Critical Differences 

A Curriculum Development/Research Project

Possible tasks for interns, research assistants/partners, and independent studies

I am seeking student partners to support and advance my scholarship and teaching in several areas related to international women's and gender studies.  Students interested in internships or independent studies should review the following description of my overall project looking for ways that their own interests intersect with the project.  To apply for an independent study or internship, send me at gray@tcnj.edu or WGS Bliss Hall:

Contact me if you have questions about specific tasks a research assistant might undertake.

 

Critical Differences: Overview, goals, and planned activities for 2005-6

 

During the 2005-6 academic year I hope to make substantial progress on a book whose working title is Critical Differences.  I have developed a focus on transnational women’s studies in my teaching, conducting research to build syllabi that extend our capacities to teach and learn about an increasingly interlinked world. My aim in Critical Differences is to advance and consolidate this learning as a published scholarly project while contributing to interdisciplinary academic initiatives at TCNJ, the program in International Studies and the US Studies minor, in addition to the Women’s and Gender Studies program.

I began conceptualizing Critical Differences in January 2000 as a framework for integrating my teaching, scholarship, and service.  In 2001 I sketched out a book, began research for two chapters, and pre-wrote one chapter.  International events since that time have made this project both more unstable and more necessary.  The question that guides Critical Differences is:  how can we embed a just recognition of differences in the models of critical thinking that we apply to pedagogy and scholarship?    

As a broad project, Critical Differences explores teaching methods and institutional structures that extend studies of difference into global perspectives.  The theoretical starting point for this study is a distinction between diversity as an institutionalized celebration of cultures and difference as a way of describing processes of intercultural conflict and change amid the asymmetrical stakes of globalization.  Transnational feminist theory cautions us not to approach cultural differences only comparatively, but rather to seek the ways that historical movements of people, goods, ideas, and practices construct and transform those differences.  Peggy MacIntosh’s work on privilege adds to this model the insight that neither the critical study of systems of privilege and oppression nor appreciative immersion in varying cultural frameworks is sufficient; that, if we are to produce new knowledge, we must do both together.  A currently unfolding discussion among transcultural feminist philosophers, legal theorists, and social scientists offers a promising methodology of critical “decentering,” the creation of knowledge that advances interests across differences.  Feminist philosopher Maria Lugones and critical race theorist Isabelle Gunning in particular have provided practical guidelines for decentering, or “world-traveling,” which demand that we not only study the “other,” but that we study ourselves through the other’s knowledge.   

Critical Differences also draws on the intersecting literature of critical pedagogy, feminist pedagogy, affective pedagogy, and active learning, in addition to the theoretical fields I described earlier in this proposal.  There is also a growing new literature by international scholars on globalizing women’s studies, including journal articles, special issues of several leading journals (e.g. Transformations 2004), and edited volumes (e.g. Sanchez-Casal and Macdonald, Twenty-First Century Feminist Classrooms:  Pedagogies of Identity and Difference, 2002).  Critical Differences will contribute a reflective account of specific pedagogical applications to this ongoing discussion as we work toward a richer understanding of the critical thinking tools needed for a globalized curriculum.              

Like my prior scholarship in American cultural history, Critical Differences is concerned with traumatic temporal breaks, historical as well as individual.  Those of us who teach global women’s issues see trauma registered in our students’ written and embodied responses to their learning.  Many students speak of how the course content challenges everything they had learned before, everything their families told them about what their lives would be like.  I came to understand that these students were undergoing an initiation into a traumatic new kind of knowledge—something like a rite of passage.  So, while Critical Differences is about teaching transnational content, it is also very much concerned with the construction of American identities.  Critical pedagogy for a globalized curriculum must confront a two-centuries-old cultural investment in producing distinctively American norms of childhood.   American childhood has been an arena where successive adult generations have redefined their own historical struggles to enjoy freedom as their children’s freedom from—a process that has required that adulthood be continually deferred and that “other” children, as well as events that disrupt the norm, be marginalized, stigmatized, erased, or appropriated to reinforce the norm.

