Teaching Global and Social Justice as Transgressive Spaces of Possibility

Abstract: In this article I reflect on introducing critical pedagogy into social justice teaching in an elite UK university as part of the Nottingham Critical Pedagogy Project. I de‐essentialise Freire's conceptualisation of the human subject and her desire for transcendence with the introduction of Deleuze and Guattari's politics of desire. This enables an adaption of critical pedagogy from its original context of popular politics to the individualised elite setting of our project. Our pedagogical objectives become the opening of spaces of possibility which decentre the dominant regime of truth of the neoliberal university and enable imagining and becoming “other”. This involves disrupting normal patterns of classroom performativity in terms of student as consumer and lecturer as producer of commodities, transgressing dualisms between mind/body, intellectual/emotional and teacher/student. Our pedagogical praxis is therefore inherently political as by radically disturbing commodified subjectivities we foster processes that lead to unanticipated, maybe even unspeakable, transgressions.     

Teaching the Politics of Obesity: Insights into Neoliberal Embodiment and Contemporary Biopolitics

Abstract:  This article reflects on the author's experiences teaching an undergraduate lecture course on the politics of obesity. The course involved a critical examination of the construction and representation of the so-called epidemic of obesity and the major causal explanations for the rise in obesity. Students were unusually discomfited by the course and invoked pedagogical concerns and instructor embodiments in expressing their reactions. Student responses demonstrate how obesity talk reflects and reinforces neoliberal rationalities of self-governance, particularly those that couple bodily control and deservingness and see fatness as weakening the health of the body politic. The course also animated many students to scrutinize more deeply their own diet and exercise practices. I argue that the intensity of reaction stems from the productive power of the discourse of obesity and considerable investment students had in their bodies as neoliberal subjects. Besides classroom observations, the data in this paper are taken from student journals.     

Active Learning for Understanding Land Degradation: African Catchment Game and Riskmap

Land degradation is the result of the intersection of a complex set of biophysical and socio‐economic factors. The capacity of an individual or community to address land degradation is likewise constrained. While it is quite possible for professionals and learners to grasp the main issues around land degradation from a theoretical perspective, internalising the reality of what it means to be the resource degrader is more difficult. We have developed two active learning methods that aim to address this problem. The first is the African Catchment Game, a role‐playing game based on Graham Chapman's Green Revolution Game, adapted for the southern Africa context and incorporating a land degradation component. In this game participants play out the complex dynamics of rural‐urban‐global linkages against a background of environmental hazards. The second is based on Save the Children Fund's RiskMap computer simulation that models risk in terms of rural livelihoods for different income groups. Ethiopia is used as the example. This paper evaluates the two active learning techniques as tools for exploring the relationships between land degradation and poverty through an evaluation of participants’ experiences. The analysis shows clear potential for developing alternative teaching curricula that are aligned to our theoretical understanding.     

An Interwoven Learning Exchange: Transforming Research‐Teaching Relationships in the Top End,Northern Australia

In this paper, we explore processes of learning through a focus on relationships. Situated within the context of our research on educational tourism with Indigenous tour operators in the Northern Territory, we examine the relationships built between three groups: ourselves, Indigenous tour operators and undergraduate university students. We develop a conceptualisation of teaching and research as an interwoven learning exchange characterised by multi‐directional learning experiences within which all collaborators teach, research and learn. By viewing all contributors, including ourselves, as active and multiple situated co‐learners, we begin a process of recognising and reconfiguring power relationships. We reflect on how an interwoven learning exchange may bring new subjectivities into being through transformed research‐teaching relationships.     

Boerhaave's Furnace. Exploring Early Modern Chemistry through Working Models

This article discusses the (re)construction and use of an Early modern instrument, better known as Herman Boerhaave's (1668–1738) little furnace. We investigate the origins, history and materiality of this furnace, and examine the dynamic relationship between historical study and reconstructing and handling an object. We argue that combining textual analysis with performative methods allows us to gain a better understanding of both the role of lost material culture in historical chemical practice, pedagogy, and knowledge production, and provide a deeper understanding of the embodied experiences and knowledge of historical actors. Having made and used two versions of Boerhaave's furnace, we provide insight in what present-day working models can tell us about historical materials and practices approximately three centuries ago.     

The green revolution game

Abstract

Teaching qualitative methods in the context of an existing research methods course presents a number of problems. Qualitative methods tend to be marginalised and constrained by traditional expectations of teachers and taught to elicit a polarised response from students. A number of factors contribute to this reaction: the paucity of library resources, a perception that qualitative methods are frivolous and challenge traditional values and the difficulty of teaching large numbers. As the course has developed, a number of innovations have been introduced to combat these reactions and they are described and evaluated in a short article by James Sidaway appended to this paper.     

Practice What You Teach: Facilitating Anarchism In and Out of the Classroom

Abstract: In recent years, human geographers have criticized the increasing corporatization, commodification, and objectification of knowledge production, and have looked to critical pedagogical frameworks that seek to counteract these forces. Anarchism, as a body of theories and practices, has a long history of engagement with radical pedagogical experimentation. Anarchism and geography have much to contribute to one another: anarchism, through its support for creative, non‐coercive, practical learning spaces, and geography, for its critical examination of the spaces of education. In this paper, I evaluate the prospects for anarchist‐geographic pedagogies theoretically, as well as through my own experiences teaching and learning about anarchism over the past decade in a liberal arts, higher education US environment. I argue for a combined critical anarchist‐geographic pedagogical approach that appreciates the challenges of building alternative learning models within existing neoliberalizing institutions, provides the necessary tools for finding uniquely situated opportunities for educational change, and emplaces a grounded, liberating, student‐led critical pedagogy.     

Academic Freedom,Intellectual Diversity,and the Place of Politics in Geography

Abstract: This paper examines the conservative critique of higher education in the USA. I argue, first, that the right's call for greater “intellectual diversity” in American higher education should be understood as an attack on the professional self‐regulation and disciplinary autonomy that are central to academic freedom in this country. Second, I suggest that the right's politicization of politics in the academy brings to light the importance of our developing a vision of the university that accounts for rather than disavows the political nature of the work we do.     

Teaching transnationalism in the Caribbean: toward an understanding of representation and neo‐colonialism in human geography

Undergraduate geography courses provide a significant entry way into representing and challenging dominant images of places and identities. Teaching geography in the Caribbean raises significant issues in terms of providing materials that explore representations of places and topics that are grounded in the region, while also moving beyond representations of islands as simply ‘Third World’, separate and distant. The author draws on the case study of teaching human geography courses at the University of the West Indies‐Mona, to explore the usefulness of transnationalism as a pedagogical framework—in conjunction with the use of films and fieldtrips—while examining processes of representation and neo‐colonialism.