Writing a/s Feminist Life: Anthropology, Education, and the (Not) New

• In Event: "Living a Feminist Life" Within and Outside, Academia: Thinking with Sara Ahmed

Abstract

We discuss the interdisciplinary tensions between anthropology in education and qualitative research in education using Ahmed. To do this, we analyze a revealing conversation across two articles in Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Douglas Foley’s (2010) and Weis and Fine’s (2013) response to Foley.  We ask what institutional processes and academic desires drive the quest for demarcation across disciplines and amongst scholars, for example the politics of institutional knowledge production, tropes of innovation, and the quest for non-complicity.  We see knowledge as not-new in a post-world, that knowledge becomes through remembering and forgetting in the quest for innovation. Disrupting the taken-for-granted and challenging well-worn lines of dis/agreement, such as those presented in these articles, are for us writing a/s feminist(s)-- a process of becoming and undoing the feminist.

Authors

• Sara M. Childers, Ohio State University

• Stephanie Curley, Manchester Metropolitan University