(Un)learning with Absence: A Dialogue with Critical Feminist Educators in Scandinavia

Abstract

Feminist pedagogy in higher education is concerned with making visible the sites of women’s oppression and marginalization in the classroom. Yet this consciousness raising is not met with a pre-defined set of pedagogical tools. Instead, educators often find themselves having to work with absence. Committing to a pedagogy that teaches and works with what is absent raises a whole set of dilemmas and questions for gender studies educators. In this annotated dialogue, a group of five graduate students and teaching-research faculty come together to discuss the implications of this commitment. We discuss collectively which conversations and issues we see as not well represented in teaching materials to our pedagogical advantage. An absence framework presents a fascinating opportunity to interrupt the very notion of ‘learning’ and what it entails. As we are all interested in questions of teaching and unlearning as a kind of transformative practice, we also ask how we can make visible other perspectives and genuinely integrate them without relying on a ‘one-time’ performance model that tokenizes marginalized identities.