Feminist Pedagogies on the Front Lines: Struggling Against a Mine, Struggling Against Patriarchy

Abstract

In 2018, residents of the Vayots Dzor region in southern Armenia began occupying the entrance to a gold mine owned by Lydian International, at Amulsar mountain, to halt operation. At the forefront of this struggle were not only local men, but also many women who identified themselves as feminists from the capital city of Yerevan. Although feminism is marginalized as a political praxis and discourse in the country—including within leftist and progressive circles—feminists are on the front lines of various larger political struggles. Through ethnographic research within feminist and environmental struggles in Armenia—in which I was situated as a researcher, friend, and comrade—I found that feminists instructed those within and outside of larger political struggles on the importance of gendered understandings of social, political, and economic relations toward their transformation. This pedagogical work was necessary for their ability to do political work as women within these larger movements. I draw on Paulo Freire’s work on pedagogy to discuss feminist forms of pedagogy as praxis. I call these dialogical pedagogy, political pedagogy of the self, and reproductive pedagogy, and argue that each offers possibilities of feminist praxis within and beyond environmental struggles in a context of feminism’s marginalization.