Teaching and Learning Like a Feminist: Storying Our Experiences in Higher Education

Teaching and Learning Like a Feminist is a conversation between academics in Women’s Studies and Gender Studies about the politics of pedagogy in higher education. What does it mean to embody feminism in universities today? Written in a creative narrative style, Mackinlay explores the discursive, material and affective dimensions of what it might mean to live the personal-as-political-as-performative in our work as teachers and learners in the contemporary climate of neo-liberal universities. This book is both theory and story and aims to bring feminist theorists such as Virginia Woolf, Hélène Cixous, Sara Ahmed and bell hooks together in conversation with Mackinlay’s own experiences, and those of women she interviewed, in their diverse roles as ‘feminist-academic-subjects’. The fluid writing style presented is a deliberate attempt to enact a ‘post-academic’ form of literature and is playfully punctuated by black and white drawings. Teaching and Learning Like a Feminist captures the precarious position of Women and Gender Studies in universities today, as well as the ‘danger’ inherent in grounding teaching and learning work in feminist politics. Mackinlay wraps herself in both and invites us to do the same. This book is designed to stimulate reflection and lively class discussion and is appropriate for courses in curriculum studies and pedagogy, education, feminism and feminist theory, gender and women’s studies, and narrative inquiry. It can also be read by individual teachers and researchers interested in feminism.

“Mackinlay re-envisages how feminist knowledge can be articulated through her audacious and engaging mix of reflection, analysis, narrative, poetry, and line drawings. This is a refreshingly personal and powerfully collective analysis of doing feminism in hostile institutions. It will give heart to many.” – Alison Bartlett, The University of Western Australia, Perth

“This highly readable book is a love story about feminism at the same time as a rigorous investigation … a must read for undergraduate students and for scholars-who-don’t-identify-as-feminist, core reading for gender courses at all levels, and mandatory reading for feminist and gender academics.” – Julie White, Victoria University

Elizabeth Mackinlay is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Queensland.