Feminist Pedagogy (Women s Studies)

This paper theorises the teaching and learning of feminist approaches to the Bible and the Qurʾan in a Master’s course with a historically Christian focus. It draws on a critical review of an assessment task, and our pedagogical experiences as teachers, to consider how students made meaning within this decolonial pedagogical space, which explored feminist approaches to the two sacred texts. Our analysis shows, our work as teachers was to hold onto the tension in the space between two feminist approaches to sacred texts, and to not succumb to the pressure to release, trivialise or exacerbate that tension.

A "WOW Journal" assignment becomes a practice of friendship in diverse group university of students, in the weeks following September 11, 2001. Journal sharing becomes a ritual (as per Hoffman) and a kind of protocol (as per Aldred & Black Elk), making it possible for students to travel to one another's "worlds" (as per Lugones).

As Royster and Kirsch explain, because so much of our field is grounded in Western tradition, even though the recovery work of feminist scholars locates women’s rhetorical voices outside these frameworks, they continue to unwittingly serve as the measure. Globalizing the point of view is an approach that Royster and Kirsch describe as a tectonic shift asking us to rethink the assumptions embedded in our field: “how do we create linkages between local and global points of view, knowledge, experience, achievement?” My contribution further explores these questions with a focus on current research on transnational feminist rhetorics and complicates their approach by questioning what exactly do we mean when we define “local” and “global”? I posit that the challenge of researching women rhetors outside of our “local” context is not only measuring and valuing knowledge, but it is being open to questioning our beliefs about “others” as we struggle to find a place to value these voices in our field. As a scholar of Middle Eastern rhetoric, I am constantly reminded of the “lack of agency” of these women and that the work I do is “on the fringe” of our field, but I believe it is central to challenging the persistence of our borders. One suggestion in Royster and Kirsch’s approach is to use our classrooms as innovative experimental sites: “We look toward the world, but simultaneously we have the opportunity to look at the world in us—within our nation, in our communities, in our classrooms” (127). My pedagogical approach to teaching Middle Eastern feminisms is one that calls into question our own beliefs and values, one that is a necessary step towards practicing an ethics of care and towards a more comprehensive understanding of the limits and potentials of our field.

This paper explores the problems and possibilities of teaching about an identity that the teacher does not share, drawing on Linda Alcoff's arguments about speaking with and speaking about, rather than speaking for a stigmatized or oppressed group.

Drawing on queer and women of color theoretical frameworks including Cherrie Moraga's "theory in the flesh," M. Jacqui Alexander's "fire" metaphor,  and Grace Chang's "Where's the Violence?: The Promise and Perils of Teaching Women of Color Studies," I discuss what I call "pedagogies in the flesh," which urge educators to challenge white entitlement and empower women and queer students of color, disrupting psychic racial violence in the college classroom.

As it currently stands, little academic attention has been paid to the systematic devaluation of femininity or femmephobia. By adopting “femme” as a critical analytic, this paper dislocates femininity from its ascribed Otherness and demonstrates how empowered femininities have been overlooked within gender studies. Femme, as the failure or refusal to approximate the patriarchal norms of femininity, serves as the conceptual anchor of this study and is used to examine how femmephobic sentiments are perpetuated within Contemporary Western Feminist (CWF) theory. This perpetuation is propped up by the thematic marginaliza- tion of empowered femininities from the texts chosen for gender studies courses, revealing a normative feminist body constructed through the privileging of identities that maintains femininity as white, middle-class, normatively bodied, and without agency. The excavation of an empowered feminine subject from the margins reveals the foothold of normative whiteness embedded within feminist pedagogies. Using a thematic analysis of how femininity is taken-up within textbooks used in gender studies courses, the current paper demonstrates how intersections of femininity have yet to be addressed within dominant Feminist theories. The femme—as a queer potentiality—o ers a way of (re)thinking through the limitations of CWF theory and the paradoxical preoccupations with the absented femme.

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

Phronetic organizational research is an approach to the study of management and organizations focusing on ethics and power. It is based on a contemporary interpretation of the Aristotelian concept phronesis, usually as ‘prudence’. Phronesis is the ability to think and act in relation to values, to deliberate about ‘things that are good or bad for humans’ in the words of Aristotle (1976:1140a24–b12). Phronetic organizational research effectively provides answers to the following four value-rational questions, for specific problematics in management and organization studies: 1. Where are we going with this specific management problematic? 2. Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? 3. Is this development desirable? 4. What, if anything, should we do about it?

