Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

We are both white scholars who grew up and currently live in the increasinglyracialized and neo-nationalistic societies of Austria (Daniela Gronold) andDenmark (Linda Lund Pedersen). 2 With few exceptions, we mainly teachwhite students from the same country in our classrooms at the university. 3With regard to race and people affected by racism in this context, race is ofteninvisible or considered as not significant since white people tend to refer topeople of other skin colours than white as coloured. Furthermore, as we will examinemore closely below, in these countries race and racism is largely removedfrom white people’s consciousness by the grand narratives of the nation statewhile simultaneously being covered by categories such as culture, ethnicity orreligion. The challenges in our teaching comprise the colour-blindness of whitepeople, including our own, and the invisibility of whiteness as a racial categoryin the perception of white people. This takes up Ruth Frankenberg’s observationthat it is only white people as a group who lack awareness of their ownskin colour – individuals from other groups will immediately identify a whiteperson as being white. 4Our chapter is the fruit of a long, ongoing discussion of racialization and ourown embodiment as individuals and more specifically our roles as scholars withinracial structures. In our latest research projects, we have both examined the publicdebates in our national contexts in relation to the constructed “other” and dealtwith methodological enquiries into the contested field of gender and race/ethnicity.Who “we” areOur first meeting was within the NOISE Summer School in Ljubljana 2004,where we were engaged in discussions on New European Identities and MediatedCultures: Revisiting the Politics of Location, as the title of the course indicates. 52Peter Hervik, “On the new Racism in Europe”, in ETHNOS (Vol. 69: 2 June 2004): 149-155 and Sevgi Kilic,Sawitri Saharso and Birgit Sauer. “Introduction: The Veil: Debating Citizenship, Gender and Religious Diversity”, inSocial Politics (vol. 15:4 2008) : 397-4103The exception we have in mind here is Linda Lund Pedersen’s experience of teaching a course on ‘Gender, Bodyand Sexuality in Scandinavia’ to US-American undergraduate students in Denmark. The students seem to be moreaware of categories concerning races-issues. This is not to say that they had a more critical approach to races anddivisions of races but they did not have a distanced attitude to discuss races4Ruth Frankenberg, The social construction of whiteness, (London: Routledge 1993).5NOISE stands for the Network Of Interdisciplinary Women’s Studies in Europe and is made possible by a grantof the EU Lifelong Learning Programme (Erasmus Intensive Programmes, DG Education & Culture). Starting in1994, the NOISE Summer School has been a successful yearly event, giving students and teachers the opportunityto exchange their knowledge in the field of Women’s Studies in an international context. (http://www.genderstudies.nl/index.php?pageid=6 located last on 14. April 2009)56