Gender & Pedagogy
https://signsjournal.org/currents-trigger-warnings/pedagogy/
Burke, Penny Jane, & Ronelle Carolissen (2018), ‘Gender, Post-Truth Populism and Higher Education Pedagogies’, Teaching in Higher Education, Vol. 23, No. 5, pp. 543-547.
Introduction: I developed the following exercise in the summer of 2018 for a particular graduate seminar I was assigned to teach for the first time that fall: ‘Foundations in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory’, a mandatory core seminar for students in McMaster University’s Cultural Studies and Critical Theory (CSCT) MA program. Since then, I have shared the exercise informally online and heard from numerous instructors that it facilitated helpful and illuminating introductory conversations in their courses as well. As the exercise seeks new readers and practitioners through this publication in MAI, I thought it would be appropriate to offer a slightly fuller account of where this document itself ‘knows from’. I frame the exercise this way not simply to fill out the story of my putting it together, but also to illustrate the importance of attending conscientiously to the ways we relate to one another in the classroom as part of our pedagogical and political responsibilities as instructors. Finally, and most importantly, I wish to acknowledge the vital intellectual work being done in the fields of Black studies and Indigenous studies, particularly by feminists and 2SLGBTQ+ thinkers in those fields, without whose labours I would not have known how crucial it is to make the university classroom a space that overtly and persistently recognises multiple ways of knowing and sites of learning if we intend to use it as a site to counter histories of misogyny, heteronormativity, racism, classism, and colonialism. I am especially indebted to Katherine McKittrick, whose words are central to the learning I narrate here, and whose work on Black feminist citation practices—which she shared in a talk here at McMaster in fall of 2018—has helped me continue to think about the work of accounting (for) where we know from.
As I mention in the exercise, the idea initially came to me during a panel discussion at a one-day Summit for Mentoring Indigenous Graduate Students held at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in early 2018, which I attended as a member of the audience. One of the broad recommendations reiterated throughout the day was that settler scholars give serious thought to the ways in which even the most seemingly mundane academic structures and conventions can reproduce colonialist hierarchies of power and alienate Indigenous students in ways that make the university a place in which they cannot learn—a place that is hostile to their learning because it disregards their ways of knowing and being. Minelle Mahtani, discussing her strategies for more inclusive classroom introductions, described how McKittrick taught her to replace the question ‘Where are you from?’ with ‘Where do you know from?’ or ‘Where do you learn from?’ This suggestion struck me powerfully. As a mixed-race person of Chinese, Polish, and Italian descent, I have been subjected my entire life to the question ‘Where are you from?’ This is a question that people tend to ask in a vein of earnest curiosity, without malice, but that nevertheless articulates particular histories of anti-immigrant xenophobia, anti-Asian racism, and the fraught status of mixed-race people in a racist society, histories that land on me each time regardless of the inquisitor’s intentions. And yet I had defaulted to also being one of these inquisitors, asking ‘Where are you from?’ as a way of making my way through first-day introductions, because that’s how I learned to do it. Sitting in the Summit, I also reflected on the perfunctory quality of those round-the-room exercises, and how I always tended to rush through them because I was eager to get to the ‘learning’ part of the class meeting. Another academic convention I had learned along the way was to separate the question of who we are from the question of what we know and what we are here to learn. Not to declare identity irrelevant to knowledge—I had learned enough from feminism and ethnic studies not to fall entirely into that fallacy—but, still, to hold those stories I might have described as ‘personal’ at bay in order to privilege ideas that lent themselves to the course I had designed. In fact, as I reflected on this habit of mine, I became aware of the anxiety in it. I actually love meeting people and hearing their stories, but as a woman scholar of colour I was determined to demonstrate professional rigour in the classroom and not give students any leeway to doubt my intellectual authority.
