Feminist Pedagogy and Research in a Culturally Diverse Classroom in a Women’s University in Bangladesh

Abstract

Abstract Purpose This ☆Authors’ note: To capture the collaborative feminist process in writing this article, we list authors’ name alphabetically rather than the traditional presentation of lead author first. chapter provides a critical discussion of how we conceptualize, conduct, and reflect upon our research in a feminist classroom at a women’s university in Bangladesh. It examines our feminist pedagogy and the epistemological, conceptual, methodological, and ethical issues we encountered in our research. Methodology/approach We use Third World, Materialist, and Poststructuralist feminist perspectives with an intersectional transnational lens to analyze our self-reflections about feminist pedagogy and the messy business of conducting our research. We draw on student participant interviews and responses to follow-up questions to support key arguments. Findings Much feminist pedagogy discourse constructs consciousness-raising and empowerment as positive. However, our research indicates our students’ experiences of these processes as well as our own as teachers and researchers is contradictory; outcomes are often unintended and not always positive, despite our best intentions. Social implications Our work seeks to destabilize problematic notions of empowerment and consciousness-raising by contributing accounts of how feminist pedagogy impacts students in sometimes negative, unintended ways. These contributions should be utilized to better understand power relations between students and teachers, as well as refine pedagogical approaches to best address and reevaluate their impacts on students. Originality/value Rather than perpetuate decontextualized and overly optimistic notions of feminist pedagogy, consciousness-raising, and empowerment that fail to capture the complexities and contradictions of women’s lives and the gendered relations in which they participate, this chapter stands as a call to feminists to problematize their key concepts and practices and lay them open to critique.