficult farm labor could be, an experience that instilled in her a deep respect for farm laborers. Adding to this hardship, Anzaldua was diagnosed in infancy with a rare hormonal disorder that caused genital bleeding starting at three months and monthly menses starting at age 6. This condition caused her daily pain, which she lived with for 35 years until she had a hysterectomy at age 38. And when Dr.

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Ghashi was talking about Job yesterday, I was thinking about Gloria Anzaldua. The farming was time-consuming. Anzaldua found refuge in stories and storytelling. When everybody was asleep at night after a long day in the fields, she would pull the covers over her head, turn on her flashlight, and read into the early hours of the morning.

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When her sister discovered Anzaldua's nightly habit, she threatened to tell their mother unless Anzaldua told her a story. Thus developed Anzaldua's gift for storytelling, a gift shared by many other members of her family. When she was 11, Anzaldua and her family moved to Hargill, Texas. For 8 years, Anzaldua grew up surrounded by Chicanos and Chicanas in Hargill, having virtually no contact with Anglos.

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This changed, however, when she began high school. Because she had scored very well on a high school placement exam, Anzaldua was sent to Edinburg High School, a predominantly Anglo institution. Although often ignored or overlooked by teachers and students alike, Anzaldua nevertheless ended up graduating valedictorian of her high school class. Throughout her early years, Anzaldua learned to cope with a sense of being different, even within her own community.

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Three factors contributed to her experience of difference. Her recurring menstrual bleeding, her same-sex preference, and her voracious appetite for reading. As she recalls, she read, quote, everything in the library, everything, encyclopedias, dictionaries, Aesop's fables, philosophy.

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I started reading all these heavy books. I literally went through all the shelves, book by book, end quote. Of note, she was especially enamored with Jane Eyre. with whom she identified, because like Anzal Dua, air quote, was short.

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She was little. She was stubborn and deviant. In 1962, Anzal Dua enrolled in Texas Women's University. This is a Texas story here, folks.

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In Denton, Texas, After a year, financial difficulties forced her to return home. Upon her arrival, she worked for a year and then enrolled in the nearby Pan-American University, now the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley. Anzadua put herself through college by working during the day and taking classes at night.

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She graduated with a BA in English, Art, and secondary education. Let me just flag that, because education is going to be a common theme throughout her life. Anzaldua worked for several years in public school systems, teaching grades from preschool to high school near her hometown.

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This was difficult work. Her students faced not only tough economic and social situations at home, but also rampant racism within the school system, which Anzaldua experienced herself. She confronted the racism by committing herself to a study of Chicano culture and encouraged her students, who are mostly Mexican-American, to incorporate their personal experiences in their writing. Anzaldua also became involved in the burgeoning Chicano movement in the United States, attending meetings of the Mexican-American Youth Organization.

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However, The more she attended these meetings, the more disenchanted she became, quote, because it was all guys. Women were simply not represented. During the summers, Anzaldua attended graduate school, just a stone's throw away from here, at the University of Texas at Austin, and obtained a master's degree in English and education in 1972.

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Soon after, she moved to Indiana and worked as a liaison between the public school system and the children of migrant farm workers. During this time, she also took her first creative writing course. In 1974, she decided that her work with the public school system did not enable her to make the kind of systemic change she desired, nor did it allow her enough time to write. She thus returned to UT Austin to pursue a doctoral degree in comparative literature.

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Through her coursework, she explored feminist theory and esoteric literature, the latter of which included a study of alchemy, astrology, the I Ching, and other metaphysical wisdom traditions. In 1977, Anzaldua committed herself to becoming a published author. She withdrew from UT Austin and moved to California. From 1977 to 1981, she lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she joined the Feminist Writers Guild and led a number of writing workshops.

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In 1979, she began working on what would become her first edited volume with Cherry Moraga, Called This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. This was a groundbreaking collection of essays, poems, letters, and personal narratives by an innovative. group of thinkers who moved beyond the usual conventions of white middle-class feminism.

