Nothing wasted: engaging values and the imagination. How can working with feminist speculative fictions enthuse and engage students with social justice and sustainability in an age of austerity?

Abstract

In the context of contemporary higher education, post white paper, ‘Students at the heart of the system’ [BIS, 2011. Students at the heart of the system [online]. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/31384/11-944-higher-education-students-at-heart-of-system.pdf, (Accessed 5 Feb 2014), in which funding and commodification of learning and of students dominate university mission statements and agendas, it is crucial that we collaborate with our students to engage imagination and critical faculties with issues of value, and of social justice. Teaching and researching contemporary feminist speculative fictions and feminist critical practice offer a priceless opportunity to make a difference, to challenge the intellectual impoverishment that this new austerity brings with it. Learning and teaching research into threshold concepts and signature pedagogies combine here with feminist critical practice in a discussion of teaching two speculative fictions which engage criticality and values: Atwood [Atwood, 2003. Oryx and Crake. New York: Nan A. Talese.) and Hopkinson [Hopkinson, 1996. A habit of waste. Skin folk. New York: Aspect, 183–202] each of which critiques flawed societies using tropes of waste, and rejection of difference. Each suggests recovery from damage done in the name of austerity, and imagines futures for the critical imagination, social justice, self-worth and agency.

Keywords::

• austerity
• waste
• feminist critical thinking
• values
• imagination
• social justice
• sustainability

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gina Wisker

Gina Wisker is a Professor of higher education and contemporary literature at the University of Brighton where she is the head of the Centre for Learning and Teaching. She is also an Extraordinary Professor at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. Gina's work is in contemporary women's Gothic and postcolonial writing, including Margaret Atwood: An Introduction to Critical Views of her Fiction, 2012; Teaching African American Women's Writing, 2010; Horror Fiction, 2005; short books on Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf; and essays on postcolonial women's Gothic and on women's vampire writing. Gina's other publications are on learning teaching, and doctoral supervision including The Postgraduate Research Handbook 2001, 2007 and The Good Supervisor 2005, 2012. Gina is the current chair of the Contemporary Women's Writing Association and the SEDA Scholarship and Research committee.