Teaching gender in and through uncertainty

Abstract

Where higher education classrooms can be sites of both cultural contestation and epistemic violence, this article examines the critical and ethical value of building uncertainty into our teaching of gender. The reflective piece draws on my own experience in a new subject at Monash University, and situates this one very small site of knowledge production within the wider processes that shape the (neoliberal) Australian university, and the discipline of sociology. I elaborate a theoretical framework for embracing epistemic uncertainty that is informed by feminist pedagogies and begins with a feminist provocation, and present my practical strategies for organizing knowledge within this framework, as well as the strategies of the students themselves. An analysis of the students’ project work (collaborative virtual exhibitions) reveals their capacity to navigate uncertainty through an interpersonal and contextualized approach to knowledge, and produce new learning spaces which unsettle harmful truths and make material new realities.

I did not understand that feminism was a way of challenging the universal. I did not appreciate how questioning sexism is one of the most profound ways of disrupting what we take to be given and thus learning about how the given is given. Feminist theory taught me that the universal is what needs to be exploded. Feminist theory taught me that reality is usually just someone else's tired explanation. (Ahmed, 2020, p. 29)

Despite increasing diversification of student and staff cohorts, Australian universities are still mired in elite, patriarchal and colonial foundations (Anderson & Riley, 2021, p. 229). The discipline of sociology exists within these foundations and within a global system of knowledge which, like the more material political and economic processes, play a critical role in inequality today (Collyer, 2021, p. 52). In both education and scholarship, there persist patterns of knowing that are considered authoritative and worthy of study, together with inadequate attention to the unevenness of these epistemic processes. There is also a lack of motivation or incentive to embrace alternate epistemic frameworks and an expectation in universities that ‘diverse students and staff must adapt to existing institutional and educational cultures’ (Anderson & Riley, 2021, p. 229). Connell et al. (2017, p. 24) note that knowledge is not an abstract ‘social construct’ but a ‘social product, generated by and embodied in particular forms of work’, and urge us to look closely at the material conditions and sites of knowledge production: what are the practices of knowledge workers in the publication of scholarship and in higher education classrooms?

This reflective piece takes as its basis one very small site of knowledge production – the classroom of a new Gender Studies unit at Monash University ¹ – and examines not just what we teach and how, but also how we might foster a reflexive and curious approach to epistemologies in ourselves and our students. The unit in question, ‘Understanding Gender 2’ (G2), centres on gender knowledges and adopts a sociological approach to knowledge that is informed by feminist pedagogies. It was developed by a colleague at Monash University and myself, and this article draws on my personal experience of organizing material, teaching the unit, and working with the students, to present a critical praxis.

The conceptual framework begins with a basic feminist provocation. In Sara Ahmed's description above, feminism is the home of critical theory: a place from which to question what was previously considered natural or default, disrupt established truths and universals, and get at the very nature of ‘how we know things’, implicating the social and the bodily in this how. For, as Ahmed explains, sensation is central to feminist epistemologies; diverse experiences of the world already exist and already foster different ways of knowing, but those which conflict with the predominating ‘tired explanation’ are silenced or disregarded.

With attention to the danger of silencing alternate ways of knowing in the classroom, this article proposes assigning positive value to epistemic uncertainty as a critical and ethical tool for teaching and learning. With G2 as a case study, I first elaborate this theoretical framework and then go on to present some of the practical strategies we adopted in the unit to navigate uncertainty through interpersonal and historicized approaches to knowledge. I then turn to the students’ projects and analyse the way students worked within this framework to produce their own learning spaces, in the form of collaborative virtual exhibitions. While the classroom is not always credited as a space from which to theorize and do research, and may be de-hierarchized within academic discourse, it provides a creativity and flexibility that is sometimes absent in research practices and is here embraced as a space of co-production and reinvention (Harley & Natalier, 2013, p. 391). Moreover, while student outcomes are often undervalued, this piece centres the students’ exhibitions as a critical and illuminating part of knowledge work (Wagh, 2021, p. 7) and includes students in the publication process; they were sent a draft of the article and given the opportunity to read and respond.

