What Fails, Teaches: On Ungrading, Black Feminist Pedagogy, and the Neoliberal University

• In Event: Analyzing Policy Through Critical Research Methods

Abstract

This paper traces a critical Black feminist autoethnography of ungrading within an undergraduate Critical Race Theory course. The study investigates how refusal, care, and ethical relations encounter institutional forces of surveillance, federal mandates, and metric-based accountability. Although the ungrading model initially operated as an embodied pedagogical intervention, structural pressures ultimately necessitated a return to conventional grading. This reversal revealed the politics of legibility and institutional risk management embedded in higher education. Rather than framing this as a failed experiment, the study examines what the breakdown teaches about academic labor, meritocratic socialization, and the limitations imposed on liberatory pedagogy. The analysis offers a site-specific, politically grounded model of Black feminist pedagogy within neoliberal academic contexts.

Author

• Dana Michelle Harris, Independent Scholar