scholarly journals Teaching 'Trump Feminists'

2018 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 82-87
Author(s):  
Tristan Josephson

This article takes up the question of how to develop effective strategies for engaging conservative students who feel under attack in feminist classrooms. Every semester I teach a Women’s Studies course that introduces students to the history and breadth of contemporary feminist social movements, with a focus on feminist struggles that center anti-racist, queer, and economic justice analytical frameworks. As a general education course, listed in the university course catalog under the rather generic title of “Introduction to Women’s Movements,” this class attracts students with a range of political perspectives from a variety of academic majors. While the majority of the students tend to enter the class with relatively liberal analyses of gender and racial oppression, a significant minority of students have more conservative views. Dealing with resistant and conservative students in women and gender studies is not a new phenomenon, especially in my position teaching at a regional comprehensive public university in northern California. While the university administration is supportive of students of color and undocumented students, it is also heavily invested in discourses of civility and ‘free speech.’ The recent election cycle and the current Trump presidency have empowered the more conservative students in my classes to mobilize this language to claim that they feel ‘unsafe’ in class and on campus. The appropriation of feminist and queer discourses of ‘safe space’ by students on the right to position themselves as being under attack and vulnerable presents a series of pedagogical challenges. I challenge explicit racist, misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic comments in class and my course readings rigorously challenge these forms of bias. Personally and politically I am committed to making sure that my students who are actually under threat – undocumented students, students of color, queer and trans students – are receiving the support that they need. However, I am also invested in challenging all of my students and trying to make my classrooms into spaces of transformational learning. I explore the question of dissent in feminist classrooms through the problem of conservative students who deploy rhetorics of safety in ways that flatten out power relations and systemic oppression. How to respond to students who proudly proclaim they voted for Trump and consider themselves feminists, or to students who tearfully confess they feel unsafe on campus because of their political views? What pedagogical strategies actively engage conservative students rather than silence and alienate them? How can instructors problematize the notion of ‘safety’ for conservative students to help them develop more critical understandings of structural violence and precarity?

2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 945-952
Author(s):  
Eleana Kim ◽  
Jesook Song

Nancy Abelmann passed away on January 6, 2016, at the age of fifty-six. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1990, after completing her dissertation under Nelson Graburn. That same year, she was hired by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she worked for two and a half decades. She was a beloved teacher, mentor, and colleague to many, and she was a key figure in multiple departments and centers. At the time of her death, she held the Harold E. Preble Professorship in Anthropology, Asian American Studies, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Women and Gender Studies and was also Associate Vice Chancellor for Research.


2012 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Savitri Persaud

Savitri Persaud is currently a master’s student at the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Her research analyzes the intersections between gender, violence, disability, and modernity in Guyana.


Author(s):  
Yu-Chen Hsiao

AbstractThe global outbreak of COVID-19 since January 2020 has forced the closure of schools and universities in over 180 countries to control the pandemic, affecting approximately 90% of students worldwide. Distance teaching has been adopted during school closures to suspend classes without suspending learning. Scholars have claimed that distance teaching is more effective than face-to-face teaching and can replace face-to-face courses. However, further investigation is required to confirm whether distance learning is suitable for all types of courses and all students. Thanks to the effective containment of COVID-19 outbreaks in Taiwan, universities in Taiwan face a less problematic situation than do those in other countries; however, plans and preparations remain essential. The present study recruited 18,085 students from a technology university in Taiwan and used the baseline data of the past three academic years before COVID-19 (2016–2018) to explore the influences of course type and gender on distance learning performance. The results revealed that compulsory courses are more suitable for distance learning courses, whereas face-to-face teaching is more suitable for elective and general education courses. The learning performance of males and females is also different: face-to-face courses are more suitable for males, whereas no significant difference between teaching methods was observed in females. This result suggests that not all courses offered by the university are suitable for distance learning courses, and not all students are adept at distance learning. Based on these results, it is recommended that a new teaching model be established for the post-COVID-19 era.


Author(s):  
S. Edith Taylor ◽  
Patrick Echlin ◽  
May McKoon ◽  
Thomas L. Hayes

Low temperature x-ray microanalysis (LTXM) of solid biological materials has been documented for Lemna minor L. root tips. This discussion will be limited to a demonstration of LTXM for measuring relative elemental distributions of P,S,Cl and K species within whole cells of tobacco leaves.Mature Wisconsin-38 tobacco was grown in the greenhouse at the University of California, Berkeley and picked daily from the mid-stalk position (leaf #9). The tissue was excised from the right of the mid rib and rapidly frozen in liquid nitrogen slush. It was then placed into an Amray biochamber and maintained at 103K. Fracture faces of the tissue were prepared and carbon-coated in the biochamber. The prepared sample was transferred from the biochamber to the Amray 1000A SEM equipped with a cold stage to maintain low temperatures at 103K. Analyses were performed using a tungsten source with accelerating voltages of 17.5 to 20 KV and beam currents from 1-2nA.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-356
Author(s):  
Ben Knights

The images of the writer as exile and outlaw were central to modernism's cultural positioning. As the Scrutiny circle's ‘literary criticism’ became the dominant way of reading in the University English departments and then in the grammar-schools, it took over these outsider images as models for the apprentice-critic. English pedagogy offered students not only an approach to texts, but an implicit identity and affective stance, which combined alert resistance to the pervasive effects of mechanised society with a rhetoric of emotional ‘maturity’, belied by a chilly judgementalism and gender anxiety. In exchanges over the close reading of intransigent, difficult texts, criticism's seminars sought a stimulus to develop the emotional autonomy of its participants against the ‘stock response’ promulgated by industrial capitalism. But refusal to reflect on its own method meant such pedagogy remained unconscious of the imitative pressures that its own reading was placing on its participants.


Author(s):  
Lise Kouri ◽  
Tania Guertin ◽  
Angel Shingoose

The article discusses a collaborative project undertaken in Saskatoon by Community Engagement and Outreach office at the University of Saskatchewan in partnership with undergraduate student mothers with lived experience of poverty. The results of the project were presented as an animated graphic narrative that seeks to make space for an under-represented student subpopulation, tracing strategies of survival among university, inner city and home worlds. The innovative animation format is intended to share with all citizens how community supports can be used to claim fairer health and education outcomes within system forces at play in society. This article discusses the project process, including the background stories of the students. The entire project, based at the University of Saskatchewan, Community Engagement and Outreach office at Station 20 West, in Saskatoon’s inner city, explores complex intersections of racialization, poverty and gender for the purpose of cultivating empathy and deeper understanding within the university to better support inner city students. amplifying community voices and emphasizing the social determinants of health in Saskatoon through animated stories.


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