Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist ... - MailChimp

INTRODUCTION
Silvia Caporale-Bizzini, Anabela Galhardo Couto, Biljana Kašić, Linda
Lund, Elena Pulcini, Melita Richter Malabotta, and Eva Skærbæk
This collection of essays looks specifically at the topic of “travelling selves”
as a complex model of self-location and within a theoretical frame that, in
feminist epistemology, embraces an understanding of the issues at stake from
a multiplicity of authorial standpoints. The theoretical frame is materialised
in a common project of research. The last two years of intense discussions,
meetings, exchange, analysis and comparisons within the Athena project have
transformed us from Teachers who work in academic institutions and civil
society, into Learners. We have learned so much from the mutual exchange of
our own personalised cross histories and life narratives. Our inner differences
have become so productive that we experience them as an act of empowerment
of our group “Travelling Selves”. This is the process that we aim to develop in
classes where students actively participate in the learning process, bringing with
them their life experiences and their personal perceptions of time and history.
Along with the teachers, they become the backbone of the educational process
in the context of feminist pedagogy. As Andrea Petö and Berteke Waaldijk
state: “We think it is important to point out that empowering students in the
classroom will also help them to create their own voices vis-à-vis the ‘grand
narratives’ of European History.” 1
As authors, we note the starting points of our various journeys,
originating within different disciplines; our aim is to give meaning, complexity
and faceting to a wide range of concepts. The idea of the “travelling self
(selves)” that underlies the book moves from a nodal point that regards as
crucial the process of constructing women’s “nomadic” identities informed
by geographical and cultural dislocation, cultural or transcultural hibridity,
history, loss, memory, contamination, dependence and interdependence and
their effect on the subject’s perception of the Real.
The volume, as well as each individual article, may become teaching
material in the field of Women’s Studies in an international and multicultural
context. Indeed, the collection can be used to enable students from diverse
1
Teaching with Memories: European Women’s Histories in International and Interdisciplinary Classrooms, ed.
Andrea Petö, Berteke Waaldijk (Galway: Women Studies Centre, National University of Irleand, 2006), 27.
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