Practise what you teach: Feminist pedagogy and life beyond the classroom

This seminar will be a hybrid event: 

Register for virtual seminar conducted on Zoom here.

Registration for in-person seminar conducted at SHHK Building is closed.

 

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Feminist pedagogy understands that the classroom can be a site for social transformation where commitments to equality and social justice are realised. It questions how hegemonic knowledges are produced, and the need to take seriously alternative sites and relations of knowledge production. Feminist geographers’ concerns about distribution and access to resources, infrastructure and services have foregrounded the relationship between distributive justice and the politics of recognition. These are innately spatial concerns. Drawing from my experiences in advocacy-based research and volunteering with a feminist LBTQ group in Singapore, I have been able to model for students what it means to ‘be the change I want to see’. This is a commitment to feminist change and transformation that is the cornerstone of its pedagogy. In this session I speak about the opportunities for implementing feminist pedagogical practices and the resultant challenges I have encountered. I also discuss how collaborating with groups and institutions outside the university has enabled me to make space for complex and critical discussions about gender and sexuality in and beyond the classroom.

 

About the Speaker:

Kamalini Ramdas is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. She is a feminist geographer who teaches courses in social theory, gender and geography. Her research interests include: queer and feminist theory, feminist pedagogy in geography education and LGBTQ+ advocacy research. Kamalini has published in leading interdisciplinary and Geography journals such as Environment and Planning A, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Gender Place and Culture, Geoforum and Urban Studies. She has also co-edited Untying the Knot: Marriage and Reality in Asian Marriage (with Gavin Jones; Singapore: NUS Press, 2004) and Changing Landscapes of Singapore: Old Tensions, New Discoveries (Singapore: NUS Press, 2013). Kamalini volunteers with Sayoni, a local LBTQ group in Singapore. She is committed to studying how community politics and activism can produce alternative spaces of care and possibility for marginalised groups in society.