Narrative Vases as Markers of Subjectivity: Engaging Feminist Pedagogies Within the Context of #feesmustfall

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 60
  In Roundtable Session: Methodology and Postcolonial Studies

Abstract

The #feesmustfall movement’s call to decolonize the university and develop an African epistemological curriculum opens up new possibilities for teaching and learning of art history in South Africa. I describe diffractive pedagogical interventions (Barad, 2007) around Ancient Greek vase painting that explore material-discursive entanglements between the ancient, the contemporary and students’ written/visual narratives and argue that students narratives become markers of their subjectivity in relation to the academy. Feminist theories of subjectivity including Haraway’s (1988) situated knowledges, Ettinger’s (2006) matrixial theory and Barad’s (2007) agential realism are diffracted through one another to reveal new thresholds of interconnection and becoming-with (Haraway, 2016) that offer ethico-onto-epistemological possibilities for design praxis in our differentiated world (Thiele, 2014a).

Author

• Nike Irene Romano, Cape Peninsula University of Technology