We are living in a time marked by violence, displacement, and division. In these conditions, education cannot retreat into neutrality. It must ask how to build responsibility, care, and solidarity across distance. Ethical entanglement is the name we give to this way of teaching. It means studying histories that are not our own, designing without detachment, and prioritizing care over distance or abstraction.

​

This project comes directly out of our classrooms. Christina Zhang teaches in post-atrocity contexts, asking students to imagine how memory can be carried into the design of space. Dean Caivano teaches political theory in places shaped by confinement, from prisons in California to community colleges in the Central Valley. In each of these settings, students confront the reality of injustice while trying to imagine different ways of living. Reframing these lessons together, we began to see a shared practice: teaching as an act of responsibility across difference.

​

Pedagogy is not an accessory to our work. It is at its center. In carceral classrooms, we witness students connect decolonial theory to their own lives, naming foster care, patriarchy, and prison itself as a system of domination. In design studios, students built speculative memoryscapes for cities scarred by violence. These moments show that teaching can open spaces of imagination where official histories fall silent. Ethical entanglement names this practice of carrying responsibility across divides, refusing detachment, and holding care at the core of learning.

​

This project unites those classroom practices. Through interviews with educators, case studies, and designing an experimental interdisciplinary course, we will develop a framework for ethical entanglement that is reflective and adaptable. We are not creating a fixed model; instead, we are identifying a set of practices that others can modify and improve. The long-term goal is a co-authored book that provides educators with tools to teach in fractured times, helping them carry responsibility into the classroom and beyond.