Teaching Heterodox Economics in a Feminist Perspective by Using Students’ Written Diaries on Consumption

ABSTRACT

Teaching heterodox economics, under a feminist perspective, involves motivating students to add complexity to human nature, to critically reflect on the social nature of economic processes, and to recognize the coexistence of several models, challenging the mainstream idea of the existence of only one economic model, that of rational choice. This paper argues that the use of students’ written diaries can serve as a useful feminist pedagogical tool for reaching these learning goals. Students’ written diaries on daily consumption allow them to create a more inclusive learning environment engaging all students in ‘practicing’ economics and helping them to understand the implications of unrealistic theoretical hypotheses, empirically ascertaining that consumers’ choices could not be explained as a process of optimization but as a social process where identities, social values and norms should be considered.

KEYWORDS:

• Students’ diaries
• consumption
• feminist economics
• feminist pedagogy

JEL CODES:

• A20
• B54
• D12

Acknowledgements

The authors are deeply grateful to two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions. They have also benefited from comments received at the 30th IAFFE Annual Conference (Geneve, June 2022) and the 1st International Conference in Education and Scholarship (London, November 2022). Usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 We mainly refer to Rethinking Economics (www.rethinkeconomics.org), a student-led non-profit international organisation founded in 2011, but also to the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Young Scholar’s Initiative (https://ysi.ineteconomics.org/).

2 See http://www.reteacheconomics.org/.

3 To account for the conceptual pluralism in the field of feminist economics is beyond the scope of our analysis, however we are aware that to teach feminist economics implies a set of approaches. For sure it is important to make students familiar with the fact that, since its institutionalisation, feminist economics has rejected a single definition, favouring the diversity of methodological approaches and research topics that are integral to the development of a feminist economics. It can be seen as a forum or better a home for diverse dissident feminist views, methods and patterns in economics. Consequently, in the multiplicity of approaches to feminist economics, it is inevitable that each proposed teaching method will adopt only some of these approaches and not others.

4 Critical or liberatory pedagogy pursues the classroom empowerment of oppressed/silent students, namely people who are non-white, working class, poor, female and culturally different.

5 For example, Lucas (1987) does not fail to point out in his analyses that the neoclassical model is the only construct of truth we have in economics (p. 108).

6 The definition of economic activity encompassing unpaid work as well as paid work is at the basis of the social provisioning approach (SPA) outlined by Power (2004) that in feminist economics provides a useful methodological starting point to analyse power differentials, agency, and how economic outcomes and processes are shaped by gender, which intersects with other social identities (Berik and Kongar 2021). SPA is a classical concept linked to the idea of social reproduction in the political economy of the labour markets (Picchio 1992) and its value (Mezzadri 2019).

7 Please refer to the various articles published in 2021 in Feminist economics’ special issues on feminist economic perspectives on the COVID-19 pandemic, available here https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rfec20/27/1-2

8 The survey was conducted in January 2022; for further information contact the authors.

9 Womanism is a theoretical perspective that originated in feminist theory that incorporates intersections of sex, race, economics, culture, politics, and social norms that ‘constantly engaged in the work of dismantling and fighting all sites of oppressive social structures that restrict and circumscribe the agency of black/African women’ (Phillips 2006, p. xxiv).

10 Students narrate their own experiences by proposing examples that consider their sex, cultural and social backgrounds that can be used to explain, in class, economic and social phenomena with an intersectional perspective.

11 The exercise was proposed for 3 years (A.Y. 2014/2015; 2015/2016; 2016/2017) involving a total of 136 students of whom 46% were women.

12 More personal characteristics can be asked to students according to the level of diversity of the class (i.e., nationality, race, migrant status, religion etc.).

13 The Keynesian consumption function, expressed in the formula , predicts that consumption is a linear function of income (Y) with a positive intercept at $\overline{C}$. The c coefficient, which varies from 0 to 1, is the marginal propensity to consume that expresses the share that is consumed on each additional euro of income.