The Struggle for Mexican American Studies in Texas K-12 Public Schools: A Movement for Epistemic Justice through Creation/Resistance

This article traces how Mexican American Studies (MAS) scholar activists led and supported a statewide movement for MAS in Texas. As a Xicana feminist scholar activist, Saldaña draws from her retrospective memory and personal archive of organizational notes, movement documents, personal testimonies before the State Board of Education, and photos, to document her journey within this epistemic justice movement. In doing so, she narrates the processes of creation/resistance that led to change in a state that has historically excluded Black, Brown, and Indigenous histories from school curricula. As a scholar activist involved in various parts of this movement, Saldaña also examines the various interconnected layers of this movement—from local efforts in San Antonio, where she teaches, to statewide organizing—to chronicle the institutional and grassroots processes that led to this historic victory in Texas.

Feminist Pandemic Pedagogies: Podcasting and the Study of Religion

In this article I will explore and share my pedagogical practices and experiences as a feminist scholar of religion, within the context of a voluntary postgraduate reading group, during the first nine months of the Covid-19 pandemic. The article is structured in two parts. The first part offers a reflection of the teaching approaches that inspired and enabled the production of a podcast about the study of religion from the perspective of black African students and scholars of religion. The second part conceptualizes the production of a podcast as a feminist pedagogical experiment and reflects on this process alongside feminist pedagogical principles. While the orientation of this article is tentative and reflexive, it advances the argument that because of the commitment to social justice that is inherent to feminist approaches to scholarship and pedagogy, feminist scholars are generally poised to work within the contexts of crisis. Therefore, within the context of the pandemic, feminist approaches to teaching and learning in the study of religion may yield insights that can contribute to the continued development of sustainable pedagogies that honor the fraught nature of these times for both scholars and students.

Rethinking Meridians

Alice Walker in her book, In Search of Our Mothers’ Garden, notes that when you write the book you want to read, you are both pointing and following your “direction of vision.” As a writer and a Black feminist scholar, the author understood this to mean that she needed to craft the tools that would help her to do her work. Rethinking Meridians is the critical knowledge project, the tool, that she wanted to have in her hand when she was a classroom teacher. Consisting of articles and lesson plans, the special issue was designed as a disruption tool that would inspire teachers and students to transcend the notion of the classroom as a static, constrained, and unliberated space. By using the lens of transdisciplinarity, Rethinking Meridians examines Black feminist theory as a teaching tool and a pedagogical practice that challenges teachers to connect the work across disciplines and beyond them.

Nancy Cunard

In the wake of inadequate histories of radical writing and activism, Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger rejects stereotypes of Cunard as spoiled heiress and “sexually dangerous New Woman,” offering instead a bold, unapologetic, evidence-based portrait of a woman and her significant contributions to twenty-first-century considerations of gender, race, and class. This full length critical study by the late, path-breaking feminist scholar, Jane Marcus, rereads Cunard’s identity as a poet, an anthologist, a journalist, and political activist against racism and fascism.

Feminism against Japan’s Military Sexual Violence

I find a new form of feminism in the activist narratives and analyze its nature by following the theorization of Ōgoshi Aiko, a feminist scholar in philosophy, who has maintained personal contacts with activists, including the late Matsui Yayori. This feminism, which I call JMSV feminism, differs from global feminism in that it has achieved transnational solidarity based on the realization that women are differentiated by power relations, not based on the discourse of universal womanhood promoted by global feminism. JMSV feminism is a form of critical transnational feminism characterized by postcolonial historical consciousness; intersectionality; transnational solidarity; mutual transformation; and the centrality of survivors. JMSV activists have demonstrated how feminists of a former colonial empire may develop an ethical relationship with underprivileged women by listening to their voices with moral humility. They also suggest that feminism is effective when it intersects with other kinds of activism.

Shirley Pendlebury, ‘Feminism, Epistemology and Education’

The following piece contains the reflections of Maithreyi Krishnaraj, a wellknown senior feminist scholar on ‘Feminism, Epistemology and Education’ by Shirley Pendlebury, in David Car( Ed.) Education, Knowledge and Truth (Routledge, 1998, pp. 174–188). Re-visiting it after twenty years, she feels that Pendlebury’s views still have relevance.

Shaping an ethical approach to trans research: Some reflections from my doctoral project

From 2016 to 2019, I conducted my doctoral project research on trans and gender-diverse experiences in Norway, focussing on the impact of a new law on gender recognition through which the previous sterilisation requirement for legal gender change was overturned. Over the course of this research, I have been exploring what it means to be an ethical feminist scholar and working to foster what I feel is a more ethical approach to research on trans individuals. In this article, I outline what I have found to be essential theoretical and methodological considerations to ethical trans research. I apply these to my own doctoral research process to demonstrate the importance of trans-focussed research, reflecting on the challenges I faced when writing my thesis.

Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea: Indian Women as Cultural Intermediaries and National Symbols

In her book, Rebecca K. Jager compares and contrasts the lives and legends of three Indigenous North American women: Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea. Jager’s research answers an earlier call by Native-American historian and feminist scholar Clara Sue Kidwell in her 1992 Ethnohistory article, “Indian Women as Cultural Intermediaries,” to revisit these stories from a non-Eurocentric perspective.

(Re) Honoring the Legacy of Jessie Bernard: An Analysis of Junior Scholars’ Outstanding Feminist Family Scholarship

As a further tribute to feminist scholar Jessie Bernard, in this paper, we review the entire collection of the National Council on Family Relations’ Jessie Bernard Outstanding papers awarded to feminist junior scholars spanning from 1990 to 2018. In so doing, we showcase Jessie Bernard’s devotion to mentoring young scholars as we highlight evolving feminist family scholarship of student/new professionals. In this paper, we sought to:(a) honor Jessie Bernard’s intellectual legacy, (b) celebrate contributions of young feminist family scholar’s work, and (c) explore how the award collection maps on to wider feminist theoretical debates and empirical shifts within feminist family science over the past three decades.