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Between 1981 and 85, Anzaldua lived on the East Coast. During this time, she began working on a poetry manuscript that was later to become Borderlands La Frontera, The New Mestiza. Her acclaimed book that continues to be widely anthologized excerpted, and cited.

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In 1985, Anzaldua returned to Northern California, where she remained for the rest of her life. There she published 2 multi-genre anthologies, and in addition, she also published 2 bilingual children's books and a collection of interviews. Anzaldua passed away in 2004 at the age of 61 from complications related to diabetes. When she died, she was within months of completing her doctoral dissertation in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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A year later, the university posthumously awarded her a PhD. And if you look real closely, you'll see that the PhD is added. It's in a different typeface, right? So they put that a year after she passed away.

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Her doctoral dissertation has since been published as Light in the Dark, Loose in Lo Oscuro, Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, and Reality. And that's what I'll be talking about today, which represents the culmination of Anzaldua's mature thought. This is a wonderful inscription, too, on her tombstone, and we're going to come back to this idea of dreams. She writes, May we seize the arrogance

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to create outrageously, wildly, which means to dream wildly, for the world becomes as we dream it. This is quintessential, Anzaldua, right there. So what is her understanding of spirituality? So it's important to note that there's really development in her thought when she's thinking about these things.

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And the terms that I have under the title there are really some of the terms that she uses from the early 1980s all the way to her posthumous work, right? So up to her death. She begins talking about spirits early on in her career. Then she kind of moves to this category of spiritual mestizaje.

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And on that note, there's a wonderful book by Teresa Delgadillo called Spiritual Mestizaje, which I recommend highly. This was very helpful for my work. And what Delgadillo is doing there is looking at this category that appears in Borderlands, La Frontera, that widely cited and anthologized work.

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But then she continues to move and she begins to speak in these other categories, which she calls conocimiento and spiritual activism. And these especially show up in her posthumous work, which is going to be our focus today. So what does she mean by conocimiento? This is just a quick definition, but it's something like a non-binary and interconnected mode of thinking.

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that draws on non-rationalist forms of knowing, such as sensation, sensing, intuiting, and dreaming. So we know in all of these ways, we can know in a very rational, logical way, but she says that's not all that we, that's not all the ways that we know. We need to take dreams seriously. We need to take affect seriously.

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We need to take feelings seriously. That's also part of our knowing. And can I get this screen up here also just to show the... So what does she say?

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Those who carry conocimiento refuse to accept spirituality as a devalued form of knowledge and instead elevate it to the same level occupied by science and rationality. Notice, a form of spiritual inquiry. Conocimiento is reached via creative acts, writing, art making, dancing, healing, teaching, meditation, and spiritual activism. There's that term, both mental and somatic, meaning bodily.

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Through creative engagements, you embed your experience in a larger frame of reference. There's that ultimate. value, that ultimate concern. Connecting your personal struggles with those of other beings on the planet with the struggles of the Earth itself.

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I'm thinking here of Catherine Keller and Earth Theology. To understand the greater reality that lies behind your personal perceptions, you view these struggles as spiritual undertakings. And remember yesterday when we started talking about liberating spiritualities, and I talked about the green is the verb, the green is the doing. These are the greens again.

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These are, she's understanding spirituality in these categories of doing, of creative making, of forms of art, right? And she goes on to talk about spiritual activism. Conocimento helps us to respond not just with the traditional, practice of spirituality, contemplation, meditation, and private rituals, the stuff that most people associate with churches.

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Or with the technologies of political activism, protests, demonstrations, and speak-outs, but with the amalgam of the two, spiritual activism. You need both. are forms of making, but for her, as it is at its highest when it combines both the practice of spirituality with the technologies of political activism. Now, all this said,

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We should note that Anzaldua had conflicting ideas about the nature of spirituality over the course of her career. And quite frankly, don't we all? Imagine what you were thinking about spirit and spirituality when you were 5 versus 15 versus 25. And if you're older than 25, you may think about it in different ways now.

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You may think about it differently last week, and it may change, right? But to illustrate this tension, I turned to some interviews from the early 1980s. In them, Ansaldua does not yet speak of spiritual matters in terms of conocimiento, creative acts or political engagement. Rather, she approaches spirituality more in terms of discrete paranormal events, drawing largely on her own heterodox spiritual experiences.

