“It's Not Just an Assignment”: A Duoethnography on the (Op)positionality of Evaluator Identity

Safety in Objects:Discourses of Violence and Value—The Rokeby Venus and Rhythm 0 Kristen Renzi (bio) Is it better for women to be valued as subjects or as objects in the eyes of society? Most feminist critics would answer almost automatically with the former, as much feminist philosophy and criticism has worked to free women from a condemnation to "object" status and win for them a "subject" status equal to that of men. In light of historical, oppressive, gender-biased treatment of both women and representations of women in art and literature, feminist theorists and critics have used the term "subject" to designate an agent or self who is licensed to full participation and rights within society, including the right to observe and use "objects"; in doing so, they have pointed out the means by which legal, social, and linguistic systems have constructed this "subject" as male.1 In contrast, the term "object" within feminist criticism often signifies an individual whose agency, social participation and rights, and even "selfhood" is not licensed or guaranteed; this "object," which society recognizes as "female," is, moreover, seen not as a full self with both mind and body but rather as reducible to her body alone. Even as modernist criticism has given way to postmodern considerations of multiple, fractured, and unstable subjects and selves, feminist theorists have continued to draw attention to the systematic inequalities between men and women that still make distinctions between subjects and objects useful when speaking about the material, social, and physical discrimination women face.2 Thus, by posing its opening question, this piece may at first seem to query one of the key assumptions that has governed feminist theory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I hope, however, to show how such a question— and giving the latter, "object," as its answer—does not contradict feminist aims but rather highlights the ways in which these aims have not yet been reached. To do so, I will show how one particular tradition of feminist criticism, feminist art criticism, has distinguished between subjects and objects along gendered lines, and I will investigate and trouble the faith that this tradition has placed in performance art to rectify subject/object inequalities [End Page 120] for female subjects. I will then turn to two feminist "performances"— Mary Richardson's 1914 protest slashing of the Rokeby Venus and Marina Abramović's 1974 performance piece Rhythm 0—which I argue do not rectify women's relegation to objecthood but rather emphasize the precarious power of women's objecthood. My argument largely counters the critical treatment of these pieces, treatments that have tended to obscure this negative power of objectification in favor of more romantic accounts of not only women's ability to be seen as subjects but also the positive impact their subject status has had on female safety in the face of violence. The temporal diversity of these performances is not incidental, but instead is crucial to my argument that this negative counter to a feminist theoretic, which urges us to see women as subjects for their increased safety, continues to haunt feminist texts throughout the twentieth century in ways that feminist politics and critics have often ignored.3 The treatment of such diverse sources alongside one another may initially jar the reader; however, treating the two together seems especially pertinent given that, despite a gap of over half a century (particularly a century in which women have made large strides in terms of securing political and social rights), we have not yet managed to fully exorcize the "object" from the woman. As feminist politics have attempted to create better and better realities for individuals and citizens of all genders, Richardson's and Abramović's texts seem audaciously, even blasphemously, to reject these attempts. This essay's re-reading of Richardson's and Abramović's performances meditates on these texts' significant rejections of the notion that women's tenuous "subjecthood" is what women need more of, and it does so not to question these texts' feminism but instead to reincorporate their excluded position into feminist notions of the subject and self. By gaining access to these performances through visual and textual traces of...

In this current context, critical epistemologies, methodologies, and frameworks like Participatory Action Research (PAR), decolonial theory, and situational analysis can provide relevant tools for critical feminist social work research and praxis to expose and reenvision harmful, extractive, and privatized knowledge generation and dissemination. In this article, I describe the possibilities for using critical situational analysis to promote critical feminist social work scholarship through the interrogation of colonial forms of knowledge production, recognition of enactments of refusal and resistance, and illustrations of situational mapping from a study focused on exploring power differentials within PAR collaborations among social work faculty and community stakeholders. I then discuss possibilities to incorporate these analytic qualitative methodologies and frameworks to promote critical feminist principles for critical qualitative inquiry.

