Discussion Questions for Week 14

1. In Cathrine M. Orr's article "Challenging the Real World/Academic Divide" she describes the ways in which the students in her feminist theory class "began to doubt their own abilities and even motivations to intervene in the practices of domination and subordination that pervade people's lives, including their own", and that discoveries made by students in the feminist theory class, such as the shortsightedness and contradictions made by so many of the contributors to the conversation on feminist theory played a key role in to students inability to act for social change/transformation.

Why do you think that revealing the shortcomings of feminist activism in the West is internalized by the student leading them to "paralyzing guilt?" Rather than anxiety and the retreat from activism, what are some alternative scenarios that might have played out among the students after having discovered the "shortcomings and contradictions" of feminist and women's studies activism?

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2. In "Globalization and Radical Feminist Pedagogy" Anna M. Agathangelou complicates GLOBALIZATION to reveal the ways in which students can use globalization to reinforce AND/OR challenge systems of domination and subordination. She assigns her students activist projects asserting that, "decolonization requires more than just a accumulation of knowledge about globalization and feminist theorizing on such social relations." As university students, what do we think about this assertion? Are we choosing to live by this credo? How are we working to decolonize ourselves and our communities OTHER than by accumulating knowledge and understanding? I hope this can serve as a "getting to know one another" sort of exercise in that we can hear about the community/activism important to each of us.