My analysis is informed by a central tension between the teaching context and pedagogical approach. Here, I pick up on studies by Nash (2013) and La Paglia et al. (2021) which point to a conflict between a neoliberal and post-feminist climate, on the one hand, and a sociology of gender and feminist pedagogies, on the other, framing this conflict as potentially transformative. In the period in question, in semester two 2020, Melbourne was in its second Covid-19 related lockdown and the teaching context was characterized by isolated and digital modes of working, studying and living, as well as by widespread job losses and funding cuts in higher education. A few months earlier, the sudden shut down of Australia's borders had caused a significant and unexpected drop in international student fees, calling attention to the precarious financial viability of the sector, as well as highlighting and accelerating underlying processes of neoliberalization.

I follow La Paglia et al. (2021) in acknowledging the need to define neoliberalization and, like these authors, refer to Grzanka et al.'s (2016, p. 298) nuanced study which characterizes neoliberalism as a series of policies that privatize, deregulate and promote competition; these policies are not hands-off but rather entail a ‘clandestine’ ‘structuring of processes and promotion of self-monitoring’. In Australian higher education, recent changes (read reductions) to government funding have been presented as impartial, in line with job-market projections, but have in fact been inequitable and biased, impacting different disciplines and groups in different ways (with women and First Nations people most likely to experience negative consequences). ² With attention to economic efficiency, we have seen the emergence of a transactional account of higher education, whereby the individual getting a job is seen as of the utmost importance and the public good, construed in terms of civics and social change, is often neglected (Blackmore, 2020, p. 1335; Doidge and Doyle, 2020, pp. 2, 4). In the European context, Angeliki Alvanoudi notably describes a situation where the student is a ‘customer’ who buys a ‘product’ (knowledge), ultimately entering the market as a commodity themself (Alvanoudi, 2009, p. 39). In this account, knowledge is a fixed entity to be transferred from expert to student (not a social product, built through dialogue and contestation), and education is more likely to perpetuate hegemonic modes of knowing than harness its potential for social change and transgression. ³ These same patterns materialize in Australia so that we see an opposition in education systems which are ‘privatized and homogenized but also active sites of cultural contestation’ (Connell et al., 2017, p. 32). The neoliberal focus on the individual decontextualizes and abstracts, enabling patriarchal and colonial foundations to remain unarticulated and uninterrogated, and erasing a framework with which to work towards structural change. In a time of crisis and uncertainty, such as we saw in 2020, this tension between education as information transfer and education as ‘places of transformative education, responsive to the challenges in the world’ is exacerbated (Ahad-Legardy and Poon, 2018, p. 11).

The discipline of sociology sits uneasily within this context, as does a sociological approach to teaching gender. On the one hand, neoliberal logics, and related recent funding changes, suggest the discipline has little worth – although the purported poor job prospects are belied by the overall employment outcomes of graduates (QILT, 2021, pp. 10–11) – and enact effects upon it, such as privileging vocational skills, assessing output and value by standardized and reductive metrics and encouraging alignment with the status quo (see Collyer, 2021, p. 52). ⁴ On the other hand, sociology, often understood to have positive social change and improvement for social groups at its heart (Collyer and Williams, 2021, p. 7), offers the tools to interrogate the biases in the very epistemological frameworks that devalue the discipline, and to foster this reflexivity in a new generation. La Paglia et al. (2021, pp 387, 388) note that Women's Studies and Gender Studies resist the neoliberal and post-feminist thinking that defines the current climate, and that students ultimately find the discipline relevant to their everyday lives. A sociological approach to gender encourages students to exercise what C. Wright Mills calls the ‘sociological imagination’, to see the individual as ‘embedded within social, structural and historical contexts’, connect private and public, and understand the structures in which they live, work and study (Dallalfar, 2011, p. 116). More specifically, the feminist tradition enables students to see the intersections between material and social spheres and epistemic and cognitive spheres, resisting frameworks that would separate these to conceal and further inflict epistemic violence (Brunner, 2021, p. 204).

Overview of the unit

It is within this context that we developed Understanding Gender 2 as the second of two new first-year units (G1 and G2) for the Gender Studies Major at Monash University. While housed in Sociology, these units were available to students across the Arts faculty and were designed to be relevant and accessible to a diverse disciplinary cohort, not least in opposition to discourse which positions the field as only for marginalized groups and those who are marked as ‘gendered’. G1 and G2 were also conceived as ‘flexible’ units; even before the Covid-19 pandemic, the intention was that they be delivered online and in largely asynchronous rather than synchronous modes, so that students could work through the content at a time and place that suited them.

