Melting Pedagogies in Times of Despair: Engaging With and Through Rossiter’s Ethics

Amy Rossiter’s body of work has had profound pedagogical and theoretical impacts on the lives and work of the authors of this paper. Using a relational methodology with letters as a starting point, we interview each other about Rossiter’s impact on each of us, and continue this engagement with letters throughout the article. With particular focus on despair in the classroom, we extend Rossiter’s contributions in conversation with Cvetkovich, Ahmed, and other queer and critical affect theorists to think through how to encounter that despair with the use of “melting pedagogies.” We illustrate some of the ways that we try to facilitate this melting, knowing that this work is always partial, contingent, and located in our own practices in the context of despair and hope. We finally consider what scholars and educators can learn and who they can become through ongoing and deliberate engagement with Rossiter’s deep and incisive contributions to ethics and a commitment to social justice.