Power and pedagogy II: Introduction

Abstract

In this issue we present the second part of the Open forum thematic section on ‘Power and pedagogy’, which continues the debates initiated with the set of papers published in Vol. 18, No. 3 of the European Journal of Women’s Studies.1 In this two-part thematic section a group of European feminist scholars who jointly developed and taught a 10-day interdisciplinary graduate-level course on ‘Practising Interdisciplinarity in European Gender Studies’ (at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, in June–July 2008) use their experiences of teaching this course as the starting point for a critical engagement with a range of key questions in feminist pedagogy. The earlier three texts by Dasa Duhacek (2011), Clare Hemmings (2011) and Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou (2011), with an introduction by Sabine Grenz (2011), analysed power and authority struggles in teaching and examined the conditions for creating sustainable interdisciplinary communities of practice among feminist scholars (Pavlidou, 2004). In the present issue Sabine Grenz, Mia Liinason and Maria do Mar Pereira expand this analysis by turning our attention to the process of learning and the dynamics of teacher–student relationships. The course was designed and co-taught by nine teachers from seven European countries – Angeliki Alvanoudi, Eniko Demeny, Dasa Duhacek, Sabine Grenz, Clare Hemmings, Paivi Korvajarvi, Mia Liinason, Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou and Maria do Mar Pereira – and it was funded as an Erasmus Intensive Programme (IP). The course is described in detail in Grenz and Pereira (2009) and Grenz (2011). Our group has a long history of common work, which started in 2003 (the first meeting took place at the 5th European Feminist Research Conference in Lund) and continued with several meetings until 2008.2 The group consisted of members with different national, institutional and disciplinary locations (Grenz, 2011). For example, some of us were located in academic contexts where