Academic intellectual authority—what we think it looks, sounds, and feels like; where we think it comes from—is precisely the problem, the structure that perpetuates imperialism in our spaces of learning and intellectual engagement. In writing up this exercise, I attempted to craft a document that insisted on the real, unquestionable presence of knowledge and intellectual agency in every person in the room, but allowed space for individuals to identify themselves as intellectual subjects in whatever terms they wished. In lieu of my past habit of tacitly and carelessly indicating to them what kinds of knowing are relevant in the classroom, I use this exercise to give my students the opportunity to tell me and each other what kinds of knowing are present, so we are in a position to learn from one another.
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The following text is the handout I distribute to my seminar students on the first day of class. I invite them to take 5–10 minutes to read through it and reflect on the prompts, and then to spend the next 10 minutes introducing themselves to the person sitting next to them at the table in terms of ‘where they know from’. We then go around the table and introduce ourselves to the entire group. I do not ask them to submit anything in writing, though some students write notes for themselves. I emphasize that they are not obligated to answer all of the questions, or to ‘cover’ any information in particular; that there are no right or wrong answers and that there is no mark attached to this exercise. We usually take a full hour (of a three-hour class) to complete the introductions.
Introduction: Teaching gender-related content and deploying feminist pedagogies in higher education (HE) has been beset by multiple challenges over recent years; indeed it has been argued that feminist teaching is in crisis. (Wright 2016) The contemporary political environment, characterised by overtones of sexism and misogyny (Read 2018), is increasingly shaped by post-truth populisms (Burke & Carolissen 2018) and the rise of neo-fascist movements, aligned with extreme formations of masculinity. (Kimmel 2013) Precisely due to this current unfolding context, the task of feminist teaching in HE has never been more urgent, such volatile circumstances necessitating careful responses, strategies and interventions. Drawing on my own and my students’ reflections, I share some of my pedagogical strategies, developed as I navigated a highly charged political and educational environment, while teaching social justice-orientated content. My work is informed by an intersectional feminist approach. (Crenshaw 1990) Students are guided to engage in weekly reflective practice within and beyond teaching spaces to make valuable connections between course content and lived experiences, contexts and broader socio-political environments, in line with critical pedagogies. (Freire 1970) This activity is grounded in feminist assertions of the ‘personal’ as ‘political’ and Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘situated knowledges’ (1988) alongside pedagogical values of reflection as fostering deep engagement and making sense of complexity. (Parker 1997) While there is a danger of students self-consciously writing what they think their teacher wants to hear (Smith 2011), they have autonomy in selecting from a personal collection of regular reflections. As this process can initially feel unsettling, the work is carefully introduced, scaffolded and supported; students are under no pressure to disclose personal experiences. In a spirit of reflexivity, recognising the importance of attending to my own locatedness, I share insights from my own ongoing reflective practice as an early career feminist scholar.
I begin this paper by providing an overview of the context, introducing key theories which have inspired my practice, before moving on to outline the background to this study and its methodological approach. I explore positionings of feminist academics in contemporary academia, referencing the context specific to my own practice, before considering key themes to emerge from the reflective data. These include the importance of transparency in speaking back to reactionary discourses; enabling critical reflection; attending to positionality and intersectionality; potentialities of facilitating polyphonic (multi-voiced) classrooms and resisting single stories (mono-narratives), as well as developing the feminist HE classroom as a site of activism, collaboration, resistance and transformation while centring self-care and solidarity.