The book will include four chapters building largely on my curriculum development and classroom experience with specific topic areas:

Chapter 1:  “Quasimodo and the Reconstruction of Kunsan.”  This chapter is a narrative entry into the complexity of stereotype and stigma as transcultural messages.  The narrative takes as an illustrative case study an international project in post-war Kunsan, Korea, where I lived for two years of my childhood.  The central task of this chapter is to “study myself” as a white American girl child through the transnational postwar encounters taking place in Kunsan. My further research has led me to both historical and contemporary amplifications of the framework for this chapter:  scholarship on military prostitution, a critical topic in transnational feminism, and the current transnational circulation of raced and gendered typology through Korean popular culture (specifically anime-based online gaming). 

ACTIVITY FOR 2005-6:  Complete the amplification of this chapter.  Submit for publication as an essay.

Chapter 2. “ Borrowed rites.”   The broad theoretical concerns of this study originated with a series of questions I have explored in teaching about female genital cutting (FGC), a practice that traumatically inducts girl children into ideals of female adulthood.  I discovered that learning about FGC shook students into new levels of critical thinking about gender oppression, but often at the cost of their demonizing the cultures in which FGC is practiced.  I learned to guide their absorption of this “shock of learning” by raising questions about Western practices that correspond ideologically to FGC, introducing debates about cross-cultural applications of human rights, and looking closely at grassroots movements to end FGC that have arisen within the communities where it is practiced.  The preliminary draft of this chapter draws on feminist theory, my teaching, the writing of my students, the experiences of activists, and illustrations of how internet research enriches our opportunities for activism even as the medium raises problems about what it represents, how, and for whose purposes.  Preliminary products of this work have included a conference talk, “I Study Dead Women Poets But Teach Global Feminisms,” and the first published portion of this project, an essay for a special section on globalizing feminist pedagogy inTransformations, the journal of the New Jersey Project. 

I have continuing questions about the uses we make of FGC in U.S. college classes.  Learning through shock destabilizes learners, opening them to authoritative direction in reorganizing their sense of the world.  What interests do we serve in the ways we teach FGC?  What critical issues, global or domestic, might we be marginalizing in favor of a focus on FGC?  How can knowledge of this practice raise our awareness of ourselves and our place in the world, rather than numb or deflect such awareness?

ACTIVITY FOR 2005-6:  Conduct research on how US faculty present “FGM” in college courses—their contexts, learning goals, and the teaching materials they choose.  Set up an interdisciplinary focus group at TCNJ for raising and debating questions such as those in the previous paragraph.  Integrate findings into the existing chapter draft.

Chapter 3.  “Crisis learning since 9/11/01.”   I initially defined this chapter in collaboration with WGST/Philosophy major Christina Holmes for her Phi Kappa Phi funded project “Knowing the Difference:  Feminist Standpoint Theory and Gender Apartheid,” applying feminist epistemology to a study of print and internet representations of women’s oppression under the Taliban. The shape of this chapter has shifted with changes in the US’s relationship with the Muslim world since the fall of 2001.  The US has engaged in two military campaigns, both partially justified by claims that women were being liberated.   The “crisis learning” experiences of my Women in War and Peacemaking students during the spring of 2002 further shaped the conceptual framework of this chapter.  With readings in critical decentering and affective learning as their starting point, they spent half a semester focusing on the experiences of Afghan women from the time of the Soviet occupation until the fall of the Taliban, together with international and independent coverage of events following the attacks of September 11.

ACTIVITY FOR 2005-6:  Continue to follow up on consequences of the “war on terror” for women of Afghanistan and Iraq.  Revise Global Women Writers syllabus for Spring 2006 as a course in nonfiction writing by women in the post-9/11/01 world.  Co-write a course in feminist international relations for the 2006-7 academic year to engage students in research and analysis on the aftermath of US regime change interventions from multiple perspectives, emphasizing the work of local and transnational women’s organizations such as Women Living Under Muslim Law and the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq.