Teaching Gender and Cultural Studies in Australia as Part of Asia: Reflections on Classroom Politics and Pedagogies

ABSTRACT

Gender and cultural studies is, at its core, a pedagogical project for social and political change. Students are invited to new ways of thinking and acting in the world, shaped by intellectual traditions evolving from various social movements around race, class and feminism in mostly Western nation-states. Our students’ imaginations are very much captured by these political possibilities, including international students whose reception and interpretation of these knowledges are filtered through different cultural contexts and in different language registers. Teaching gender and cultural studies in Australia with increasing numbers of international students from Asian countries presents a range of practical, intellectual, and ethical questions. How might we translate different intellectual traditions and languages across local and international student groups, in ways that enhance learning for both cohorts? How might we be implicated in the reshaping of international students’ imagination of their own genealogies, and their futurities? What colonising logics might unwittingly be reproduced in our curriculums that are expressly committed to the rhetoric and activism of decolonialism? Through the perspective of two classroom practitioners, this article investigates the challenges and possibilities of teaching Gender and Cultural Studies to local and international students in Australia.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender studies
• cultural studies
• politics
• pedagogy
• cross-cultural
• Australia
• Asia

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr Sara Tompkins for her kind comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shawna Tang

Dr Shawna Tang is Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She researches and teaches at the juncture of sexuality, gender and race. Her twitter handle is shawnatang.

Christen Cornell

Dr Christen Cornell is Research Fellow and Manager of Research Partnerships at the Australia Council for the Arts. She is also Honorary Associate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research areas include cultural studies, cultural policy, Inter-Asia cultural studies and urban studies. Currently she works in applied research on the social and cultural impacts of investment in the arts.