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So listen to her recount, for example, her earliest spiritual memory. She writes, My awareness of a spiritual dimension started when I began differentiating between who I was as a little kid and who my mother was, what the table was, what the wall was. When I was about three years old, I was sitting on the floor, and above me on the table were some oranges I wanted, but I couldn't reach.

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I remember reaching for the oranges, I could feel my arms getting really long. I really wanted them, and suddenly there were three bodies, like I was three of me. I don't remember if I really got the oranges or not.

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But right after that experience, I began to feel apart, separate from others. Before this point, I couldn't differentiate between myself and other things before I'd feel like I was a part of the wall. Now, this is no doubt a surreal story, and I wondered whether one of the most surreal technologies of our day, ChatGPT, could help bring it to life. curious to think what she would think of altered reality today.

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Now, the results that I got were mixed, as I will show. I asked ChatGPT to produce an image of the story I just told you all. And this was the first image that was generated. Most immediately, I was struck by the fact that the default AI image here is that of a light-skinned,

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Anglo child, which continues to echo the racial bias Anzaldua experienced at her high school in Edinburg, Texas. So I said, please make the child Hispanic. Also, I'm missing some crucial details here, I told ChatGPT, like the table above the child and the child's arms getting really long. And if it helps you to know what is recounted here is a paranormal experience.

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So this is what ChatGPT gave me. Maybe Hispanic, maybe Asian, I'm not sure. I knew that this may take a while. So I said, change to a Hispanic girl, make arms longer, and put more oranges on the table, and please don't give the child just four fingers.

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Also, convert to an illustration. And this is what I got. Now we're moving in the direction of anime. More corrections were in order.

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So I typed, the expression on face should be one of incredulity and hesitancy. please put the setting tonight. This is the next image that I got. An improvement, but it still looks and feels more Disney-esque than Anzal doing.

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So in my last set of directions, I typed, make it a three year old Hispanic girl and put it in the form of a storyboard. And that's what I got. I'll let you all read through that.

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There's still some things that are wrong. Notice in the third panel, there's two girls, should be 3. Notice that she's actually grabbing the orange. The story says,

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I'm not sure if I grabbed them. There's that moment of doubt in the story. And the penultimate, there was one version right before this. That last panel reads, it read, after that, I felt so separate.

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And then it had her thinking like I was part of the wall, which changes the meaning completely. Because it would be like, oh, I feel so separate from other human beings. Like, I'm part of the wall and not part of humanity.

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But actually what she's saying is, no, before I felt like I was part of the wall because I felt like I was part of all living creatures, all living things, inanimate and animate, right? That's the kind of eco-theology that Catherine Keller was talking, how we're connected. I'm thinking about her quote about Rumi, right? And so what she's saying here is that I missed feeling like I was part of the wall.

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once I had this experience. So all said, I don't recommend processing Anzaldua through the medium of AI. It's best to read her directly. So in other early interviews, Anzaldua describes in detail several other out-of-the-ordinary experiences, such as a time when she was tripping on mushrooms and discovered she had multiple selves, the feeling of connecting to multiple selves through orgasm,

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the experience of being immobilized during meditation by a heavy vibration, and the ability to see other worlds superimposed upon this one. But such accounts have proven to be a challenge for many interpreters today. But Anzaldua's insistence on sharing them proved significant in its own right. She commits herself to the task of telling these stories.

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So as she says in one interview, I think it's about time for these ideas to be in print. I went to psychic readers and workshops and psychic development right after one of my near-death experiences, and these saved my life. It really helped me to get in touch with who I was and what I wanted to do.

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I'm happy it's going to be in my interview book. People should know about this aspect of me and my life. Then the interviewer, Anna Louise Keating, says, Don't you think it's going to make you less respectable and less reputable because a lot of scholars don't believe in such things?

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Anzaldua responds. Tough shit. Once I get past my own censorship of what I should write about, I don't care what other people say. Some things were hard for me to reveal, but my strong vocation for writing makes me more open.