This flexible mode of learning is increasingly common, in part for its economic efficiency, from the university's perspective, and in part for its accessibility, for students who are juggling other commitments or are physically remote. The apparent advantage of ‘empowering’ students to learn ‘independently’ can, however, perpetuate inequalities rather than erase them (Nash, 2013, p. 413). Our first challenge, then, was to foster an interpersonal and situated model of learning within a context that promotes independence, individualized outcomes and disembodiment. In 2020, during Melbourne's extended lockdowns, not only did we have limited ‘face-to-face’ time, we were also logging in to Zoom and the university's learning platforms from our own bedrooms and office spaces. A second challenge was to create space for students to question assumptions and build new knowledges within an asynchronous format, which would seem to lend itself to the transfer of static information from authority to individual student. And, finally, we were cognizant of the tension between the sort of thinking we wanted to foster in students and a university structure which requires clear rubrics for assessment, number grades for outcomes, and job-marketable skills.

Our central aim in G2 was to draw attention to the way gender-based thinking has exposed the biases and power structures that inform fields of knowledge and what we think we know. We organized the unit around four modules: ‘Gender and History’, ‘Gender and Science’, ‘Gender and Politics’ and ‘Gender and Language’ and invited students to consider what a gendered lens revealed about knowledge production in these fields. Each of these modules focused on a simple question, along the lines of: How does gender shape history/science/politics/language and vice versa? What has changed in these disciplines with the emergence of feminist studies, queer studies, intersectionality, trans studies? What might still be unknowable within our collective frameworks of knowledge and outside the limits of current academic discourse?

In keeping with the unit's central focus, we assessed students on their capacity to articulate gender knowledges to a general public, in an explanatory Conversation type article, and to reflect on their new learnings in a reflective essay. This work of unsettling and translating epistemologies then fed into the final assessment task, which anchors this piece, where students became organizers of knowledge themselves and developed a virtual exhibition in a group. Here, we presented some broad themes (with topics like ‘Brain Sex’, ‘Wise Women and Witches’, which loosely aligned with content from different modules) for students to select from and refine, depending on what was meaningful to them, and instructed them to ‘create a narrative about your topic that shows effective use of gender analysis’.

To facilitate this assessment structure and the central place of collaborative project work in G2, we divided the 12-week unit into two parts:

Eight weeks of educator-organized knowledge: content was delivered in asynchronous but interactive online lessons and a fortnightly synchronous tutorial. We also had weekly drop-in Q&A sessions.

Four weeks for students to develop skills as organizers of knowledge themselves: these designated ‘project weeks’ involved student-led and facilitated Zoom catch-ups, a ‘show and tell’ session, and group independent learning. We continued to hold weekly drop-in Q&A sessions.

While the reduced face-to-face hours of this format aligned with a flex-model of ‘independent’ learning, our intention was not to leave students to their own devices but to facilitate collaborative knowledge building. Interestingly, Harley and Natalier (2013, p. 391) present the co-production of knowledge that is central to feminist pedagogies as a positive response to the neoliberalization of the university and problems such as the increased casualization of university educators; such an approach may fail to address underlying problems, but it does resist neoliberal ideologies and create space for critique of the institution as it stands. Similarly, group project work encourages the feminist pedagogical principles of learning-with and de-hierarchizing traditional sources of authority but can be at odds with what students want or expect, since importance is attached to individualized outcomes and grades, and open and self-directed tasks conflict with the belief that education is about the transfer of expert information.

While we cannot entirely alleviate these tensions, our transparent theoretical framing of the unit, which I will elaborate in the next section, sought to prompt reflection on teaching and learning processes, as did the format of the assessments themselves. We used the term ‘exhibition’ within this sociological context to assist students in reflecting on the materiality and humanity of knowledge production. To scaffold the students’ work, we spent time discussing the role of the curator: what does it mean to include certain voices in the exhibition and discard others? To use certain colours, orders, to include only what is traditionally thought of as ‘academic’? What role does the audience play, as part of a knowledge-building community? We advised students to treat their exhibitions as public documents and made it clear that their work would be available for use by other students and academics, as a pedagogical resource. ⁵ The questions of the curator then gather substance, and the students’ efforts contribute, in turn, to public knowledge production.

