CRT Rewind: Teaching toward (the Elusive) Social Justice

The key event around which this paper is built is the 2010 absolute discharge granted to Eric Tillman, a former (and current) Canadian Football League executive, who pleaded guilty to a sexual assault charge involving a teenage girl in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada (Pruden, 2010). Drawing on critical race theory as applied to pedagogical spaces (Knaus, 2009; Earick, 2009), it offers a reverse chronology, autoethnographic response to the ruling in the Tillman case, as well as to "public" discourse produced by, and informing, the case itself. Combining autoethnographic reflections and a bricolage of artifacts, it interrogates (im)possibilities of teaching toward social justice with/in pejoratively gendered and racialized social spaces such as those of the Canadian Prairies and offers pedagogical possibilities for speaking to disrupt.