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Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Current Issue
Volume 27, Issue 2/3, 2024
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- Essay
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Recalcitrance and feminist pedagogy
More LessAbstractThis article discusses an anti-gender mobilisation at the University of Amsterdam that sparked a widespread media and political debate about the perceived threat of ‘wokeness’ to academic freedom. Our analysis draws from a range of experiences, including classroom dynamics, institutional hearings, meetings, and informal discussions among colleagues. We examine the challenges of care and feminist pedagogy considering allegations that gender and sexuality programmes contribute to ‘a concerning radicalisation’ and endorse ‘woke ideology’. Specifically, we explore how the conflation of an individualised notion of academic freedom and potential hate speech became plausible in the neoliberal university, and how we responded by reclaiming academic freedom as a justice-centred collective right and duty. In the face of institutional silence and ongoing denial of the legitimacy of non-binary persons, we engaged in recalcitrant acts of resistance. These actions, which included discussing and critically analysing the allegations in some of our classes, underscored the university’s inadequacy in safeguarding marginalised students and staff, as well as the academic disciplines we represent.
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Dehumanised and objectified
Authors: Ea Høg Utoft & Anuja Anil PradhanAbstractWe argue that neoliberal universities implement student evaluations of teaching (SETs) as governing technologies to impose control on lecturers, resulting in their dehumanisation and objectification. Through ‘story work’ we weave together empirical quotes in existing literature, tweets, and our own experiences, to reveal that SETs employ animalistic and mechanistic dehumanisation, enhancing existing systemic inequalities such as gender and race. As a result, biased SETs induce negative affect that causes undue distress, especially among marginalised lecturers who are expected to act constructively on discriminatory or abusive ‘feedback’. By ignoring lecturers’ calls to revise or abolish the use of SETs, we uncover that universities effectively gaslight and neglect lecturers – further denying our humanity. We end by highlighting acts of solidarity and resistance that show how alternatives to SETs, rooted in feminist pedagogies and care ethics, can be grassroots mo(ve)ments towards structural change.
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Sexualised researchers in ethnographic encounters
Authors: Lise Zurné & Loes OudenhuijsenAbstractDespite decades of feminist critique on androcentric biases in academia, mainstream academic literature and training of ethnographic research typically neglects the gendered and sexualised dynamics between researchers and interlocutors, in particular the prevalence of sexualised harassment in fieldwork settings. This article outlines why this topic remains overlooked within anthropological training and education and, more importantly, how we can move towards a more inclusive approach to signalling, acknowledging, and processing these experiences as an integral element of ethnography. We contend that this encompasses an epistemological concern, as knowledge production is based upon intersubjective and situated encounters (Haraway, 1988). We identified three dimensions in the discussion of the sexualised and gendered vulnerabilities of research practice – the pedagogical, the institutional and the epistemological – and propose a set of educational opportunities as a response. Drawing upon feminist pedagogies, these include a reconsideration and systemic critique of methodological and epistemological training, more vulnerable approaches to teaching, writing and representing ethnography, and the institutionalisation of a network of support that resists the individual responsibility that the neoliberalisation of education pushes towards.
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Teaching coding inclusively
Authors: Olivia Guest & Samuel H. ForbesAbstractWe present our stance on teaching programming with the aim of increasing reflexivity amongst university educators through dissecting and destroying pervasive anti-pedagogical gendered framings. From the so-called male geek trope that dominates Global North/Western perceptions of technology to the actively anti-feminist stances such demographics espouse: programming has a sexism problem. Herein, we touch on how and why programming is so gendered in the present; we expound on how we manage this in our classrooms and in our mentorship relationships; and we explain how to keep doing so moving forwards. Through weaving examples of programming into the text, it is demonstrated that basic coding concepts can be conveyed with little effort. Additionally, example dialogues – exchanges between teachers and students and between educators – are worked through to counteract inappropriate or harmful framings. Finally, we list some ground rules, concrete dos and don’ts, for us to consider going forwards. Ultimately, as educators, we have a twofold obligation, for our students to a) learn programming, and for them to b) unlearn problematic perceptions of who can code.
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Teaching gender under the rise of postfeminism
Authors: Marielle Zill, Krisztina Varró, Elisa Fiore, Rik Huizinga & Dora SampaioAbstractThis paper discusses efforts to re-integrate feminist classroom perspectives and pedagogies within the undergraduate geography curriculum at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. As ‘feminist educators’ of this recently revised programme, we identify the mounting hegemony of postfeminist and neoliberal ideologies as key contextual challenges to our endeavour, coupled with the legacy of Dutch geography as a pragmatic, applied discipline. By zooming in on and collectively reflecting on our roles and practices in the courses we coordinate and teach, we delineate three strategies worth pursuing to achieve a feminist teaching agenda under the current political-institutional climate. The proposed strategies of valuing lived experiences, embodied immersive epistemologies, and partial local knowledges, are rooted in the main concerns of feminist-inspired research and help create and cultivate situated moments of connection, reflection, and learning. While these strategies are certainly not capable of subverting neoliberal and postfeminist tendencies on their own, we contend that they can be useful building blocks for feminist inspired teaching agendas beyond our discipline as they help expose traditional power hierarchies within and outside the classroom, as well as underscore the societal relevance of feminist thinking in times of increased social polarisation and reactionary politics.
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Refrains for inquiring otherwise
By Claire TioAbstractThis article explores how students experiment with unconventional and subversive research approaches in their BA theses. I draw on an (auto-) ethnographic case study of the Inquiry Otherwise Track (IOT): an extracurricular thesis programme I co-organised at Erasmus University College Rotterdam in 2023, which aimed to help students navigate the implications of feminist, decolonial, and artistic considerations in their graduation research. Highlighting the way my students and I navigated the tensions we encountered between established conceptions of ‘proper academic research’ and our open-ended, critical, and creative endeavours, this paper draws out three refrains that gave us the courage to face those tensions head-on: (1) focus on the intention that moves you, (2) make thought-feeling confluence, and (3) attend to what refusal opens up. I offer these refrains as useful pedagogical tools that could allow others to further develop and practice experimental, decolonial, and feminist inquiry.
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Caring about the elephants in feminist classrooms
AbstractThis article explores how feminist teachers can engage with affective pedagogies when teaching intersectional gender studies. In the context of global corporate universities that emphasise action plans on diversity, equality, and inclusion, and alongside a rise in anti-gender and anti-diversity politics both within society and on campuses, feminist scholars encounter challenges in navigating affective contestations and tensions when teaching intersectional gender studies. These tensions can both evoke uncomfortable atmospheres and offer hopeful glimpses of societal changes and solidarities. In addressing this, we employ the idiom of ‘the elephant in the room’ to exploring how affective tensions emerge in the classroom and how feminist teachers may respond to and care about them. Drawing on literature on affective pedagogies, we conceptualise affects as intensities that move within and infuse feminist classrooms and analytically unpack two experiences of elephants emerging when teaching an intersectional gender studies programme at a Danish university. Specifically, we offer two takes on affective pedagogies that we name ‘swaying the elephant’ and ‘holding the elephant’ and discuss the ways in which feminist teachers can nurture ethico-political and affirmative practices in education.
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Emancipation on thin ice
Authors: Michiel De Proost & Gily Coene
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Editorial
Authors: Sara de Jong, Rosalba Icaza, Rolando Vázquez & Sophie Withaeckx
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