Finally, we designed the format of the assessment to give weight to the process of constructing meaning, as well as to the interaction between individual and group learning. Students presented their collaborative virtual exhibition on an ePortfolio platform, together with an individual workbook (made up of research, design ideas, plans, reflections, etc.) that collated their working. As Jones and Shelton (2011, pp. 21–2) define it, a ‘portfolio is a medium for reflection through which the builder constructs meaning, makes the learning process transparent and learning visible, crystallizes insights, and anticipates future direction’.

Building uncertainty into knowledge

As we explored with students in the unit, through examples such as the gendered and racialized delivery of healthcare, a failure to interrogate and reflect on colonial and patriarchal ways of knowing has historically enabled the establishment and circulation of truths which inflict harm. In building the content, we sought out knowers, from diverse contributions to the scholarship, who could question and disrupt, helping us to work into uncertainty. Feminist thinkers, particularly women of colour who have navigated oppression along racial and gendered lines, have figured prominently in this domain (Medina, 2021, pp. 410–11). In 1988, Gayatri Spivak notably described the practice of ‘epistemic violence’ as ‘the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other’ (Spivak, 1988, p. 280). The universal I, here embodied by the white man, assumes authority to be the knower and believes that ‘objects, nature, and Others (are seen) to be known or ultimately knowable’ (Ellsworth, 1992, p. 112). Considering himself separate from his object of study, this knower readily defines and pigeonholes others; he also has no need to understand, or even consider different ways of knowing.

In 2007, Miranda Fricker notably coined the term ‘epistemic injustice’ to describe uneven and damaging race-class-gender-based patterns of knowledge production. Fricker's (2007) work distinguishes between ‘testimonial injustice’, where speakers are denied credibility based on their identity, and ‘hermeneutical injustice’, where people struggle to understand or articulate their reality – yet have that sense of it, that Sara Ahmed describes – since established ways of knowing have been formed through the experiences and histories of dominant social groups. Adding important complexity to these definitions, and following Spivak's work on the silencing of marginalized groups, Kristie Dotson (2011, pp. 242–4) makes a further distinction between ‘testimonial quieting’ by others and ‘testimonial smothering’ of oneself.

The former is particularly relevant here for its promotion of an active unknowing. Indeed, for those in privileged positions, there is frequently advantage in not paying attention to other perspectives and in not scaling the ‘epistemic difference’, or gap in worldviews, caused by different social situations (Bergin, 2002, p. 198). This materializes in different ways and has been explored in a vast range of fields. In her work in queer theory, for example, Eve Sedgwick (1993, pp. 23–4) elaborates the idea of a ‘privileged unknowing’. ⁶ She gives the example of the way rape laws historically encouraged ignorance; perpetrators could be cleared by claiming not to notice what the woman wanted or didn't want. While largely beyond the scope of this article, thinking in this domain depends on a large body of decolonial scholarship which has illuminated the failure of Western epistemology to acknowledge its limits, sometimes with the same terminology of a (colonial) ‘unknowing’, as an ignorance which is ‘aggressively made and reproduced’ (Vimalassery et al., 2016). ⁷

Importantly for this piece, such approaches have fostered a recognition of knowledge as power-bound and fundamentally partial or limited. Here, feminist standpoint theories have been particularly influential; by connecting epistemology to social position and embodiment, they not only validated previously uninterrogated or disregarded ways of knowing but also challenged decontextualized and universal approaches. Again, women of colour have pioneered this field and, in the Australian context, we owe much of our understanding of the complexity of speaking from place to Indigenous practices and scholars in Indigenous Studies. Aileen Moreton-Robinson notably elaborates an Indigenous woman's standpoint theory; inherently distinct from a white experience (2000, p. xvi), this standpoint centres the relationship between the body, country and sovereignty in epistemology (2013, p. 335). In the academy, where Indigenous scholars are in a ‘battle to authorise Indigenous knowledges and methodologies as legitimate and valued components of research’, Moreton-Robinson outlines the importance of developing this standpoint theory as a means of doing research and analysis, and of producing knowledge (2013, pp. 331, 333).

