Deep-rooted emotion is a critical site of knowledge that has been systemically de-legitimized in western institutions of learning. My focus on heartbreak highlights what it means to validate feelings from an ontological and relational perspective; it also stresses the political implications of leaning into grief and desire. Contemporary models, such as Taylor Swift’s music, are examined as entry points into knowledge-making and pedagogy. Aligned with the feminist situated writings of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Ursula K. Le Guin, and adrienne maree brown, my research holds academic space for the spills of loving, entanglement, and all that can’t be contained – not for wellbeing but as epistemological sites.
Linh S. Nguyễn is Canadian children’s author and PhD candidate at the Faculty of Education. Her research engages with the decolonial methodologies of spillage and storytelling to develop feminist and anti-imperialist pedagogies that stem from emotion, relation, and embodiment as epistemology. Linh completed her H.B.A. in English, Writing & Rhetoric, and Creative Expression & Society at the University of Toronto and her MPhil in Arts, Creativity and Education at Cambridge.