Following the ‘European refugee crisis’, European states have initiated different migration and integration policies that often perpetuate and reinforce nation-state otherisation, capitalist exploitation, colonial legacies, and gendered and racialised oppression. Using an interdisciplinary approach based on decolonial theory, world-systems research, Marxist analysis, critical state theory, critical race theory and feminist critiques, this article finds that a rigorous investigation of a complex world-system and its deep structures, including modernity/coloniality, capitalism, the nation-state, racism and sexism, can shed light on the formation of a global mobile labour force that manifests itself in place- and context-specific ways. Based on this assertion, this article analyses processes of migrant integration in Germany’s domestic work force and points to its colonial, gendered and racialised dynamics. The article concludes by reviewing Napuli Langa’s account of and involvement in the migrant resistance movement in Germany which began in 2012. This resistance movement highlights alternative ways of living together in and against the modern/colonial world-system that goes beyond (neo)liberal inclusionism.

Despite an ever-growing critical literature, vulnerability retains its place as a dominant concept in climate politics. What is less heavily researched is the concept of “invulnerability,” an idea that feminist and decolonial theory has many tools to critique. After unpacking the material and discursive elements of vulnerability politics, this article focuses on invulnerability as a concept that is an influential yet unexplored set of masculine and colonial fantasies. These fantasies – of modernity, mastery, and continentalism – are critiqued through different critical traditions, which are brought into conversation with climate politics literature. I then discuss the counternarratives of Oceanic thought, following Teresia Teaiwa’s prompt to “island the world.” I argue that this can be done through a focus on care, relationality, and a decolonial politics of resistance. I conclude that resisting the politics of vulnerability requires an engagement with critical feminist and decolonial thought to enable an imaginative piercing of the fantasies of invulnerability.

The political geographies of D/decolonization: Variegation and decolonial challenges of /in geography

project of modernity reordered and rearranged the world by imposing categories of difference. These currently materialize in inconspicuous bordering systems designed to enforce the separation between the Global North and Global South; the west and rest; the have and have-nots: dualities continuously (re)produced today in the spatial arrangement of the world and in the domain of everyday life. This research focuses on the material possibilities afforded by design to scatter sovereign power— that was once exclusive to nation-state borders— and embed it in the sociotechnical systems that mediate everyday life. This dissertation presents a design-informed framework that situates design in contemporary practices of bordering— understood as processes of exclusion experienced by migrants that are (re)produced at the level of everyday life by state and non-state actors. I propose that by paying attention to everyday life we can uncover how design has been complicit in creating and perpetuating the undocumented migrant condition and how design has been used in the production of “illegality”. In this sense, this research does not seek to uncover the power of design, but instead turns its attention to the ontological relation between power and design, the ways power dynamics materialize by design and how design (re)enforces power dynamics, put simply, it is an exploration of how power is designed.Using the experience of undocumented Nicaraguan women in Costa Rica, I argue that undocumentedness is a designed technology of population management that materializes and legitimizes “illegality” while reproducing the colonial logic of difference between Costa Rica(ns) and Nicaragua(ns). This logic of difference, instrumental to the project of nation-building, is currently (re)produced by popular and political discourses that materialize in technologies of migrant management. Based on the experience of Nicaraguan women living in Río Azul — a marginal, urban neighborhood in the outskirts of San José —, and informed by critical border studies, decolonial theory, feminist theory, political theory, and critical geography, this dissertation locates everyday life as the site of border-struggles for undocumented Nicaraguan women.This dissertation also considers counter-practices that materialize in the form of designs that emerge and operate from other logics, logics that are initially driven by state exclusion such as contestation and (in)visibility, but ultimately logics that build the communal and forms of autonomy. These forms of contestation use design as material politics, in this sense, design is used to reconfigure the material possibilities afforded by their undocumented condition and to redistribute these material possibilities as forms of emancipation.