The Aalborg Project may be interpreted as a metaphor of modern politics, modern administration and planning, and of modernity itself. The basic idea of the project was comprehensive, coherent, and innovative, and it was based on rational and democratic argument. During implementation, however, when idea met reality, the play of Machiavellian princes, Nietzschean will to power, and Foucauldian rationality-as-rationalization resulted in the fragmentation of the project.

In this new collection, contributors from a variety of disciplines provide a critical context for the relationship between feminist pedagogy and academic feminism by exploring the complex ways that critical perspectives can be brought into the classroom.

This book discusses the processes employed to engage learners by challenging them to ask tough questions and craft complex answers, wrestle with timely problems and posit innovative solutions, and grapple with ethical dilemmas for which they seek just resolutions. Diverse experiences, interests, and perspectives—together with the various teaching and learning styles that participants bring to twenty-first-century universities—necessitate inventive and evolving pedagogical approaches, and these are explored from a critical perspective.

The contributors collectively consider the implications of the theory/practice divide, which remains central within academic feminism’s role as both a site of social and gender justice and as a part of the academy, and map out some of the ways in which academic feminism is located within the academy today.

At the same time that case studies are widely used and have produced canonical texts, it may be observed that the case study as a methodology is generally held in low regard, or is simply ignored, within the academy. For example, only 2 of the 30 top-ranked U.S. graduate programs in political science require a dedicated graduate course in case study or qualitative methods, and a full third of these programs do not even offer such a course. In contrast, all of the top 30 programs offer courses in quantitative methods and almost all of them require training in such methods, often several courses. In identifying this paradox of the case study’s wide use and low regard, Gerring rightly remarks that the case study survives in a “curious methodological limbo,” and that the reason is that the method is poorly understood. In what follows, we will try to resolve Gerring’s paradox and help case study research gain wider use and acceptance.

Publishing and the book industries in Africa still face a plethora of problems and challenges. However, one very positive development in recent years is that much progress has been made in gender equality in African publishing, which has seen the emergence of a whole new generation of agile, visionary, and enterprising women publishers.

The first in a series of profiles of ‘Women in African Publishing and the Book Trade’ appeared in The African Book Publishing Record volume 47, issue 1, 2021, and was well received. It profiled a group of women who have made notable achievements and impacts on the book sector in Africa: in publishing and the book trade, in different roles and positions. A kind of mini Who’s Who, the profiles are intended to be a showcase of the variety, richness and energy of women involved in book publishing and the book trade in Africa today, as well as some of the women who have made significant contributions to the African book sector in the past.

The initial series of profiles focussed on 24 women in publishing in nine countries in English-speaking sub-Saharan Africa. Series II presents a further series of profiles of 28 women breaking the mould in African publishing – currently and in the past – in eight countries in anglophone Africa, and one in Mozambique. In Series II the scope has been extended to profile not only women actively engaged in book publishing and the book sector in Africa (as directors or heads of publishing companies or book trade organizations, or in senior management positions), but now also including a number of women/academics involved in publishing education and training, and who have written extensively, and eloquently, about many aspects of publishing and book history in Africa.

The pre-print version of Series I of Women in African Publishing (2021) remains freely accessible at https://www.academia.edu/44277446/Women_in_African_Publishing_and_the_Book_Trade_A_Series_of_Profiles.

After the legendary essay „Why have there been no great women artists?“ from 1971., Linda Nochlin highlighted the question of absence in art history several times for starting point of her texts. On similar track, considering teaching in general and analysing approved art history highschool textbooks in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (croatian plan and program), it is noted complete absence or extremely small number of presented women artists in content. Besides that, it is recognized gender insensitive language and other numerous disputable gender representations. Considering the fact that textbooks are one of the most visible curriculum components and that they are often the only source which students and teachers use, detailed analysis from feminist perspective could significantly generate critical thinking about contents of those textbooks. This research will also compare similar analysis for other highschool subjects such as croatian language and literature. Except the aforementioned, art history textbooks will be examined through UNESCO guidelines for textbooks analysis from a gender perspective. This work will include analysis from four different authors of art history highschool textbooks -  Jadranka Damjanov, Radovan Ivančević, Antun Karaman and Natalija Stipetić Ćus/Elen Zubek/Blanka Petrinec Fulir/Zrinka Jurić Avmedovski. In the second part of research theoretical basis will be presented through critical pedagogy because approved content, expected to be learned by students, in a certain way presents also the structure of society and art representation which is considered legitimate. Finally, this research will contribute to the knowledge on which ways authors approach gender sensitive contents and female authorship in art history and how much is analysed content important in context of education.