It follows that, in G2, we were interested in fostering an opposing sort of unknowing to that outlined above: an active consciousness and openness to alternate and not-yet formulated epistemologies which has the potential to be transformative. ⁸ In the classroom, a sociology of knowledge and a feminist pedagogical approach provide modes of going beyond simple awareness of plurality, ambivalence, or learning to disagree, to resist and shift unjust epistemic patterns. With an emphasis on ‘knowledge’ as that which is socially produced within a context, rather than ‘information’ (Nieto Ángel et al., 2020, p. 141), and on the way ‘systems of knowledge intersect with systems of oppression’ (Weber, 2010, p. 128), students come together in the ‘feminist’ classroom to pool different perspectives and, critically, build new commonalities.

Budgeon (2021, p. 250) makes some important distinctions between feminist epistemologies and post-truth rhetoric; while proponents of post-truth use plurality to argue that all claims to truth are equally valid, and that what one feels offers unmediated access to reality, feminist epistemologies, with attention to those social sites of knowledge production, connect personal experience and knowledge but understand reflection, evaluation and theory as critical to how we interpret plurality. The feminist project is then about ‘provid(ing) the tools to analyse the conditions under which “truth” can be claimed’ (Budgeon, 2021, p. 262).

A key element is dialogue and working with others in a ‘thinking-with, interrelationality, solidarity, and comparative cross-cultural analysis of power and oppression’ (Ramos and Revelles-Benavente, 2017, p. 8). In a unit like G2, efforts to put different epistemologies in conversation apply not only to classroom discussion but to the organization of course material (readings, guest lectures, forum discussions, case studies …). Whether the ‘conversation’ takes place in person or largely online, through different media, equal participation or representation is difficult in practice since the power relations and dominant cultural frameworks which impact any object of study also shape the learning context. Crucially, feminist pedagogies acknowledge and work with the fact that institutions, teachers, syllabi are not neutral but implicated. By recognizing this blurring of sites of knowledge production with private and public life, they aim to see the classroom for what it is: ‘an extension of the world in which we live’ rather than a ‘mess-free mechanical’ environment (Kishimoto and Mwangi, 2009, p. 98).

In this ‘messy’ space, presuming that an educator can create the necessary conditions for students to share on an equal footing is problematic; for some groups, this sharing or ‘testimony’ may, by necessity rather than choice, be what bell hooks (2015, pp. ix, 7) calls a ‘talking back’, and may be unjustly perceived by others as ‘crazy’, ‘mad’ or ‘defiant’, and thus actively silenced. Kishimoto and Mwangi (2009, pp. 95–6) similarly suggest that efforts to create a ‘safe space’ in the classroom often carry assumptions about whose safety is important and whose voices should be privileged or tiptoed around. The authors propose, instead, a ‘contested’ space to unsettle dominant modes of knowing; discomfort is not avoided but pursued, since the alternative – a happy conformity – may harm women of colour (Kishimoto and Mwangi, 2009, p. 97). Marcelle Townsend-Cross (2018) also distinguishes between safety and comfort, pointing to the necessity of ‘uncomfortable pedagogies’, and Megan Boler (2004) outlines a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ where that active unknowing is framed in terms of what one does not want to know. Central to Boler's approach is facing the precarious foundations of our own identities, and practising a ‘collective witnessing’, where analysis of one's own perspective is always understood ‘in relation to others, and in relation to personal and cultural histories and material conditions’ (Boler, 2004, p. 204).

These approaches by no means erase the asymmetries that pervade the learning environment and structure discussion, but they can draw our attention to the problem of epistemic injustice, fostering what Medina (2013, p. 50) calls a ‘beneficial epistemic friction’ and encouraging redistribution of the labour of knowledge. Can assigning positive value to uncertainty and fostering an awareness of what one does not know or does not want to know alter who does the work of scaling those ‘epistemic differences’? And how do students, in their own creation of learning spaces, move beyond uncertainty and the simple acknowledgement of difference to take up more complex positions and articulate new realities?

Organizing knowledge: educators

As we created online lessons for the students to independently explore how gender knowledges have changed what we thought we knew (using examples noted above such as the delivery of healthcare, or the history of hysteria, or the violence of binary language), we were cognizant of the danger of perpetuating epistemic violence ourselves. In this asynchronous material, we wanted to make space for an uncertainty which was generative rather than confusing. As a cis white woman, I am part of a group which has historically centred itself in feminist epistemologies and excluded other voices (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1298; Moreton-Robinson, 2000, pp. xvii–xx). ⁹ Aware that our teaching team and many of the feminist thinkers that we called on as experts were also white women, given the make-up of the faculty, we did not want to subconsciously privilege Western knowledges, or position white women at the heart of feminism and its struggles.

