Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

choose the theme “Cooking for someone else” while the third group chose“Entering the university for the first time”. Nevertheless, already during thefirst phase of the method – when everyone writes down a memory from aconcrete situation – some students reacted very strongly against the method.One student started to cry, and left the room. She described her reaction to theteacher who accompanied their group as a mixture of different things. Takingpart in the group who wrote about “Cooking for someone else”, her feelingof homesickness became too strong. But she was also angry over the method,because, as she said, “This is not therapy!” and at the same time, she explainedthat she did not have enough trust in this group to be able to take part in thiskind of exercise. Another student explained that she became angry because shefelt forced to take part in this method, but that she had realized too late thatshe did not want to participate (so she had stayed in class). During the closingslot, when we discussed the analysis and reflected over the day, a third studentfelt a need to leave the classroom. During the closing session of the workshop,the classroom was filled with emotions of different kinds – anger, sadness,surprise, curiosity – with the result that many of the students and some of theother teachers in the group, too, felt somewhat sceptical about the method.At different stages during the day, the students returned to thecomparison with therapy. Some were surprised that we wanted to work withthis kind of method on an academic course. One student said: “I have been tofeminist therapy, and I liked it, but that was in a group outside of the academy”.Why did they return to this notion of therapy? And why was it difficult forthe students to grasp the difference between a therapeutic method and thisresearch method? On the one hand, it is not difficult to see the similaritiesbetween memory work and feminist therapy – both methods work with thesame material, that is, our memories and experiences. On the other hand,that is also the only thing that the two modes of procedure have in common.If feminist therapy has a curative function, where the aim is to heal andstrengthen the individual against oppressive structures and relations, memorywork has other aims: to understand how we work ourselves into the structures.Indeed, memory work is built upon a profound scepticism against the idea of“individuality”. The uniqueness of experience – as well as the aspiration forconsciousness – is stated as a fiction by the memory work collective who wantsto investigate how we construct meaning about our selves in and through asocial world. So, why did some of the students return to the notion of therapy81