An edited selection of excerpts from longer texts, which discuss the structural role of education within the art sector, artists' challenges to formal education and its structures, and the incorporation of ideas about education into specific works and practices. Chapter titles are Introduction, Primer, Indiscipline, Art School, Pedagogy as Medium.

In this paper we argue that the use of the communicative theory of Jürgen Habermas in planning theory is problematic because it hampers an understanding of how power shapes planning. We posit an alternative approach based on the power analytics of Michel Foucault which focuses on ‘what is actually done’, as opposed to Habermas’s focus on ‘what should be done’. We discuss how the Foucauldian stance problematises planning, asking difficult questions about the treatment of legitimacy, rationality, knowledge and spatiality. We conclude that Foucault offers a type of analytic planning theory which offers better prospects than does Habermas for those interested in understanding and bringing about democratic social change through planning.

Abstract
This qualitative study examined the meaning-making of white women investigating the racialized identity of Whiteness and interrogating how privilege is operationalized in day-to-day interactions in the U.S. society. An awareness of privilege does not have to be based in shame and guilt. It can be transformed into effective actions through embodied consciousness. Embodied ways of knowing can help to expand intellectual conversations into opportunities to practice engagement even when it is uncomfortable to do so. It is not possible to examine privilege without talking about race.
If conversations that might otherwise be uncomfortable, or threatening can be transformed by attending to the source of knowledge through the bodily experience, then resistance and discomfort can be used as opportunities to increase people’s awareness, challenge unconscious biases and hidden assumptions that keep racism and other forms of oppression alive and make them available for modification. This study illuminates the potential for joining feminist, anti-oppressive theories with embodied reflexivity to investigate how cultural locations socialize us to collude with structural inequities.
The work includes taking an embodied approach to learning. Honoring the body as a source of knowledge means being intentional about how our bodies experience resistance to change. Resistance is intended to represent a process of questioning and challenging dominant narratives, and cultural beliefs that reinforce institutional inequality. Resistance in this context includes a range of physical, emotional, and cognitive challenges, various levels of discomfort and unconscious barriers that could be difficult to identify. The scholarly significance of this study is contributing to our understanding of how Whiteness as a racialized identity is understood and managed in a country where Whiteness has been all but invisible to public policy. The aim of this work is to extend our scholarly conversations about the difference between intellectualizing the work and embodying the work.

Key Words: privilege, Whiteness, structural inequality, racism, white fragility, embodied ways of knowing, embodied learning, consciousness, culture, hidden biases, feminist pedagogy, anti-oppressive, critical empathy, intersectionality, resistance, cultural humility.

"During my first time teaching introduction to comparative ethnic studies as a
newly hired, tenure-track faculty member, I was about to begin class one day
when a white male student raised his hand. I acknowledged him, and the following exchange ensued:

Student: Can we cancel class today?
Me: Why should we cancel class?
Student: I don’t feel like being in the classroom today, and since my parents pay for your salary, I think it is only fair you do what I say.

Though I was momentarily taken aback, I also chuckled at his reasoning (and
audacity) a bit, after which I explained to him that by paying his tuition (which
is what I suspected he meant), his parents were actually paying for his SEAT in my classroom, not my salary, since that is actually paid by the Washington state legislature. Up to this point, the other students in the class were following this exchange very closely, like a tennis match. Perhaps interested in seeing how I handled their classmate’s request, and thus how seriously they should take me, the students were as attentive as I had ever seen them, some on the edge of their seats looking anxious, others wearing a horrified look on their faces. I finally concluded the exchange with the following statement: “and, regardless of who pays for my services, I am your professor, not your personal prostitute.” The class let out a collective,
sizable gasp, followed by uproarious laughter, which helped dissipate the
tension somewhat. My admittedly awkward final comment was an attempt at highlighting the fact that although I might have been there to provide a service for them (I was there to teach him and his classmates about race relations), I was not at their disposal, so they could not dismiss me whenever they weren’t in the mood for class. I then proceeded to preempt the material for that day to have a discussion about entitlement and white privilege, even though I am fairly certain we had covered those topics before (nothing like a real-life, just-happened example to provide insight and drive a point home)..."

This article presents the theoretical and methodological considerations behind a research method which the author calls ‘phronetic planning research’. Such research sets out to answer four questions of power and values for specific instances of planning: (1) Where are we going with planning? (2) Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? (3) Is this development desirable? (4) What, if anything, should we do about it? A central task of phronetic planning research is to provide concrete examples and detailed narratives of the ways in which power and values work in planning and with what consequences to whom, and to suggest how relations of power and values could be changed to work with other consequences. Insofar as planning situations become clear, they are clarified by detailed stories of who is doing what to whom. Clarifications of that kind are a principal concern for phronetic planning research and provide the main link to praxis.

