Paper Title
School-Based Mentoring Programs as a Site for Feminist Community Engagement
Location
Room 212, West Center
Keywords
Critical Pedagogy, Feminist Community Engagement, Intersectionality, Girl Studies, Mentoring
Start Date
April 2016
End Date
April 2016
Abstract
Our women and gender resource center school-based mentoring program for girls engages ongoing negotiations or “border crossings” (Anzaldua, 1987) at the intersections and entanglements of the mutable, often competing boundaries of self-making/being made, service/activism, institution/community, insider/outsider, and complex relationships of the personal/political. Placing ourselves, students and our community partner, as multiple centers of inquiry, we deconstruct our practices to foreground the mentoring program as part of critical and emancipatory “feminist projects” with politicized agendas to challenge sexist ideologies and practices (Code, 1991; Harding, 1987).
Academic and public shifts place a gaze on girls with the context of “Alpha Girl” (Kindlon, 2006), “Future Girl” (Harris, 2004), “Girl Power” and “DIY,” discourses which celebrate power, self-determination, and success. Concurrently, discourses circulating throughout the school and sites of popular culture embed hierarchical markers of the body which characterize girls as ‘at risk’ or unhealthy. Our Young Women Leaders Program poses unique opportunities and challenges to address intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) as a methodological and practical tool. We seek to explore the “messiness” (Lather, 2007) of community engagement that lives in the in-between in order to contribute to a terrain of politicized feminist community engagement (Iverson and James, 2014) based in social justice activism.
School-Based Mentoring Programs as a Site for Feminist Community Engagement
Room 212, West Center
Our women and gender resource center school-based mentoring program for girls engages ongoing negotiations or “border crossings” (Anzaldua, 1987) at the intersections and entanglements of the mutable, often competing boundaries of self-making/being made, service/activism, institution/community, insider/outsider, and complex relationships of the personal/political. Placing ourselves, students and our community partner, as multiple centers of inquiry, we deconstruct our practices to foreground the mentoring program as part of critical and emancipatory “feminist projects” with politicized agendas to challenge sexist ideologies and practices (Code, 1991; Harding, 1987).
Academic and public shifts place a gaze on girls with the context of “Alpha Girl” (Kindlon, 2006), “Future Girl” (Harris, 2004), “Girl Power” and “DIY,” discourses which celebrate power, self-determination, and success. Concurrently, discourses circulating throughout the school and sites of popular culture embed hierarchical markers of the body which characterize girls as ‘at risk’ or unhealthy. Our Young Women Leaders Program poses unique opportunities and challenges to address intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) as a methodological and practical tool. We seek to explore the “messiness” (Lather, 2007) of community engagement that lives in the in-between in order to contribute to a terrain of politicized feminist community engagement (Iverson and James, 2014) based in social justice activism.