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To be a writer means to communicate, to tell stories that other people haven't told, to describe experiences that people don't normally find in books, or at least in the mainstream books. But we could still ask, well, what does she think of spirits? In light of the dark, she says, I've been asked this question many times. And each time the question takes me back to my childhood, which I learned, witnessing las curanderas de mi mama grande, that the physical world is not the only reality.

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So here she recounts a situation in which her grandmother believed that an older woman had bewitched her son, her uncle Rafa, into falling in love with her. Rafa was obsessed with this older woman. He couldn't eat or sleep and would walk around obsessing about her. Anzaldua's grandmother thus hired a curandera, a traditional folk healer, to heal her son.

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This curandera, who was from a small town across the border in Mexico, claimed to be an apprentice of the great folk healer Don Pedrito Jaramillo and was known for healing people all over South Texas with a blend of shamanism, herbs, and invocations to Catholic saints. Anzaldua describes how the curandera proceeded to heal her uncle. After sweeping Rafa's body with the small branches tied together with herbs, the curandera rubbed him with herbal tea and eucalyptus leaves to give him a proper cleaning, or limpiesa. The curandera then took a fresh egg and rubbed it all over his body.

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El Huevo, the curandera claimed, would absorb the disease caused by the bad spirit invading him. She cracked open the egg into a bowl and examined it for spots or marks. The spots and condition of the egg, she said, helped her divine the cause and the origin of the sickness. The curandera then buried the egg in the backyard, and as Andaz Duo recalls, Rafa slept very well that night and ate a huge breakfast the next morning.

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He was back to his sprightly self, writes Anzaldua, and I began to have faith in the curanderas and the reality of spirits. But Anzaldua goes on to inquire further about the reality of spirits. In a series of rhetorical questions, she goes on to ask, is the idea of chamanaria real, or is it a work of the imagination, and therefore fantasy, not reality? When A shamana journeys, does she move outward in her body around the earth, or does she move inward into an altered state of consciousness where she experiences realities outside normal perception?

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In a similar way, Ansal Doua asked the same about dreams. Here we're back to dreams. Are dreams real? Do they represent a separate

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reality? Do we make dreams? Or does something outside us originate and orchestrate them? Is imagination's non-ordinary reality real?

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And what I find to be one of the most important passages in Light in the Dark, Anzaldua then responds with this remarkable passage. Does it matter whether the journey comes from a waking dream, the unconscious in symbolic representation, or a non-ordinary parallel world. Who cares?

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As long as the information, whether metaphorical or literal, gained from the shamanic journey makes a positive change in a person's life. We must avoid the snares of literalism. or in a setting like this, we could say fundamentalism. Are spirits literally present, or are they imaginably present?

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They are both. But even more significantly, Anzaldua then invites her reader to grapple with these questions through the framework of spiritual activism, which she describes as an activist stance that explores spirituality's implications. And this is where her social ethics starts to come out.

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She says, Conocimiento pushes us into engaging the spirit and confronting our social sickness with new tools and practices whose goal it is to affect a shift. And backing up here, we can chart We see spiritual inquiry. We see all of these active verbs here, creative acts, struggle, struggle, struggle, spiritual undertakings, creative engagements.

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But there's one pathway that also gets her to spiritual activism, and that is her discussion of new age spirituality, with which her work is often associated. On the one hand, she is critical of scholars who dismiss New Age spirituality on the basis of what they take to be. Let me see this.

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Let's see if it's coming up here. There we go. She dismisses, or she's critical of scholars who dismiss New Age spirituality on the basis of what they take to be its, quote, flaky language and Pollyanna-like sentiments. Anzaldua's long-standing interest in esotericism and theosophy, areas of study and practice that are commonly associated with New Age spirituality, suggest a basic affinity with New Age thought.

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On the other hand, however, Anzaldua simultaneously laments the fact that many interpreters have reduced her work to a mere form of New Age spirituality. As a point of fact, Anzaldua is actually quite critical of some forms of New Age spirituality that tend to take flight from real problems of the world. Anzaldua is not surprised that New Age spirituality strikes some of its critics as, quote, disconnected from the grounded realities of people's lives and struggles. She squarely acknowledges that, quote, most contemporary practitioners of new age spirituality in this country ignore the political implications and do not concern themselves with our biggest problem and challenge, which she identifies as racism and other racial abuses.