Background: The shift in mental health towards ecological and collaborative models, in alignment with the recovery paradigm, has sparked interest in dialogical and coproductive practices. These practices aimed to promote epistemic justice and strengthen the therapeutic alliance. Among these, collaborative writing (cowriting) is emerging as a promising tool. However, it currently lacks a robust theoretical and methodological foundation, particularly in its integration with phenomenology and its clinical applications. This article proposes the core elements of a “phenomenological cowriting” model that seeks to frame the practice within clinical phenomenology, distinguish it from purely narrativist approaches, and highlight its unique contributions. Summary: This study conducts a theoretical analysis with a focus on clinical applicability, integrating the principles of clinical phenomenology with collaborative and dialogical methods. The relevance of a phenomenological cowriting model is demonstrated through a comparative analysis with other collaborative writing approaches, such as those based on narrativist or ethnographic traditions, and is exemplified by a case vignette. From a clinical perspective, we propose a three-phase model: (1) therapeutic dialogue, (2) the use of transcription as a “textual artefact,” and (3) joint rewriting. This model provides significant value in terms of process and outcomes. As a process, it embodies a collaborative care framework that minimises epistemic asymmetry and promotes patient agency. As an outcome, it helps clarify the patient’s lived experience, including its prereflective dimensions, thereby enriching shared psychopathological knowledge with a first-person perspective. Key Message: Phenomenological cowriting should be understood not as a mere technique but as a comprehensive and integrated model of care. Grounded in clinical phenomenology and the coproduction of a text, it provides a structured method for constructing therapeutic pathways that foreground an active role for the patient, ultimately generating clinical knowledge rooted in the subjective experience of suffering.

In our semester original teaching idea, we detail possibilities of resistance to the neoliberal university by considering tribal critical race theory and postsocialist feminism as frames for decolonization. The semester takes shape by focusing on foundational readings to bridge decolonial and postsocialist thought as the basis for dialogue about neoliberalism as it manifests imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy in our universities. Focusing on property ownership as a discursive link between neoliberalism, decolonization, and postsocialism, we ask students to theorize/analyze how ownership of property and communication of that ownership maintains, extends, and resists colonial, liberal, and capital forms of power in the institution. We anchor our theoretical application by presenting students with a case study about the indigenous lands upon which our universities are built/occupy accompanied by a discussion about university “ownership” of ancestral remains and sacred objects. In our final assignment/assessment, students use decolonial and postsocialist feminist theory in assignments and discussion to reimagine the neoliberal university’s relationship to property. Applying their critical understanding of history and alternative approaches to knowledge and property, students construct statements of commitment to actions that the university should take as a result of land acknowledgment. Courses Communication Theory or Methods and Intercultural Communication. Learning Outcomes By the end of this activity, students will be able to: (1) identify discourses of institutional ownership as it relates to property, bodies, and knowledge and apply what they learn to a public document; (2) engage in communication inquiry about property, equity, justice, and ownership; (3) apply ethical communication principles and practices; (4) utilize communication to embrace difference; and (5) practice democratic deliberation focused on public ownership.

Criticism on the Eurocentric character of the concept of fashion has been raised already for almost four decades within fashion studies. Yet, the growing entanglement with globalization studies and postcolonial and decolonial theories has accelerated an epistemological turn within fashion studies. The epistemological turn not only fostered new research on the empirical level, it also challenged the theoretical framework of the discipline. Even the concept of fashion itself, entrenched as it is in modernization theories, has gradually come under attack. The concept of fashion has been held accountable for defining only ‘modern’ western fashion as its research object, while side-lining, even erasing, other ‘traditional’ sartorial systems. In order to redress the Eurocentric character of fashion theory and the exclusionary effects it engenders, fashion has been redefined as a ‘universalism’. Although this view became quite mainstream, in its turn it also became gradually criticized. It has been rightly argued that redefining fashion as a universalism is only another way of re-inscribing fashion scholarship in the hegemonic western ‘modern/colonial’ way of knowledge production. Studying sartorial practices positioned outside the western capitalist fashion system through the lens of fashion obscures an understanding of their own specific characteristics. In this article, I will turn more specifically towards the question of which methodologies we can mobilize if we, scholars versed in western modern knowledges and modern knowledge production, are committed to a multiplicity of sartorial worlds in as well as outside ‘the West’. The article proposes a hermeneutic–dialogical method of interpretation and translation as an epistemological as well as an ethical tool towards a more adequate understanding of ‘other’ ways of wearing, making, feeling, thinking of and living through clothes. Finally, this article offers a tentative analysis that shows what this dialogical approach might entail.

