Teaching about Ferguson: An Introduction

Abstract

This forum wAs orgAnized around the idea of asking feminist scholars to reflect on the practice of teaching about racial violence as well as on the experiences of teaching in the midst of racial violence. What do feminist pedagogies centered on Ferguson and its aftermath look like? How do we present the various forms of violence —including state action (in the case of murder) and state inaction (in the case of nonindictments) — that produce and uphold the conditions that mark the current situation? How do we bring our feelings about this moment into our classrooms, and how do we do this feeling-teaching in ways that attend to the fact that feminist scholars are endlessly called on to perform affective labor and also that racialized and gendered bodies’ affects are policed inside and outside of the academy? What happens if we refuse the composure that faculty bodies are supposed to perform and enact grief, rage, or sadness? What happens if we refuse performing anything but exhaustion, numbness, or a protective desire to shield our bodies from our students’ scrutiny or curiosity? It quickly became apparent that a forum focused on “feminist pedagogies of Ferguson” would be far more expansive than a conversation focused on how to teach about Ferguson; put simply, to speak about Ferguson is always to speak about more than Ferguson. “Ferguson” has become shorthand for a murdered young man, Michael Brown, for a grand jury’s nonindictment of the police officer who shot him, and for