Subjects, Subjectivities, and Slavic Studies: A Design for Anti-Racist Pedagogy

Abstract

Folding together elements of anti-oppressive pedagogies and collaborative curriculum design, this contribution illuminates several possibilities for practicing anti-racism in the classroom while working with texts from Russian literature and history that do not necessarily center race. The identities and experiences of our students and ourselves, as well as the diverse forces that act upon us, are as important in the classroom as the texts in front of us, because our identities and experiences form the lens through which we interpret and interrogate. By framing this dynamic as a pedagogical tool, this contribution demonstrates that by engaging with Russian history and literature, students may gain critical perspectives on hierarchies of race, class, gender, and nation in their own lives and contexts while simultaneously discovering histories that they would not otherwise encounter, thereby broadening and deepening their sense of both global and national landscapes and their own positions and movements within them.