Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

More documents

Recommendations

Info

In her editorial response to Hemmings, Evans highlights the riskof having the field of Women’s/Gender Studies canonized, standardizedand homogenized through European benchmarking and quality assurancepolicies. 21 Hemmings also acknowledges that the disciplinization of the fieldthrough European benchmarking and tuning may end up as canonization. 22Establishing a canon of course is not to be theorized as necessarily a ‘bad’ thingsince a ‘canon’ may be related to the field’s greater institutional autonomy.Still, following Hemmings’s argumentation, I want to draw our attention to anumber of ‘tricky’ questions concerning issues of canonization that need to beanswered by feminist scholars who deal with Bologna: who will decide whatis the ‘right’ kind of Women’s/Gender Studies to be taught; which intellectualand national voices will be dominant; who will write Women’s/Gender Studiesbenchmarks; who is considered to be a Women’s/Gender Studies expert, andwho will define and control what counts as feminist knowledge? For instance,will it be a small number of white privileged feminist academics coming froma European metropolis? Will it be the EU bureaucratic institutions? And howcan we be sure that this latter will not be the case? This is the first serioustension to be resolved.The second tension is what I consider to be the ‘hardest’ part of theBologna process, namely its neoliberal nature. Here I would like to focus onthree oxymoron schemas/concepts that emerge from the parallel use of identicalterms by feminist and neoliberal discourses in order to denote differentmeanings/ concepts. These terms are interdisciplinarity, flexibility/mobility, andEuropean-ness.Both neoliberal educational reforms and feminist radical transformationsof knowledge production seem to favour the notion of interdisciplinarity,in opposition to the long monodisciplinary tradition of academic institutions.Hark argues that inter- and transdisciplinarity “function as magical signs,empty signifiers meaning whatever their users want them to mean”. 23For example, in the Bologna context interdisciplinarity is related with thereorganization of study programs in accordance with the modularizationof knowledge. In this sense, according to Hark, interdisciplinarity isconceptualized as an element of the market-oriented neoliberal education, and21Evans, “Editorial Response”, 312.22Hemmings, “Tuning Problems? Notes on Women’s and Gender Studies and the Bologna Process”, 123.23Hark, “Magical Sign: On the Politics of Inter- and Transdisciplinarity”, 13.44
as a good strategy to be adopted by enterprise-universities in order to increasetheir competitiveness, prestige, and funding. 24 There is a big difference betweenthis latter approach to interdisciplinarity and the feminist one. Women’s/Gender Studies scholars conceptualize interdisciplinarity as a practice of transgressing“borders between disciplinary canons and approaches in a theoreticaland methodological bricolage that allows for new synergies to emerge”, toquote Lykke, 25 and produces new critical and liberating forms of knowledge.This notion of interdisciplinarity is not identical with the one being promotedby neoliberal education policies.Liinason & Holm distinguish between two kinds of interdisciplinaritywhich signify different kinds of knowledge-seeking strategies: ‘instrumental’and ‘cognitive’ interdisciplinarity. 26 The former aims at problem-solving andit is mostly connected with the applied sciences, while the latter handles questionsof fundamental understanding and is mostly related to critical interdisciplinarityor transdisciplinarity. According to Liinason & Holm, neoliberaleducation policies tend to promote instrumental/utilitarian interdisciplinarity,which fits perfectly with the model of vocational training/specialization for thelabour market and the prioritization of applied science, without challengingdisciplinarity. 