Chapter 14: Conversations, Performance-Based Learning, and Meaning Making: Understanding the Pandemic Through Philosophical Performance

Women have been on the frontline combatting COVID-19, yet at the same time the pandemic has exposed the unequal position of women in this society—this, dual pandemics. In this chapter, through autoethnography, we reflect on the pandemic as transnational feminist educational researchers in America. We base our autoethnography on our experiences of performing Simone de Beauvoir and Charles Sanders Peirce in 2017 for the course on philosophical theories of education that remain with us. We argue that performance-based pedagogy invites students to learn within a dynamically open process of philosophical narrations rooted in individuals’ concrete gendered and embodied existence within in complex social webs of meaning and embodied within a philosopher’s world of their era. It refuses the linear conception of time and the dualism between the philosophical and the autobiographical, thereby intimately connects one’s personal life with the broader socio-political environment.