Book
Pedagogies of Possibility is a book forthcoming from West Virginia University Press. It is a collection of interdisciplinary essays from practitioners who engage students in pedagogies of possibility, supporting them to navigate challenging times with a sense of hope, and to envision (and learn how to build) more equitable presents and futures.
Our contributors and readers are post-secondary educators who are evolving teaching methods that transform fears about a precarious future -- fears which can be paralyzing -- into visions for new ways of being in relationship with each other and the world. Students face crippling debt, environmental catastrophe, and increasing global fascism. The faculty who teach them face these same issues. This book contains actionable experiments and experiences, and supports conversation among educators who are meeting the urgency of this present moment.
Our work follows countless historic and contemporary scholars, activists and practitioners who see hope not as a naive concept but as central to struggle and change -- and to the kinds of collaboration and community care that are necessary for survival.
Editors
Deborah Keisch
Senior Lecturer & Director of the Community Scholars Program
UMass Amherst
Deborah Keisch, PhD, is a faculty member in Civic Engagement and Service Learning and the Director of the Community Scholars Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has been immersed in the field of education for nearly three decades as a practitioner, researcher, and activist - and is committed to liberatory research and teaching practices that support the work of social change. Deborah holds a bachelor's degree in human ecology from College of the Atlantic, a master’s in education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a PhD in anthropology from UMass Amherst.
Jessica Bacal
Director, Reflective Practices
Smith College
Jessica Bacal MFA, EdD is Director of Reflective Practices at Smith College, where she co-developed and teaches a class about imagining and practicing the navigation of uncertain futures. She also works closely with first generation students. Her previous books are Mistakes I Made at Work: 25 Influential Women Reflect on What They Got Out of Getting It Wrong (Plume 2014) and The Rejection That Change My Life: 25+ Power Women on Being Let Down, Turning It Around, and Burning It Up at Work (Plume 2021).
Authors
Jonathan Adler
Professor of Psychology
Olin College of Engineering
Jonathan Adler is Professor of Psychology at Olin College of Engineering, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Medical School, Editor of Personality and Social Psychology Review, and Chief Academic Officer at Health Story Collaborative. His research focuses on the dynamic relationship between our life stories and our well-being. He is also a theater director and a playwright produced Off-Broadway.
Shana Agid
Associate Professor of Art, Media, and Comunication
Parsons School of Design
Shana Agid is a book artist, letterpress printer, designer, teacher, and organizer whose work focuses on relationships of power and difference in visual, social, and political cultures. His design work explores possibilities for making self-determined infrastructures and campaigns through teaching and design research. She is an Associate Professor of Arts, Media, and Communication at Parsons School of Design, a long-time member of Critical Resistance, and the Transformative Justice Skill Up Fellow at Interrupting Criminalization for 2024-2026.
Marta Almazovaite
Marta Almazovaite graduated from Smith College in 2024 with a degree in Psychology and a minor in Education & Child Study. At Smith, she conducted research across a variety of departments, served on the Honor Board, and participated in the performing arts. She now lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she enjoys being in nature, ice skating, and crafting in her free time.
Erin Park Cohn
Director, Wurtele Center for Leaderhip
Smith College
Erin Park Cohn is committed to building a generation of young leaders who disrupt individualistic and hierarchical models of leadership and adopt collaborative practices to facilitate positive change. She serves as the Director of the Wurtele Center for Leadership at Smith College and is the author of Facit Saltus on Substack. Erin holds a PhD in 20th-century US History from the University of Pennsylvania.
Alix Gerber
Assistant Director, Design Thinking Initiative
Smith College
Alix Gerber is a design researcher, and has been teaching human-centered and speculative design since 2017. Since receiving her MFA in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons School of Design, Alix has collaborated with people who work towards transformed social systems to express their visions materially. Most recently, she has been leading the Making Radical Futures Lab in working with grassroots groups in the Connecticut River Valley who prefigure futures without capitalism (mutual aid networks, worker cooperatives, community land trusts, etc) to visualize a local post-capitalist future.
Millie Howard
Millie Howard is an Environmental Science & Policy alum from Smith College in the class of 2025. Their work in Environmental Science & Policy centered around climate justice and urban ecology, pairing with their concentration in Community Engagement and Social Change to explore the importance of community-based work in building climate resilience. They have learned about and practiced design pedagogy through their role as Studio Design Partner at the Smith College makerspace, Design Thinking Initiative, from 2022 to 2025, and their role in the Making Radical Futures Lab in the summer and fall of 2023. Millie’s creative and professional focus in these roles was to inspire creative restoration and repair of objects and textiles in order to strengthen relationships with commonly used objects and reduce waste.
Jallicia Jolly
Assistant Professor of American Studies and Black Studies
Amherst College
Dr. Jallicia Jolly is an Assistant Professor in American Studies and Black Studies at Amherst College and a Visiting Scholar at Princeton University's Center on Transnational Policing and the Effron Center for the Study of America. She is the founder and director of the Black Feminist Reproductive Justice, Equity, and HIV/AIDS Activism (BREHA) Collective—an interdisciplinary, medical humanities lab that bridges research, advocacy, student collaborations, and high-impact learning experiences on the health and movement-building of Afro-diasporic girls, women, and gender diverse people. A 2025 National Academy of Sciences U.S. Kavli Fellow, Dr. Jolly’s first book manuscript, Ill Erotics: Black Caribbean Women and Self-Making in the Time of HIV/AIDS (University of California Press, Forthcoming 2026), is an ethnography of the reproductive justice organizing of young Black Jamaican women living and loving with HIV that chronicles their everyday confrontations with illness, reproductive violence, and inequality in neocolonial Jamaica.