Sulafa Zidani (2021) notes that simply drawing from an established canon can reinforce a certain way of knowing and suggests a ‘decolonized syllabus’ which centres key questions or themes, rather than canonical texts. In this way, different ways of knowing are more readily brought into the conversation and students can also include their own diverse experiences (Zidani, 2021, p. 974). For each of the different modules (Gender and History etc.), we collated and developed material from/in a range of sources (case studies, mini lectures, readings and other media), creating a platform for different perspectives and leaving space open for students to explore aspects that interested them and share their own examples in interactive forums and collective word clouds. This approach also works to ensure that students’ identities and experiences, including those who belong to marginalized groups, are not separate from education, including them as knowers themselves. ¹⁰

To take the example of ‘Gender and Language’, the online lesson began with reflective videos from experts in relevant fields. We asked colleagues to talk about the way that their own thinking, and their discipline more broadly, had been shaped by the emergence of gender knowledges. Rather than dictate the content, we encouraged these guest speakers too to draw from their own experience: what changed for you? One linguist, for example, spoke about her work on medical texts from the 17th century. She explained that, as an early career researcher some twenty years ago, she understood what was in the text to be all that was relevant for a linguist, before later realizing she had been ‘kidding herself’. As this guest points out, gender knowledges have since called attention to the bodies, social contexts and belief systems that produced these texts, highlighting the white male bias to an impartial or objective study of language and to how we understand English even today.

This sort of example primes students to consider their own experience at school and university and what biases might persist in epistemologies and in accepted modes of research, teaching and learning. Attention to gendered hierarchies and power relations in the online lesson content connects then to those broader questions, with which I began the article, about the university today: what is considered worthy of study (e.g. pop culture v. high art, Gender Studies v. Economics); which voices/genres/forms/languages have authority and which do not.

After watching reflective videos from guest experts, students navigate the online, asynchronous lessons themselves, working through diverse examples (teenage girls like Alicia Silverstone's character in Clueless, the connotations of African-American Vernacular English and Australian Aboriginal English, the language of queer Indigenous artist Mojo Juju) to consider the way bodies shape how we use and think about language, and to ‘connect mind/body and the personal and political’ (Shope, 2005, p. 58). Following the educator's description of her own transformative learning experience above, these sorts of examples aim to produce moments of discomfort and growth for students who are reckoning with subconscious and social biases related to ideas of standard English grammar, class and race. They are invited to reflect on the way they themselves, and the people around them, use English, or use other languages, and how these coexist in a global context. Students shared disparate examples that were relevant to them (e.g. someone learning Spanish shared masculine dominance in the language and the legacy of a culture of machismo promoted by Francisco Franco's authoritarian regime in Spain; another student brought up the recently released song by American rapper Cardi B WAP, ‘Wet-Ass Pussy’, and the gendered public reception of explicit lyrics), having been encouraged to see these as connected to class material rather than ‘an obstacle to their path to real knowledge’ (Shope, 2005, p. 58).

To avoid an overload of disjointed material, we made sure to return to the central questions throughout (how does gender shape our language/politics etc. and language/politics etc. shape our gender …) and remind students that the goal is not knowing everything but being curious about, and learning to articulate, the ways that we know and don't know. Equally important, which emerges even here with the predominance of American pop culture, is a recognition of how we pay attention to the global North, and a discussion about, and search for, which perspectives we might still be missing. Throughout the lessons, prompting questions encourage students to always come back to contextualizing material and reflecting on the conditions that underpin different ways of knowing.

Organizing knowledge: students

In the second part of the unit, students produced final exhibitions which were overwhelmingly characterized by generosity, care and curiosity. They demonstrated their attention to the processes of knowledge production, consistently foregrounding perspectives from those in marginalized communities and giving space to a range of source types, beyond the traditionally ‘academic’ (e.g., first-person accounts, music videos, online forums). An analysis of a few examples here offers insight into the potential for embracing epistemic uncertainty for new understandings. I consider the strengths of, and occasional limits to, the students’ approaches, focusing on two main aspects: (1) presentation of a dialogue between different ways of knowing which unsettles established truths and navigates an ‘unknowing’ to articulate something more complex; (2) linking of individual experiences, either their own or others’, with social, structural and historical contexts to highlight broader epistemic patterns.