Advertising is one of the most effective and most used ways of communication. It transmits the message using different communication tools. Everywhere that we look upon each moment, we are faced with an ad. The ads are entered into our lives so much, they gives us the message directly, on the other hand  they save the submessages to our subconscious using images and metaphors and  try to influence our buying habits. The first task of an ad is to attract the attention of the target audience. If it can’t draw attention, it can’t transmit the message. To draw attention, it finds the weaknesses parts of the target audience to convey the message. Good advertiser makes accurate market research and applies the correct strategies to identify the needs and interests of its target audience. If the ad prefers the easy way, it uses the  common images and well-known tactics to draw public
attention.  In today's world, women also started to have self. But in different social classes, she still postponed and still an “object” to “fulfill the purpose”. She has a mission to please the man and to have sex with him to satisfy his most vulnerable part. He still has the authority the power of money. So, automatically “man” becomes the target audience and “woman” becomes the utility article for the advertiser.

Back cover text: If the new fin de siècle marks a recurrence of the real, Bent Flyvbjerg’s Rationality and Power epitomizes that development and sets new standards for social and political inquiry. The Danish town of Aalborg is to Flyvbjerg what Florence was to Machiavelli: a laboratory for understanding the real workings of power, and for grasping what they mean to our more general concerns of social and political organization. Politics, administration, and planning are examined in ways that allow  a rare, in-depth understanding. The reader witnesses, firsthand, the classic and endless drama which defines what modernity and democracy are and can be.

Objectives: To help students: (1) think critically about how they perform gender through clothing choices; (2) recognize how different cultures define masculinity and femininity.
Courses: Communication Theory, Gender and Communication, Popular Communication, Rhetorical Theory, Visual Rhetoric

En este artículo, presento una reflexión sobre mi experiencia como
maestra travesti no binaria que trabaja en el contexto universitario. Mi punto de vista se sitúa en los feminismos críticos e interseccionales y, a partir de él, planteo un conjunto de reflexiones sobre el quehacer docente y la lucha por abrir un espacio educativo que sea incluyente con todos los cuerpos. En el trayecto de este escrito, discuto lo que podría llegar a ser una pedagogía feminista y expongo mi lucha contra el binarismo de género en la academia, mi defensa de una ética del cuidado y mi apuesta por hacer de la docencia un lugar sensible
a las opresiones de clase, género, raza y sexualidad.

In this chapter, we explore how young people use social media to challenge what they position as rape culture in schools and online. In the first part of the chapter we draw on our research with a feminist group in a London secondary school to explore how young people navigate sexual harassment, victim blaming, slut-shaming, rape jokes, cyberflashing, and other forms masculine sexual entitlement online and in school. Next we outline through discussion of research in two further schools how we have used these research findings to build pedagogical interventions in the form of school guidance and lesson plans on digital defence and feminist activism with the charity School of Sexuality Education.

In this chapter we look at three different manifestations of social media feminist humour that challenge rejections of feminism or anti-feminism. First we look at the hugely popular twitter account @NoToFeminism, which posts witty rejoinders to anti-feminist discourses, and was initiated specifically to parody the #womenagainstfeminism movement. Next, we examine the twitter hashtag #FeministsAreUgly, to consider how feminists have intervened into the sexist logic that women are feminists because they are sexually undesirable to men. We consider the affordances of the hashtag to stimulate discussion and debate around conventional beauty norms and also how hashtags can be co-opted in ways that mutate far outside its original aims. The hashtag was created in 2014 as a way for people of colour to speak back against beauty standards and cultural privilege and we problematize how it has now potentially become a site of enforcing, and validating the exact same beauty norms it was designed to interrogate. Finally, we explore ‘misandry’ Twitter hashtags and Tumblr posts which ironically present female superiority in an attempt to parody anti-feminist claims that feminists are man-hating. This tongue in cheek action can be considered a way of mocking wilful misunderstandings of feminism. We also, however, consider whether some of the memes celebrate violence against men in gender binary and essentialising ways. Overall we argue that social media affordances offer women opportunities to defend feminism, in novel and exciting ways that move us beyond simplistic claims that we are in any way living in a postfeminist moment without sustained feminist political dialogue and critique.

This article provides an answer to what has been called the biggest problem in theorizing and understanding planning: the ambivalence about power found among planning researchers, theorists, and students. The author narrates how he came to work with issues of power and gives an example of how the methodology he developed for power studies—phronetic planning research—may be employed in practice. Phronetic planning research follows the tradition of power studies running from Machiavelli and Nietzsche to Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. It focuses on four value-rational questions: (1) Where are we going with planning? (2) Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? (3) Is this development desirable? (4) What should be done? These questions are exemplified for a specific instance of Scandinavian urban planning. The author finds that the questions, and their answers, make a difference to planning in practice. They make planning research matter.