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Significantly, it is precisely in light of the social and political shortcomings of New Age spirituality that Anzaldua appeals directly to spiritual activism. This emphasis on spirituality's social implications clearly puts Anzaldua's conception of spirituality on a different path from mainstream New Age approaches. So in closing, Anzaldua spirituality.

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emerges through her interventions as a writer who seeks to heal. Referring to herself in the second person, she states, through the act of writing, you call, like the ancient chamana, the scattered pieces of your soul back to your body. For you, writing is an archetypal journey, home to the self. a process of building bridges to the next phase, the next place, the next culture, the next reality.

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At the same time, Anzaldua also acknowledges that there is never any definitive resolution, but rather, quote, just the process, the process of healing. For her, conocimiento, spiritual mestizaje, and spiritual activism serve as the needed technologies to engage this process. They are pathways through which new forms of social transformation are born. And I know she'll be on the front lines today, holding this banner.

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with all the multi-faith folk in Minneapolis. As a writer, Anzaldua intuitively understands her role as an intermediary. The educator is going to come back here. She is a guide, an educator, a midwife, a shamana, and a daimon, which she discusses in various points in her writing.

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Now, in ancient Greek writing, a daimon served as an intermediary between heaven and earth, who took prayers up to the gods and brought back rewards and commands. As pragmatist philosopher Jim Garrison explains, the Greeks also believe that at birth a daimon seizes each of us determining our unique individual potential and mediating between us and our best possible destiny. Anzaldua understands herself as a daimon in two senses.

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Both as an intermediary shamana who helps bring human beings to our best possible decenary and as a subversive and maverick demon. Like Jane Eyre, who was stubborn and deviant, Anzaldua bucked the conventions of traditional forms of religion, thus approaching demonic in the pejorative sense, while still performing A therapeutic and socially transformative function. demonic in the salutary sense.

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Both of these impulses give rise to an incredibly daring and socially conscious thinker. As readers of Anzaldua, how we choose to interpret the reality of spirits matters. Are they mere figments of our imagination, or are they actual spirits? When we see, when we search for an answer, perhaps we would do well to turn to Anzaldua as our guide, to hear her once again in tone.

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Will the snares of literalism trap us? Does it really matter that we definitively know the origins of our spiritual journey? Let us focus instead on how the spiritual journey can heal us and our broken world. And let us begin that journey by widening our perception of the world and transforming it through our embodied, creative, and communal actions.

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Thank you. That was outstanding. You are not off the hook yet, sir. It's Q&A time.

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My goodness, that was outstanding. Thank you so much, Dr. Tudis. You can do us a kindness.

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The QR code will be in front of you on the screen as well as on the document that you were given yesterday. If you can scan that and submit your questions on Slido, we'll take a Q&A for about 9 minutes or so, and then we're going to keep going right into Dr. Gushy's next lecture as well, too. So I am going to cheat because this is a part of my own doctoral work.

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I love your explanation of On Zaldua and spiritual activism, there's a colonial epistemology that exists in Western education. Most of our theological frameworks are centered on white culture. When you look at the authors from marginalized communities and Zaldua, Watchman Nee, Howard Thurman, Richard Twist, all these other communities, spiritual activism is almost normalized.

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It's a part of the air that they breathe. And yet the church has consistently lost its credible witness in terms of spiritual activism. How do we help the church recover its influence and the necessity of spiritual activism in the climate in which we live, where it's desperately needed and the church is appallingly silent in the midst of these things? How do we help the church recover its spiritual activism and begin to trust or retrust marginalized voices?

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Any thoughts? No, that's absolutely. And make sure you submit those questions as well, too. I think we need to have a laser focus on what are the creative interventions that we can make in our particular context.