The exhibition – entitled ‘Past and Present: Global Perspectives of Trans Identities’ – is a good example of the way students created a dialogue between different ways of knowing. In a ‘page’ on ‘The Untold Stories of the Sistergirls and Brotherboys of Australia’, they presented interviews, videos, images and quotes from First Nations people and interspersed these with their own notes, following the style of giving a platform to/exhibiting others voices rather than speaking for. ¹¹ As such, different interpretations of the terms ‘Sistergirl’ and ‘Brotherboy’, from a range of personal perspectives, come together to paint a broad picture of gender fluidity, and to centre a spiritual rather than biological concept of masculine and feminine. The students recognized a divergence from common Western understandings of gender and note: ‘none of these definitions are the same … and may leave you confused trying to align Sistergirls and Brotherboys with one of the identities in the LGBTIQA+ acronym’, but this is because these are ‘concepts that exist outside of the gender binary and their origins precede the colonization of Australia’.

Such an awareness, of course, highlights the fact that the students, and their assumed audience, speak as outsiders to Indigenous epistemologies. There is an ethical challenge here in a predominantly non-Indigenous cohort researching marginalized communities from a position of privilege and from within the institution of the university: What is the work for? Who benefits from it? In Norma Berenstain's (2016, pp. 588, 570, 588) concept of ‘epistemic exploitation’, the ‘dominantly situated extract [the] labor’ of marginalized groups; this ‘taxing’ work is often unpaid and is also frequently used to maintain ‘dominant epistemic frameworks’. In G2, we wanted these considerations to form part of the learning experience; attention to epistemologies demands a reflexive approach to engaging with others, and the work of others, both inside and outside the classroom. Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003, p. 521) presents a useful model here in ‘feminist solidarity or comparative feminist studies’, which encourages attention to the interconnections between the histories and experiences of different groups. The page above on Sistergirls and Brotherboys managed this remarkably well: rather than being about First Nations people (as a knowable object of study), their exhibition was about the relations between colonialism and Indigeneity, and the interconnectedness of different understandings of gender, including the students’ own and any associated limitations. As Bodkin-Andrews and Carlson (2014, pp. 786–91) explain, we need to understand Aboriginal identity through Aboriginal perspectives (hence their voices in the exhibition) and methodologies (still to work on?), rather than use a Western lens to interpret, identify and categorize. And indeed, the students’ work understands First Nations people as knowers to learn from (taking us back to Moreton-Robinson's argument about the importance of legitimizing Indigenous methodologies), highlighting how the presumption to know leads to misrepresentations and stereotypes (they note the projection of savagery, for example, onto First Nations people), and how things that their audience may consider natural and timeless, such as heteronormativity, emerged from a colonial framework. As Mohanty (2003, p. 521) further describes, a feminist solidarity model turns our attention to ‘relations of mutuality, co-responsibility, and common interests’. And indeed, the students endeavoured to take on co-responsibility in the epistemological labour, and shift, rather than reinforce Berenstain's ‘dominant epistemic frameworks’, taking us on a journey of Western ways of knowing and their limits.

The resulting representation of complex gender identities and conceptions of sexuality was, however, occasionally interrupted by evidence of slippage back within the bounds of dominant ways of knowing, which in this case means Western and heteronormative modes of identifying and categorizing genderqueer people. In an accompanying glossary, for example, the students provided a couple of reductive definitions; these inconsistencies demonstrate the tension between seeing things differently or recognizing plurality and subconsciously reproducing the ways in which one has learnt to understand gender over time.

One of the other student groups, presenting an exhibition entitled ‘Mate and Australian Masculinity’, offered a potentially valuable strategy here: making their own learning process explicitly part of the exhibition. This group offered a fascinating journey through ‘Australiana’, tracing the genealogies of the term ‘mate’ as a way of presenting a national identity built on whiteness and masculinity, and opening space to see its limits and potential harm. The students came up with the idea of including reflective videos of their coming to know/unknow, encouraging their audience to also implicate themselves in history and in the exhibition's narrative.