In this article, I, using Paul C. Mocombe's structurationist theory of phenomenological structuralism against feminist theories, put forth the argument that the third wave (1990 to the present) of feminine activism against the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism has given rise to feminine patriarchy, the push by women for equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with their white male counterparts by recursively organizing and reproducing the patriarchy of the society, which is institutionalized as the nature of reality as such, in a genderless position of their own. Hence, women have pushed for integration and equality in the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism as gender neutral agents of the protestant ethic against any other alternative forms of system or social integration, which renders their historical activism dialectical, oppressive, and exploitative; they, paradoxically, reify, commodify, and glorify their sexual female identity as feminine men.

This chapter draws on theories of new materialisms that assume the discursive (language, ideology, emotions) and the material (physical space, material objects, bodies) are always entangled and act together to produce phenomena. We use these theoretical concepts to persuade readers that the ways we perceive, judge, and discriminate based on social-class difference are literacies that we acquire and produce across time and space. The authors argue that these literacies are acquired by the body through our material-discursive intra-actions and are often felt viscerally, even when we don't have access to language appropriate for articulating what we know. We use vignettes from teacher education courses to support a call for tending to the body, space, social-classed texts, and emotions in the design of curriculum and pedagogy aimed at approaches to teaching and learning that are sensitive to social class. Randall was just five years old when he sat with Stephanie (first author) in the kitchen area of the informal learning space that was housed in his neighborhood. He visited this space, known as the Playhouse, after school every day that it was open, typically about three days a week. He hadn't gone to school on this day, and so he arrived quite early, while Stephanie was cutting up vegetables and fruits and doing other things to get the space ready for a couple of dozen children to pour through the doors searching for snacks and friends, ready to pick up their projects where they left off or to change course entirely and start something new. Stephanie sliced the big bunch of cucumbers that she had picked up at the local food bank and listened to Randall as he talked about things he liked and didn't like, things he wanted to do and didn't want to do. As the conversation carried on, Randall began talking about things that worried him.

Kenneth Grahame, John Steptoe, Jenny Offill and Nancy Carpenter: these and other Anglo-American children’s writers craft fictions in which pedagogical efforts to delimit what others think or do prove toothless. What degree of directiveness toward others is ethically permissible or morally obligatory? By posing without resolving this question, these authors adopt a critically ambivalent stance toward paternalism that is not only in line with contemporary philosophical accounts of this concept, but also helpful for rethinking how we theorize about critical pedagogy and student agency.

Niccolò Machiavelli, the founder of modern political and administrative thought, made clear that an understanding of politics requires distinguishing between formal politics and what later, with Ludwig von Rochau, would become known as Realpolitik. No such distinction has been employed in the study of rationality. Yet I will argue that distinguishing between formal rationality and real rationality is as important for the understanding of rationality and planning as the distinction between formal politics and Realpolitik has been for understanding politics.

The purpose of the present chapter is to demonstrate how social scientists may engage with mass media to have their research impact public deliberation, policy and practice. Communicating research to practice is part and parcel of applied phronesis and not something external to it. Even in Aristotle's original definition of phronesis, laid down more than two millennia ago, the knowledge–action relationship is clear. A defining characteristic of phronesis is, in Aristotle's words, that it is ‘reason capable of action’ (The Nicomachean Ethics, 1976: Bk VI, 1140a24–1140b12). Phronetic research results (‘reason’) are therefore results only to the extent they have an impact on practice (‘action’). In public affairs, reason is made capable of action by effectively having reason enter the public sphere and public deliberation. It is reason times exposure in the public sphere that matters, not reason alone. Today, mass media dominate the public sphere in liberal democracies. The relationship of research with media therefore needs to be reflected. However, to my knowledge no study exists that describes in detail this aspect of phronetic research. Even in social science as a whole, studies of how scholars work with mass media to secure public impact of their research seem rare (Bagdikian 2004; McCombs 2004; Bryant and Oliver 2009). This, then, is the purpose of the present chapter: to begin to close this gap in our knowledge of social science and phronesis. Because the field is underexplored, it was found to be prudent to start with a phenomenological case study. The study shows how a group of phronetic social scientists, including the author, engaged with media, including world-leading titles such as The New York Times, in order to place their research results on the public agenda and initiate change in their chosen field of interest: megaproject policy and management.