CfP – next volume of the Teaching with Gender book series

Call for papers:

Teaching with Feminist Politics of Responsibility in Times of Crisis

For: ATGENDER Teaching with Gender Book Series

Editors: Beatriz Revelles Benavente and Ana M. González Ramos

The focus of this newest volume in the Teaching with Gender book series is on teaching politics of responsibility in and outside of feminist classes in contemporary times of a transversal crisis. The Teaching with Gender book series addresses challenges and possibilities of teaching about women and gender, discussing pedagogical, theoretical and political dimensions of learning and teaching. Teaching feminist politics of responsibility nowadays means at the same time radically questioning racialized and sexualized epistemologies (Athanasiou 2013) and acting against new conservative ‘rationality’. The Teaching with Feminist Politics of Responsibility in Times of Crisis volume aims to shed light upon three particular dimensions of this topic which will structure the book: first, by revisiting how can we reconfigure a feminist politics of responsibility “able to respond” (Haraway, 2008; Barad, 2007) or engage with contemporary crises; second, by conceptualizing crisis and explaining how it is transforming contemporary societies and affecting individual vulnerabilities and institutional structures; and third by offering practical cases from different European locations in which crisis and responsibility have served to reformulate contemporary feminist pedagogies, altering curriculums, reframing institutions, and affect the process of teaching and learning. The relevance of the topic cuts across many of the established feminist journals with recent special issues including “Gender and crisis in Global Politics” (International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2013); “Responsibility and Identity Global Justice” (Hypathia, 2011); and “Feminism and the politics of austerity” (Feminist review, 2015).

In this volume, we want to review the key concepts of feminist politics, responsibility and crisis through and with a feminist practice of teaching and learning by focusing on local and regional areas of Europe. How can we enact feminist political responses to the neoliberal conceptualizations of contemporary crisis? How can these articulate processes of teaching and learning in and out of the classroom responsible and “respond-able” to society? We invite interested scholars to answer these and other questions by connecting the three main areas of feminism: theory, practice and pedagogy.

We further invite authors to review different concepts of responsibility such as “self-responsabilitation” (McLead, 2015), care and responsibility (Young, 2011), absent responsibility (Ahmed, 2014) or relational responsibilities (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2008). We are interested in reflecting on specific feminist political practices for concrete problems dealing with the many materializations of contemporary crisis such as an unequal distribution of economic resources, the refugees problematic, the environmental crisis, neo-liberalism in academia, etc. These issues open up another set of relevant questions that authors might want to address in their contributions:

These issues open up another set of relevant questions that authors might want to address in their contributions:

• What kinds of feminist responses are emerging at the classrooms?
• How are the different feminist political movements enacting alternatives to this multilayered crisis?
• How are these practices materially reconfiguring the classroom and shaping knowledge production and distribution?
• How can we imagine a feminist politics of respond-abilities?
• How are these concepts such as crisis, responsibility and teaching reconfiguring contemporary feminist politics?
• How to critically respond to various forms of human deprivation coercive dispossession and explotation of various kinds under the modes of capitalism and neoliberal governmentality?
• How to find ethical ways of objecting cultural racism and xenophobia?
• In which way feminist responsibility resonates to the claim of decolonizing epistemology to incorporate a subjugated perspective (class, antiracist, non-western) and its liberating modes of knowledge?
• How to evolve all cognitive areas of feminist engagement against oppressive sociopolitical relations in order to respond to the injustice suffered by women recalling for feminist empowerment, solidarity and sociality?

The editors welcome proposals for chapters from different European regions. Abstracts should be 800 – 1000 words maximum excluding references.

The deadline for receiving proposals will be 15^th of March. You can do that by submitting the abstracts to: info@atgender-test.wp.hum.uu.nl; brevelles@uoc.edu; or agonzalezram@uoc.edu

Notifications of acceptance: 10^th of April

* Full papers will be 3000 words.

* *The editors will organize a book session for potential authors at the ATGENDER Spring Conference: “Spaces of Feminist Learning & Teaching – queering movements, translations & dynamics” (Utrecht, 2016). Please indicate when you submit your proposal whether you will be present at the conference and will participate in the session. Attendance at the conference is not compulsory for potential authors; abstracts by scholars who are unable to come to the Utrecht conference will also be considered.

Download the .pdf version of this CfP here