Excerpt: In a world where the government breeds dragons to eat people of color, Black women freedom fighters called "Sapphires" cultivate the ultimate survival strategy: they train the dragons. Sapphires strategically satisfy the dragons' hunger for "dark meat" by feeding them soul food.1 Once the unnamed narrator is able to "si[t] astride" the "huge" "beautiful" leader of the dragons named "Queen," the Black women's revolution can begin.2
N. K. Jemisin's short story "Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death" (2019) uses [End Page 298] nonrealist devices to diagnose long-standing structural violences while gesturing toward alternative worlds. In this way, the story enacts Octavia Butler's statement on the imaginative work of speculative fiction: "There's nothing new / under the sun, / but there are new suns."3 There is "nothing new" about the U.S. state systematically stereotyping and killing Black people. Dragons might as well take their place among linked anti-Black, misogynist, and heterosexist tools of state violence. Just as the story's narrator trains and "si[ts] astride" the very creature designed to kill her, Jemisin also reharnesses discursive violences that mark Black women in particular as angry and expendable.4 Dragons emerge as a nonrealist vehicle asserting the necessity and immanence of "new suns."5 Ending on the cusp of a Black women's revolution, Jemisin's story points to possible worlds that are free of police murders, housing segregation, mass incarceration, and the relentless scapegoating of Black womanhood.
Here I make a brief case for teaching U.S. women's studies with an emphasis on Black feminist speculative fiction—a genre of writing by Black women, cis and trans, that uses nonrealist world-building to do the political work of valuing Black genders and sexualities.6 Nonrealist narrative choices in this context do not signify the unreal but rather illuminate multiple layers of Black life in a real world structured by white supremacy. My texts of focus are Black feminist because they interrogate dominant assumptions at the intersections of race, sex, sexuality, and gender in the interests of Black women's freedom.7
The pedagogical reflections I offer stem from my experience teaching women's studies during the coronavirus pandemic and abolitionist uprisings since spring 2020.8 Like Farah Jasmine Griffin, I have been struck by how Black speculative texts can model "community-building" for students "in the midst of economic, social, political, and ecological catastrophe."9 Griffin ultimately emphasizes how the genre can help students imagine different worlds—"new suns," in Butler's formulation. Yet the white supremacist storming of the Capitol together with the murders of Breonna Taylor, Riah Milton, George Floyd, and too many others have since compelled me to sit longer with the first part of Butler's formulation: "There's nothing new / under the sun." As Saidiya Hartman writes, Black Americans have long "been allowed to die in great numbers without a crisis ever being declared."10 Pandemics past and present only accelerate and expose the realities of institutionalized vulnerability to death.
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, NY, and London: Routledge. 1994.
In Teaching to Transgress,bell hooks--writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual--writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal. bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom? Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself. "To educate is the practice of freedom," writes bell hooks, "is a way of teaching anyone can learn." Teaching to Transgress is the record of one gifted teacher's struggle to make classrooms work.
Suzanne Bost, Quiet Methodologies: Humility in the Humanities. University of Minnesota Press, 2025.
How might foregrounding the writings of colonized peoples transform the ways we work in the humanities? In an era dominated by loud political rhetoric, Suzanne Bost advocates for quieter modes of scholarship: intellectual humility rather than ego, collaboration and conversation rather than singular argumentation, continual reflection and revision rather than defensiveness, and a willingness to believe in different ways of being and knowing rather than adhering to academic norms. With Quiet Methodologies, she demonstrates practical decolonial scholarship and proposes alternative approaches for fostering meaningful engagement. Turning to feminist, queer, and decolonial writings from Gloria Anzaldúa, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Audre Lorde, and many others, Bost reflects on what we do when we work with literature, culture, and ideas. She weaves together multiple voices, methods of writing, and culturally diverse epistemologies and uses creative devices such as collage, her own original poetry, revision, lists, images, and conversation to disengage academic thought and writing from colonial theories and archives that have passed as neutral. Eschewing conventional monograph formats, her work embraces a reciprocal and heterogeneous learning process with profound ethical implications. Part of a movement of reimagining research and education through care, Quiet Methodologies is a powerful exploration of the possibilities of criticism during crises. It encourages readers to be visionary and pragmatic, challenging current conditions and offering alternative ideas for the future of the humanities.
Chatterjee, Piya, and Sunaina Maira, eds. The imperial university: Academic repression and scholarly dissent. U of Minnesota Press, 2014.