Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Volume 27, Issue 2/3, 2024

We argue that neoliberal universities implement student evaluations of teaching (SETs) as governing technologies to impose control on lecturers, resulting in their dehumanisation and objectification. Through ‘story work’ we weave together empirical quotes in existing literature, tweets, and our own experiences, to reveal that SETs employ animalistic and mechanistic dehumanisation, enhancing existing systemic inequalities such as gender and race. As a result, biased SETs induce negative affect that causes undue distress, especially among marginalised lecturers who are expected to act constructively on discriminatory or abusive ‘feedback’. By ignoring lecturers’ calls to revise or abolish the use of SETs, we uncover that universities effectively gaslight and neglect lecturers – further denying our humanity. We end by highlighting acts of solidarity and resistance that show how alternatives to SETs, rooted in feminist pedagogies and care ethics, can be grassroots mo(ve)ments towards structural change.

Despite decades of feminist critique on androcentric biases in academia, mainstream academic literature and training of ethnographic research typically neglects the gendered and sexualised dynamics between researchers and interlocutors, in particular the prevalence of sexualised harassment in fieldwork settings. This article outlines why this topic remains overlooked within anthropological training and education and, more importantly, how we can move towards a more inclusive approach to signalling, acknowledging, and processing these experiences as an integral element of ethnography. We contend that this encompasses an epistemological concern, as knowledge production is based upon intersubjective and situated encounters (Haraway, 1988). We identified three dimensions in the discussion of the sexualised and gendered vulnerabilities of research practice – the pedagogical, the institutional and the epistemological – and propose a set of educational opportunities as a response. Drawing upon feminist pedagogies, these include a reconsideration and systemic critique of methodological and epistemological training, more vulnerable approaches to teaching, writing and representing ethnography, and the institutionalisation of a network of support that resists the individual responsibility that the neoliberalisation of education pushes towards.

This paper discusses efforts to re-integrate feminist classroom perspectives and pedagogies within the undergraduate geography curriculum at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. As ‘feminist educators’ of this recently revised programme, we identify the mounting hegemony of postfeminist and neoliberal ideologies as key contextual challenges to our endeavour, coupled with the legacy of Dutch geography as a pragmatic, applied discipline. By zooming in on and collectively reflecting on our roles and practices in the courses we coordinate and teach, we delineate three strategies worth pursuing to achieve a feminist teaching agenda under the current political-institutional climate. The proposed strategies of valuing lived experiences, embodied immersive epistemologies, and partial local knowledges, are rooted in the main concerns of feminist-inspired research and help create and cultivate situated moments of connection, reflection, and learning. While these strategies are certainly not capable of subverting neoliberal and postfeminist tendencies on their own, we contend that they can be useful building blocks for feminist inspired teaching agendas beyond our discipline as they help expose traditional power hierarchies within and outside the classroom, as well as underscore the societal relevance of feminist thinking in times of increased social polarisation and reactionary politics.

This article explores how students experiment with unconventional and subversive research approaches in their BA theses. I draw on an (auto-) ethnographic case study of the Inquiry Otherwise Track (IOT): an extracurricular thesis programme I co-organised at Erasmus University College Rotterdam in 2023, which aimed to help students navigate the implications of feminist, decolonial, and artistic considerations in their graduation research. Highlighting the way my students and I navigated the tensions we encountered between established conceptions of ‘proper academic research’ and our open-ended, critical, and creative endeavours, this paper draws out three refrains that gave us the courage to face those tensions head-on: (1) focus on the intention that moves you, (2) make thought-feeling confluence, and (3) attend to what refusal opens up. I offer these refrains as useful pedagogical tools that could allow others to further develop and practice experimental, decolonial, and feminist inquiry.