Paper Title
Teaching Intersectionality in a Transnational Context: New Perspectives on Engaging Intersectionality in Women’s and Gender Studies Courses
Location
Room 223, DiGiorgio Campus Center (DiGs)
Keywords
intersectional pedagogies, transnational feminisms, immigration
Start Date
April 2016
End Date
April 2016
Abstract
This panel, comprised of three graduates of the UCLA Women’s and Gender Studies PhD Program, now junior faculty and postdoctoral fellows with experience teaching in a range of public and private institutional contexts in California (Cal-State Northridge, Santa Clara University, UC Riverside, and UCLA) will include paper presentations examining how instructors navigate the tensions that arise when employing intersectional and transnational feminist frameworks in gender studies classrooms. We will examine intersectionality specifically from within the California context because California illuminates some of the challenges and possibilities posed by the framework.
California's diverse student body includes those who have not been the traditional subjects of intersectional theorizing and often raise particular problems for gender studies instructors of intersectionality such as how does intersectionality resonate with US Latino students but at the same time become limited in understanding the context of immigration and nation-states? While crafting syllabi, how do gender studies instructors straddle developing intersectional content while simultaneously attending to questions of empire raised by transnational phenomenon such as the war on terror? How does one examine the insights gleaned about blackness in the US while teaching novels such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americana where the meaning of blackness circulates beyond the US border and draws on other genealogies of race, colonialism, and nation-states? These and other issues will be explored across a range of diverse women’s and gender studies courses.
Teaching Intersectionality in a Transnational Context: New Perspectives on Engaging Intersectionality in Women’s and Gender Studies Courses
Room 223, DiGiorgio Campus Center (DiGs)
This panel, comprised of three graduates of the UCLA Women’s and Gender Studies PhD Program, now junior faculty and postdoctoral fellows with experience teaching in a range of public and private institutional contexts in California (Cal-State Northridge, Santa Clara University, UC Riverside, and UCLA) will include paper presentations examining how instructors navigate the tensions that arise when employing intersectional and transnational feminist frameworks in gender studies classrooms. We will examine intersectionality specifically from within the California context because California illuminates some of the challenges and possibilities posed by the framework.
California's diverse student body includes those who have not been the traditional subjects of intersectional theorizing and often raise particular problems for gender studies instructors of intersectionality such as how does intersectionality resonate with US Latino students but at the same time become limited in understanding the context of immigration and nation-states? While crafting syllabi, how do gender studies instructors straddle developing intersectional content while simultaneously attending to questions of empire raised by transnational phenomenon such as the war on terror? How does one examine the insights gleaned about blackness in the US while teaching novels such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americana where the meaning of blackness circulates beyond the US border and draws on other genealogies of race, colonialism, and nation-states? These and other issues will be explored across a range of diverse women’s and gender studies courses.