On the other hand, the ‘Mate and Australian Masculinity’ exhibition did present some examples of the way students may struggle to connect the individual to the structural. The students succeeded in bringing in situated and embodied examples, rather than speaking in abstract terms, but occasionally relied on individual experience as evidence and prioritized individualized change. For example, after analysing the gender dimensions to the word ‘mate’, they suggested ‘the easiest solution would be to limit your use of the word or ask people whether they mind’; they also noted anecdotal evidence of women not objecting to being called ‘mate’ but finding ‘love’ or ‘sweetie’ offensive, without always relating this back to their broader analysis of things like semantic derogation. This group took the very important step of exposing problematic foundations to Australian identity, although their solution was sometimes simply to be more inclusive within an existing model, rather than to imagine alternate formulations of ‘Australian’.

In another group, students working on ‘Witches and Witch-hunting’ demonstrated a creative capacity to connect seemingly disparate examples across history and place, precisely by using broader patterns to create a narrative. These students began with the much-studied Salem trials, but quickly pivoted to pop culture today, presenting cultural artefacts and media from the 1869 painting Salem Martyr’ to tweets from J.K. Rowling, YouTube clips from video essayist and transgender advocate Natalie Wynn's channel ContraPoints, and music videos from Cardi B and Taylor Swift. Throughout, the students presented the contexts and conditions behind the production of negative constructions of women and femininity, paying attention to the specificities of different groups but also weaving a story of solidarity via a central focus on women vilifying other women in misogynistic cultures. The traditional images and colours for witches (black and green, cauldrons and smoke) that informed their design theme could have perpetuated the idea that the witch belongs only to history and fantasy; in practice, however, the continuity of this theme as a backdrop for the analysis of very different case studies facilitated unexpected links across time and place. In contemporary examples which did not appear immediately ‘witchy’, the presence of this same clichéd symbolism highlighted commonalities with historical cases and shed new light on labels such as ‘bitch’, ‘whore’ and ‘slut’.

One final exhibition, ‘Intersectionality: An Evolution’, was exceptionally rigorous and perceptive and highlights some of the consistent themes in the ways students approached this assessment task overall. In a multifaceted and complex narrative, this group's exhibition avoided chronological versions of feminism, which position white feminism first and intersectionality second, to instead trace the origins of black feminist thought and expose the problems of decontextualization (e.g. in the case of hashtag #MeToo, which is often used without reference to the origins of the movement, founded in 2006 by American activist Tarana Burke). They went on to apply intersectional thinking to local and practical examples, suggesting, for example, ways that councils and government policies could avoid treating First Nations people as a homogeneous group. By situating perspectives in history and place, and outlining the power relations that informed and connected them, the students produced a whole that destabilized what we might presume to be normal, standard and known. Finally, this group, like most others, offered practical and entertaining resources for their audience; students developed material such as Spotify playlists, printable worksheets, FAQs and glossaries, as well as interactive activities such as flashcards and comment boxes.

While the topic on intersectionality is perhaps most explicitly about different lenses and critical thinking, in all these projects, students succeeded in putting different ways of knowing, and the conditions that underpin them, into dialogue. Their exhibitions embraced uncertainty to show their object of study – be that witches, Sistergirls or mates – as evolving, positional and political. They also largely sought to situate their own perspectives and understandings within larger social structures and power relations; by implicating themselves and their audience in the narrative, their exhibitions became expressions of collective and transformative learning.

Conclusion

In 1975, Sandra Bartky described an ‘anguished consciousness, an inner uncertainty and confusion which characterizes human subjectivity in periods of social change’ (1975, p. 428). In going on to point to the ‘feminist consciousness’ as an ‘anguished consciousness’, Bartky highlighted the way so many women sensed a contradiction between their experience of the world and established understandings of how/what that world was. It is by naming this ‘inner uncertainty’, making it public and collective, theorizing it (developing those tools through which we mediate and interpret reality), that we can apprehend something that isn't yet, and create the conditions for transformation.

In G2, students came together, even in lockdown, to seek out those disconnects between their own reality, or the reality that so many people in marginalized groups experience, and dominant modes of knowing/seeing. By materializing and making public this not quite knowing/understanding/articulating, they learnt from each other and built a space of learning for others. In what remains an extraordinarily difficult time for students and universities alike, feminist pedagogies present collaborative and ethical strategies for developing the frameworks within which to understand and transform our reality. If (despite the good employment prospects) a degree in Gender Studies doesn't lead to a job, it nonetheless offers the tools to bring a new one into being.