27 In contrast, within the framework of Women’s/Gender Studies,interdisciplinarity has been understood in terms of cognitive interdiscipli narity,as a radical research and pedagogic practice/position, a sort of experimentalopenness which provides the essential ‘conceptual space’ for the examination ofthe hybrid networks that are constructed through the intersections of gender,sexuality, class, ethnicity, and age, and the socio-cultural hierarchies andpower relations of inclusion and exclusion. Feminist interdisciplinarity aims atdeconstructing the disciplinary identities and borders which constitutenaturalized cultural historical products that represent power relations. In thissense, ‘interdisciplinarity projects’ are dangerous for the monodisciplinary regimesof modern universities as these projects involve a lot of hard work andchange at a cognitive/conceptual level for which there is hardly any ‘real space’within the profit-oriented neoliberal academic structures. Based on my teachingexperience as a co-teacher in ‘Practicing Interdisciplinarity in European24Ibid., 12-13.25Lykke, “Women’s/Gender/Feminist Studies — A Post-disciplinary Discipline?”, 97.26Mia Liinason and Ulla Holm, “PhD’s, Women’s/gender Studies and Interdisciplinarity,” Nordic Journal of Women’sStudies, NORA 14, no. 2 (2006): 118.27Ibid, 122-123.45
Page 1: Teaching with the Third WaveNew Fem
Page 4 and 5: © Åse Bengtsson and Catti Brandel
Page 6 and 7: “This Is Not Therapy!” 75Un/Exp
Page 9 and 10: PrefaceThe idea of writing this boo
Page 11 and 12: IntroductionDaniela Gronold, Brigit
Page 13 and 14: Brandelius who is portrayed on the
Page 15 and 16: The institutional context of Women
Page 17: The chapters present new feminist e
Page 20 and 21: IntroductionSecond-wave feminism is
Page 22 and 23: Second-Wave Feminist Generationalit
Page 24 and 25: and conflictual ones), and since th
Page 26 and 27: This allows her to conceptualize a
Page 28 and 29: The Anglo-American and the French t
Page 30 and 31: To traverse the classifications of
Page 32 and 33: ing system without a General and wi
Page 34 and 35: Let me end this chapter by providin
Page 36 and 37: Buikema tells the story of Sarah Ba
Page 38 and 39: Roof, Judith. “Generational Diffi
Page 40 and 41: postmodern capitalism and the impli
Page 42 and 43: European scope and its neoliberal c
Page 44 and 45: front. A strong motivation offered
Page 48 and 49: Gender Studies’, 28 I agree with
Page 50 and 51: expected to play a central role as
Page 52 and 53: Implications for teaching gender: d
Page 54 and 55: These re- appropriations cannot be
Page 56 and 57: Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. “Fle
Page 58 and 59: We are both white scholars who grew
Page 60 and 61: mapped in the first part of project
Page 62 and 63: able much earlier; therefore the pe
Page 64 and 65: Using the example of Germany Wollra
Page 66 and 67: of a link to already existing stere
Page 68 and 69: The alien’s green colour tells of
Page 70 and 71: Implications of teaching Critical W
Page 72 and 73: ness to people with different backg
Page 74 and 75: theories. This concept can be fruit
Page 76 and 77: Räthzel, Nora. “Nationalism and
Page 78 and 79: nism’ in the classroom. Thus, whi
Page 80 and 81: As a method, memory work focuses on
Page 82 and 83: ence on the teaching. This was beca
Page 84 and 85: when we wanted them to do memory wo
Page 86 and 87: in the consciousness-raising groups
Page 88 and 89: as a therapeutic method, they not o
Page 90 and 91: “Empowerment has, however, someti
Page 92 and 93: fascination with the strong commona
Page 94 and 95: practice”. 43 She explains MacKin
Page 96 and 97:
has been exposed to subjection by o
Page 98 and 99:
Sebastien, Amanda. “Tendencies in
Page 100 and 101:
a historical moment when technologi
Page 102 and 103:
As earlier noted, there are certain
Page 104 and 105:
new per se, they like Internet-base
Page 106 and 107:
where technological and media accou
Page 108 and 109:
to avoid binaristic traps, rejectin
Page 110 and 111:
ReferencesBraidotti, Rosi. Metamorp
Page 112 and 113:
IntroductionIn 2007, with two other
Page 114 and 115:
WoMen at workIn all, it took us alm
Page 116 and 117:
Facing Uncertainties and Self-quest
Page 118 and 119:
Doctorate degree’s curricula for
Page 120 and 121:
In addition, many feminist academic
Page 122 and 123:
and duties which are seen as comple
Page 124 and 125:
answers adapted to their own profes
Page 126 and 127:
As the form of the message counts a
Page 128 and 129:
ReferencesBlanchard, Soline, Jules
Page 130 and 131:
As the learning outcomes demonstrat
Page 132 and 133:
Within the organizational structure
Page 134 and 135:
Gender-sensitive didactics can be p
Page 136 and 137:
A further dimension is knowledge ab
Page 138 and 139:
Teaching materialsSince language is
Page 140 and 141:
and absences, both short term and p
Page 142 and 143:
The cliché cloakroomSometimes it w
Page 144 and 145:
and goatees, later almost all wante
Page 146 and 147:
Presentations from the working grou
Page 148 and 149:
ConclusionTeachers’ self-reflecti
Page 150 and 151:
Mühlen Achs, Gitta. Geschlecht bew
Page 152:
Milka Metso, PhD Candidate, Univers
show all

Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?