Feminist Tools for Moving Forward: Revisiting Race, Gender, and Class in Education

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The global tides of the COVID-19 pandemic have had an inarguably destabilizing effect on our societies. Assumptions about what was known, agreed upon, or ‘normal,’ have been upended. Profound disagreements about the very basis of social relationships, including what constitutes nations and communities, have been revealed in ways that no one expected. At the same time, global struggles against white supremacy, patriarchy, and imperialism have been met with (proto)facisct and nationalist responses. Charting ways forward and sowing ‘seeds of change’ feels increasingly difficult to conceptualize, let alone actualize. There is no time like the present to assert the necessity of critical adult education. As the late feminist theorists bell hooks argued, “[t]rue politicization- coming to critical consciousness- is a difficult, ‘trying’ process, one that demands, that we give up set ways of thinking and being, that we shift our paradigms, that we open ourselves to the unknown, the unfamiliar” (1989, p. 25).

In education spaces, we have seen a renewed interest in feminist, anti-racist, and Marxian analysis. This is likely attributable to increased global discourses around racial justice as well as the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on women. In many ways, the violence visited upon ‘others’ has been made more visible and public responses demanded. At the same time, questions of labour, extraction, and exploitation are closer to the surface of public discourse than they have been for many years following decades of neoliberal assaults on workers. In this context the Marxist/ian analysis of education and learning is at a crucial juncture. On the one hand, the violence of capitalism grows exponentially as its contradictions intensify and manifest in complex appearances. On the other hand, the historical traditions of Marxist theory are in periods of revision and resurgence as long needed contributions from feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial scholars are being acknowledge and incorporated into more dynamic analyses of the social relations of capitalism, its morphology, and its reproduction (Carpenter & Mojab, 2017).

While important work continues to understand the relationship between educational institutions/processes, the circulation of ideology, and questions of labour power and the production of value, the proposed session examines the relationship between capitalism and its constitutive or fundamental relations, that of race and gender, as they are expressed in relations of imperialism, colonialism, and democracy and to consider the implications of these relations in our theorization of research in the field of education. In this panel, we hope to help participants think through two key conceptual debates in feminist theory, intersectionality and social reproduction, and to understand how these debates inform our conceptualization of critical adult education praxis, theory building, and research and our political imagination for social change. Specifically, drawing on feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial contributions to Marxian theory, the proposed session offers three attempts to think through a Marxist feminist approach to education by investigating three key sites of adult education praxis: arts & culture, NGOs/civil society, and workplaces.

Sub Unit

• 21st Century Socialism and Education: Global Alternatives to Patriarchy, Racial Capitalism, Militarism, and Climate Change

Chair

• Genevieve Ritchie, UofT

Individual Presentations

• Dissent Interrupted: Settling Refugee Youth - Genevieve Ritchie, UofT; Shirin Haghgou

• “You protect a harasser because he is your comrade!”: Contested activist spaces and gendered experiences of female student activists in Pakistan - Mariam Parvez Sheikh, University of Massachusetts Amherst