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So with the people that we work, the communities that we're in, what are the interventions, small and large, or large and small, that we can begin to insert into these conversations so that the discourse widens, that's the only way that it happens, right? In small and large ways. And I want to emphasize the small, the importance of the small. Because these can happen in meetings, they can happen in church groups, they can happen in liturgies, they can happen

00:39:34.920 - 00:39:50.200

discussions around the table, they can happen, but discussions with people in your own family who do not agree with you. I mean, that's where change starts to happen. I mean, there has to be small interventions. Now, of course, I mean, it also takes courage, right?

00:39:50.680 - 00:40:03.400

And there's also a sense of self-preservation. And sometimes it's just, it's too much to enter these conversations knowing that there's going to be a huge cost for you at the end. So we have to be wise. We have to, you know, take care of ourselves.

00:40:03.960 - 00:40:26.520

and make sure that we're in it for them. It's a marathon, it's not a sprint. And so that all has to be part of it as well, because if healing, social healing, personal healing, is the ultimate goal, as Anzal Dua suggests, then we just need to be wise about the choices that we make. But we all can make interventions.

00:40:26.560 - 00:40:58.600

And this is especially to my white brothers and sisters, as people who sit in positions of privilege many times, you're a crucial voice in making sure that many voices are included that aren't typically included. And I just want to say it's a beautiful testament to this school that you have had these kind of voices even before the arrival of your president, Jose Irizarri. In many ways, from the histories that I've been taught,

00:40:59.160 - 00:41:20.520

is that there were movers and shakers here, white men of privilege, who were saying, we need to start opening the conversation. And it's because of those conversations that we're now able to have these kinds of conversations, right? And to really expand the conversation. So it all starts somewhere, and we all have a part to play in this journey.

00:41:21.960 - 00:41:32.800

Thank you very much. We have a question from our Vice President of Institutional Advancement, Dr. Ryan Arnold. But as I told you before, I am not going to butcher the Spanish language.

00:41:32.800 - 00:41:44.320

So I'm going to show you the question in that way because I don't want to do that in public. So I refuse. Okay. Would you mind saying that out loud?

00:41:44.440 - 00:41:57.640

Yeah, well, is there a heuristic aspect of Conocimiento? Where's Ryan? Yeah. So by the heuristic you're referring to, like, what is the practical use of conocimiento?

00:41:57.640 - 00:42:06.440

The self-learning practice. The self-learning practice. But say more. What do you mean by the self-learning practice of conocimiento?

00:42:07.280 - 00:42:41.080

Experiments by what we would consider rule of thumb. a concept or framework. Yes, okay, I get the question now. So absolutely, and what I would do is I would tie this idea of the daily praxis of connocimiento to the lecture yesterday when I was talking about philosophical pragmatism.

00:42:41.320 - 00:42:58.680

One thing that I didn't bring out fully is that the role of habits in pragmatism is absolutely central. I mean, that's, again, that's where change gets made. It's how we orient ourselves in the world, as I was just saying, right?

00:42:59.160 - 00:43:28.600

How we orient, how we put ourselves, how we make those mini decisions, those micro decisions, and those in turn becomes habits. But when we have these habits, that determines who we are as a person, as a community. It's what we do, ultimately, that determines who we are. And what we do, we do so through meaningful and purposive habits.

00:43:29.160 - 00:43:39.280

So we really need to cultivate the habits. And it's not something that we can, I'm going to do conocimiento today, I may do it three weeks now. No, it has to be every day. I mean, the same for Paulo Freire.

00:43:39.880 - 00:44:00.920

Conscientization for Freire is an ongoing process. And it's not only about learning new things, learning who I am, but also letting parts of us die that need to die. Ideologies that we need to leave behind. So there's always this continual process of death and rebirth in Freire, and I would say the same is true for Anzaldua.

00:44:01.160 - 00:44:08.720

And for me, that equates to a lifelong set of habits. Outstanding. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Teeter.

00:44:08.800 - 00:44:18.280

Chris, thank you very much. Truly outstanding. We are going to transition and get ready to hear from Dr. Gushy.

00:44:18.280 - 00:44:23.080

So he will be up here momentarily in about a minute or two. So if you need to grab some refreshments, water,