Public Talk with Dr. Maria Belén Ordóñez

Becoming-with: Notes on Thinking and Learning Atmospheres

Public Talk with Dr. Maria Belén Ordóñez 

• Tuesday, March 18: 3:00-3:45

• MCC 530

  113 McCaul Street

   

Becoming-with: Notes on Thinking and Learning Atmospheres

In this talk, Maria Belén Ordóñez shares her approaches to scholarship and teaching embodied in ethnographical and pedagogical practices of queer sociality and becoming. Seeking to transform the act of learning and to actively unsettle hierarchies of knowledge, Ordóñez explores frameworks for understanding different notions of what the body can do and be within and beyond the classroom. To this end, her current research focuses on the concept of becoming-maternal when it is detached from subjectivities of motherhood. In parallel, her current research collaborations focus on transformative accessibility, informed by years of teaching and learning from students, which raises broader questions about difference and misfitting. These inquiries are central to her own becoming as an educator and scholar, highlighting the imperative of advancing alter-pedagogies in art and design education.

Biography:

Dr. Maria Belén Ordóñez is an Assistant Professor of Social Sciences/Humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Science. Her research intersects feminist and queer theories, multi-sited ethnography, and critical theory, with a focus on sexuality, intimacy, and body politics. Ordóñez' past ethnographic research examined unofficial channels of public pleasure, desire, and affect in Canadian media headlines and in queer/feminist oppositions to obscenity and censorship laws. Her research includes anti-oedipal readings of parent-child relationships in legal, cultural, and cinematic forms. Currently, she is collaborating with Dr. Laura Thrasher (Educational Developer, Inclusive Teaching at OCADU) on a Research Seed Grant project that develops a participant-driven unconference, creating resources and materials for accessible pedagogy in art and design post-secondary education. This project involves organizing and documenting the Transformative Access Unconference (TAU), which explores the intersection of critical pedagogy, neurodivergence, disability, art, and design. Ordóñez has also collaborated on projects such as Feminist Technology Networks (femtechnet.org) and she teaches courses in feminist theories, experimental ethnography, critical theory, social change, and body politics.