Editor’s Note: Toward a Transgressive Communication Pedagogy: Reflections and Directions in/for Dark Times

This essay introduces a special section marking the 30th anniversary of bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress, exploring its relevance within the current sociopolitical climate marked by intensified assaults on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in education. Grounded in hooks’s vision of education as a practice of freedom, this essay proposes a framework of transgressive communication pedagogy— an approach that champions radical love, political agency, and open dialogue to resist hegemonic educational structures. The featured contributions in this section examine transgressive practices across diverse contexts: community-based intercultural teaching, intersectional identity work, support for Black students in minority-serving institutions, decolonial approaches to media history, and culturally sustaining public speaking pedagogy. Together, these essays offer a dynamic constellation of transgressive strategies aimed at disrupting dominant norms of knowledge, language, and power.