Publication Date
2012
Description
In this article, we refine a politics of thinking from the margins by exploring a pedagogical model that advances transformative notions of service learning as social justice teaching. Drawing on a recent course we taught involving both incarcerated women and traditional college students, we contend that when communication among differentiated and stratified parties occurs, one possible result is not just a view of the other but also a transformation of the self and other. More specifically, we suggest that an engaged feminist praxis of teaching incarcerated women together with college students helps illuminate the porous nature of fixed markers that purport to reveal our identities (e.g., race and gender), to emplace our bodies (e.g., within institutions, prison gates, and walls), and to specify our locations (e.g., cultural, geographic, socialeconomic). One crucial theoretical insight our work makes clear is that the model of social justice teaching to which we aspired necessitates re-conceptualizing ourselves as students and professors whose subjectivities are necessarily relational and emergent.
Journal
Humboldt Journal of Social Relations
Volume
34
First Page
85
Last Page
104
Department
Women's & Gender Studies
Recommended Citation
Davis, Coralynn V., and Carol Wayne White. 2012. "How Porous are the Walls that Separate Us? Feminist Pedagogy, Incarceration, and Disseminating Knowledge." Humboldt Journal of Social Relations (special issue on Social Justice Action, Teaching and Research) 34:85-104.
Included in
Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons, Civic and Community Engagement Commons, Community-Based Learning Commons, Criminology Commons, Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons, Curriculum and Instruction Commons, Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons, Educational Methods Commons, Epistemology Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Feminist Philosophy Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, Service Learning Commons, Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education Commons, Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons, Social Psychology and Interaction Commons, Women's Studies Commons