This article provides a Latin American feminist critique of early decolonial theories focusing on the work of Aníbal Quijano and Enrique Dussel. Although decolonial theorists refer to Chicana feminist scholarship in their work, the work of Latin American feminists is ignored. However, the author argues that Chicana feminist theory cannot stand in for Latin American feminist theory because “lo latinoamericano” gets lost in translation. Latin American feminists must do their own theoretical work. Central to the critique of the use of gender in decolonial theory is an analysis of the social pacts among white capitalists and white working-class men that not only exclude white women but make citizenship and democracy impossible for men and women of color in the metropolis as well as in the colony. By revealing the nexus between gender, race, and democracy, not only is the coloniality of gender apparent, but also the coloniality of democracy.

purely an epiphenomenon of discourse but that unconscious desire is productive in the construction of the subject's experience and that this understanding is critical for political and social criticism. For me, a feminist psychoanalytics promises deep and profound change for the individual and of relations of power/knowledge because it offers a way to understand the complexities of unconscious desire, the way it shapes the female subject and therefore can mystify her experience in the first place. Understanding the itineraries of desire is possible, offering a woman a way to see how her imagining constructs her 'own' experience as such, how to see her imagining already to be inflicted with or subjected in oppressive relations, how to see her possible complicity with oppressive relations, and finally how to see the difference between oppressive relations and the constrictions of desire. Although I understand desire always to be related to political economies, I think of desire as discontinuous from these, not reducible to these. This allows for an analysis of both the inner curve of desire and the engagement of desire in social technologies of reproduction. Smith is right to argue that her standpoint epistemology is also meant to bring knowledge to women that would extend their understanding beyond the immediately known. I always understood her to be taking this position; I simply disagree that this is accomplished by making women's experiences the point d'appui for political criticism, although doing so would limit feminist criticism to a sociological Indeed, my reading of Smith's writing is meant to suggest that even she does not just begin with women's experiences because what makes women's experiences visible to Smith or to any woman also requires being able to make visible what has been excluded from or disavowed in what Smith describes as dominated discourse. What feminists have learned from deconstruction is how to see or read the traces of exclusion, of disavowal, and even to be able to argue that the discourse of hegemonic masculinity is constructed through disavowal. But deconstruction has also taught feminists to read their desire to deconstruct male dominated Reading the disavowed is not like representing the working of a fish tank or quite like reading a subway map. Reading the disavowed is not only about uncovering excluded experiences. It is also about a self-reflective tracing of the desire to exclude. Indeed, it is a deconstructive gesture that allows Smith to name sociological discourse a male dominated one. Thus, when Smith criticizes me as 'the analyst' for not

1. The Hybrid Criticism of Patriarchy. 2. The Matrix of Feminist Criticism. 3. From Feminist Criticism to Standpoint Epistemologies. 4. Engendering African American Criticism. 5. Formulating a Feminist Politics of De-colonization. 6. Queer Embodiments of Feminist Theorizing.

Feminist Disability Studies

Gendered violence is historically and presently a colonial tool that wields power over and against Indigenous peoples, attempting to destroy or erase their sovereignty and lives. Decolonization is necessary in movements addressing gendered violence in settler colonial nation-states. In this article, we forefront Indigenous organizing as a practice of survivance and decolonial feminist theory building. We argue that decolonial feminist critique deepens our understanding of complex iterations of gendered violence. By witnessing resistant Indigenous community responses to sexual violence, we can begin to imagine and build coalitional decolonial feminist possibilities. Witnessing, we argue, is a decolonial heuristic for engaging with resistant subjectivities at the colonial difference as embodied theory and praxis of decolonial feminism.

This poem emerged from the raw data material of the author’s most recent teaching evaluations in higher education, recasting the very phrases and opinions that often remain, decontextualized and invisible in the educator’s official records. Rather than accepting the felt judgments that often do harm, the poem reworks reviewers’ bolded sentences into a counter-narrative that centres the context of classroom dynamics and relational learning - transforming deficits into narrative coherence. Additionally, this poem illustrates how reviewers’ feedback, when clipped from its classroom context, can be situated into surveillance practices of women’s tone as well as feminist critique that often flattens relational learning. By repurposing those words as another act of rebellion, the poem reframes criticism as a site of meaning-making. It moves from accusation to invitation, from rating to reflection, and from surveillance to shared responsibility. The inspiration for this writing is situated in the lived realities of the author - a woman of colour - who has written about embracing poetry as a transformative practice in educational environments (Abraham, 2024). The author invites readers through the journey of reconsideration - from receiving student feedback in the form of teaching evaluation that is centred in anonymity to building dialogic, context-rich response to the felt damages of a consumer-style feedback system.