Doing Feminisms in the Academy: Identity, Institutional Pedagogy and Critical Classrooms in India and the UK by Radhika Govinda

Author:Radhika Govinda [Govinda, Radhika]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zubaan Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
Published: 2020-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

9

Putting ‘Gender’ into Gender and Development

Reflections on Feminist Teaching and

Practice in Development Studies

MEGAN HARRINGTON

The discussion felt familiar, and so did my place within it, as the students around me engaged in debate during a tutorial session for a development studies course on which I was a course tutor. The undergraduate course, offered at the University of Edinburgh to students across a range of academic disciplines, brought together core and guest lecturers over a 10-week period to speak on topics related to social, economic and environmental sustainability in development. Weekly tutorial sessions augmented the bi-weekly lectures, where students were organised into small-group seminars to debate key issues from the course lectures and readings at the direction of the tutor. This particular week focused on the transformation of subsistence economies to market economies, and the students were studying the impact of ‘land grabs’ in the context of agro-industrial expansion in the Global South. The debate was heated. Was capitalist development in this context an opportunity for job creation and economic growth? Or were there alternative, more environmentally and socially sustainable possibilities, which might better address the needs of the ‘commons’, in the pursuit of development?

A young engineering student raised his hand, and put forward a passionate argument in favour of capitalist development. Yes, environmental issues were a concern, he conceded. But how was the transformation of the rural economy truly bad for the ‘commons’, in social or economic terms? There could be no development without job creation and GDP growth, he argued, and such capitalist expansion offered both. As long as environmental needs were taken into account, what more was there to argue about?

Several students nodded, convinced by his argument; others prepared themselves to respond. As first-year undergraduates, most students began the course from a starting position of familiarity with the hegemony of neo-liberal economic development. Through this course, armed with an essential reading list and material presented during course lectures, the students had freshly been exposed to rebuttals to that hegemony, which, for many, represented their first engagement with academic counterarguments in these debates. As I looked across the room - assorted students from disciplinary backgrounds as disparate as biology, ecology, economics, engineering, history, political science, sociology, anthropology, and even English literature - I considered how to proceed. I had been working with these students for several weeks, and had come to understand the difficult process of unlearning in this development studies classroom. Even the mere suggestion that growth, job creation and capitalist expansion were phenomena to be questioned was, for some, already a radical position.

But as a feminist scholar, a former gender and development (GAD) practitioner, and a current Ph.D. in international development applying feminist analysis to the study of agro-industrial development in southern Africa, I felt this was perhaps a necessary opportunity to introduce feminist teaching to this non-feminist classroom. Just like my past experience of being the lone feminist voice in teams of non-feminist development consultants, I now found myself within my teaching as the lone feminist voice within a non-feminist development classroom.

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