This week will be our last meeting of the autumn term and it will be an opportunity to do some writing together to explore our further thoughts about Adrienne Rich’s reflections on critical pedagogy in times of crisis. Whether you were able to join our last meeting or not, please do feel welcome to join us for this session where we will guide you through an easy, iterative loop writing exercise.
At our last meeting there was a lively discussion about what the increasing social and political pressures on scholarship that uses words like diversity, race, inclusion, and gender might mean for members of our group.
One strategy is to swerve around the words that are being flagged as problematic by using apparently ‘neutral’ language to describe the research we have been doing, and will continue to do, on oppressive systems and practices in higher education. It demands extra work from us, as scholarship and teaching from and about marginalised positions has always done, but that is not going to stop us from saying what is actually happening in the world and our classrooms. There are always time and places in which you have to choose words that will slip by the gatekeepers.
Another strategy is to use even stronger and plainer language. Words like diversity and inclusion are everywhere, but even words like intersectionality and decolonization have arguably been captured by university managers and techniques of bureaucratization. The profusion of committees, charters, guidelines, brochures, and mission statements about the contemporary university’s commitment to various forms of inequality signal some kind of recognition that we need to be talking about these issues. However, research-informed accounts such as Sara Ahmed’s On Being Included, now already 13 years old, note that such work remains largely symbolic, however much energy minoritised scholar-teachers pour into it. In this context, perhaps it would be good to move on from using the words that have already been captured and weakened by university discourse and start talking more directly and plainly about racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, classism, and transphobia. Words like ‘diversity’ or ‘inclusion’ increasingly do the work of obscuring the violent and specific ways university systems and practices actively reproduce inequality.
One of the most interesting strategies is to be even more creative with language, drawing on obscure or culturally specific meanings of existing words to do other kinds of thinking. This is a practice marginalised peoples have always drawn upon to use dominant languages to do their own thinking. Sometimes this has meant reclaiming words used to objectify and humiliate them, using the master’s language to do things the master never dreamed of in his philosophy. And often such deft play with language produces beautiful and profound meditations on human existence through its sheer defiance.
In our discussions at the Critical Pedagogies Project we are always searching for these creative strategies of resistance, what one participant in the last meeting described as the capoeira of pedagogy. We invite you to share your ideas about the language we could use to continue doing the work that matters to us — whether you want to make a case for coining new words, reclaiming old ones, or bringing culturally specific uses of words to a larger community, let us know how we could dance with you.
In case you missed our earlier announcements, or, even better, an exciting window opened in your July for zine-making and creative destruction of the university, there are a few places left to book on our Zine-making workshop https://buytickets.at/studentpartnershipuow/1223825
The workshop will be facilated by Dr Annapurna Menon on July 10th, 1-4 pm, at the University of Westminster, Cavendish campus in London.
Wide Sargasso Sea begins with a fire that burns down the plantation the protagonist Antoinette and her family have profited from, and it ends just before she herself is about to set a fire that will burn down her husband’s English estate. It’s an interesting structure for a novel that is, in many ways, about enduring colonialism, rather than destroying it. Rhys’ protagonist, a white Creole heiress, is buffeted about by patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism, and the only actions available to her seem to be destructive ones, either destroying herself or destroying the structures that scaffold her life. The genius of Rhys’ novel is to finally turn fire into a creative act.
In the spirit of Antoinette, and creative destructionists everywhere, we’ve been reflecting on how often our more recent discussions in the reading group seem to turn to burning down the system, rather than enduring, reforming, or transforming it. There’s an important difference in tone and tactics between all these ways of responding to the colonial university, and over the years, the reading group has certainly tended more towards transformation than anything else. But is it possible to transform fundamentally colonial logics and practices? Can we achieve this as individual educator-researchers in our daily work? Do we need more collective praxis, imaginary, and theory to build the anti-colonial university? These are not new questions in critical pedagogy, unfortunately. However, the persistence of those questions reflects the fact that many of us continue to experience labour in higher education as demoralizing and even unethical, forcing our training and commitments as feminist, anti-racist, and queer scholars into constant battles with the coloniality of the university.
We would like to invite you to join us for a spring (early May) zine making workshop on the theme of creative destruction of the university. If you have never made a zine before, fear not, information and gentle guidance will be available! While we organize the workshop and firm up the details, we’d like to invite you to begin to contemplate the theme of creative destruction, gather your daydreams of fire, and notice anything that shows you the shape of the university you really want to work in.
Our first meeting will be on Tuesday, February 7th, from 2.30-4.00 pm. At this meeting, we will discuss the Silent University, a solidarity based knowledge exchange project developed by displaced people and forced migrants. Our reading will be “The Pitfalls of Institutional Pedagogy” by Ahmet Öğüt, which you can access here: https://tsu-orientationprogram.kunstverein.de/consultants/the-pitfalls-of-institutional-pedagogy
Our second meeting will be on Wednesday, March 8th, from 2.30-4.00 pm. We will explore the idea of the pluriversity via the community building website Designing the Pluriversity (https://designingpluriversity.org). On the website you will find a number of invitations to provocations we can reflect on as a group. We invite you to engage with provocation number 11 by Stephen Loo entitled ‘Meal at the End of the Pluriverse’.
Both meetings will take place via Zoom this term.
Early notice: we are planning our Annual Lecture in person this year and will share details about that as soon as we can. We look forward to seeing you all then!
Critical Pedagogies Project 