Valerie Joseph
AEMES Mentoring Administrative Director
Smith College
Valerie Joseph is the AEMES (Achieving Excellence in Math Engineering and Science) Mentoring Administrative Director at Smith College. She has a Ph.D. in anthropology and graduate degrees in Movement Therapy and Social Justice Education and is the founder of Grounded Space Consulting, an organization that convenes public conversations by marginalized people and about marginalized topics. Valerie loves to bring people's truths to conversations with the loving intention of growth and healing. She is a fervent believer in the power of "both/and."
Em Judkins
Em Judkins (they/them) is a queer poet and filmmaker with a B.A. in English and Film and Media Studies from Smith College. Their work has received the Ethel Olin Corbin Prize, the Ruth Forbes Eliot Prize, and the Elizabeth Drew Essay Prize, and appears in The Core Review, new words poetry journal, Emulate, and elsewhere. You can find them at emjudkins.com and @ee.jay_ on Instagram.
Fhrynée Lambert
University of Michigan
Fhrynée Lambert (she/her) is dual PhD student in English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research centers Black reproductive decision-making and (M)othering practices in the U.S. and Caribbean, reflecting her commitments to reproductive justice and community-driven scholarship. She is a graduate of Smith College, where she earned dual degrees in Africana Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, along with a certificate in Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice.
Megan Lyster
Assistant Director, Wurtele Center for Leadership
Smith College
Megan Lyster has supported students, faculty, and staff in designing and implementing project-based learning experiences since 2007. After receiving a Master of Arts from Prescott College, she taught courses in design and social innovation at Hampshire College before transitioning to supporting faculty as the Instructional Designer for Experiential Learning in the Amherst College Center for Community Engagement, where she facilitated community-based and project-based learning initiatives inside and outside the classroom. In her current role as the Assistant Director in the Wurtele Center for Leadership at Smith College, Megan supports students, faculty, and staff to cultivate the creativity, courage, and collaborative capacity to facilitate positive change in the world.
Tiaa McKinney
Amherst College
Tiia McKinney (she/her) hails from Eleuthera, The Bahamas and her experiences on the island informs her research and interests. She is an Amherst College graduate with a double major in Law Jurisprudence and Social Thought (LJST) and Spanish. She is passionate about the intersection between law and reproductive justice. She envisions and aspires to create a just and equitable future where Caribbean experiences are centered and all can access reproductive care.
Rachel L. Mordecai
Associate Professor of English
UMass Amherst
Rachel L. Mordecai is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Editor of sx salon. Her teaching and research interests are primarily in the field of Caribbean literature and culture. Mordecai’s book Citizenship Under Pressure: The 1970s in Jamaican Literature and Culture appeared from UWI Press in 2014; her monograph in progress is on Caribbean family sagas.
Emily Norton
Director, Design Thinking Initiative
Smith College
Emily has taught social innovation at RISD and worked as a design strategist, supporting corporations, communities, and institutions in creatively addressing organizational challenges and change. She grew up in an architectural co-housing experiment, which taught her that working together and with natural systems, we can responsibly design and build the worlds we want to live, learn, work, and play in. She holds a B.F.A from the Rhode Island School of Design and an M.Des. from Design Academy Eindhoven, the Netherlands.
Noah Romero
Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies
Hampshire College
Noah Romero (Filipinx - Ilocano/Visaya) holds a Ph.D. from Waipapa Taumata Rau (the University of Auckland) in the fields of Critical Studies in Education and Māori and Indigenous Education. Bridging critical Indigenous studies and education, Romero's research examines how dispossessed and deterritorialized people redefine learning and identity in subcultural contexts, with a focus on Indigenous and immigrant communities in the U.S., Aotearoa (New Zealand), the Philippines, and the Philippine diaspora.
Boone Shear
Senior Lecturer
UMass Amherst
I teach in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I facilitate Building Solidarity Economies, a collaborative research and teaching project, designed to advance conditions for community autonomy and well-being. I am an activist anthropologist and organizer, involved in a community and movement based solidarity economy and mutual aid projects. I publish on ontological politics and radical pedagogy for academic and non-academic audiences.
Kelly Vogel
Doctoral student
Lesley University
Kelly Vogel is a doctoral student at Lesley University with a focus on Embodied, Trauma-informed pedagogy in higher education, and a Professor of English Composition at Holyoke Community College in Holyoke, MA. Her research focuses on ways that Embodied, trauma-informed pedagogy might offer safety and connection for all stakeholders to thrive in learning environments
Beth Wynstra
Associate Professor: Arts & Humanities
Babson College
Beth Wynstra is Associate Professor of English and the Faculty Director of the Center for Engaged Learning and Teaching at Babson College. A theater historian and expert on the life and works of Eugene O'Neill, Beth wrote Vows, Veils, and Masks: The Performance of Marriage in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill, which was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2023. Beth regularly directs plays and musicals both at Babson and beyond, and she works as a dramaturg for theater companies around the world.