Community courses emphasise experiential engagement with theories, ideas, and subjects marginalised in academic knowledge production.
The pedagogical approach is informed by feminist, decolonial, and antiracist epistemologies.
We use enquiry-based teaching and learning methods, which aim to empower participants as agents generative of their own questions, and acknowledge and build upon the rich diversity of knowledges we all bring into any classroom.
Instructors and participants commit to creating horizontal relationships that disrupt and deconstruct hierarchies between “professor” and “student.”
Community courses are offered without tuition fees to participants who are selected based on an open call.
PAST COURSES
Gendered Violence and Transformative Justice
(Winter 2024)
Call for Participants
What is gendered violence? (How) can we end it? How does violence—in its intra- and interpersonal, as well as its systemic institutional and structural manifestations—appears at intersections, becomes ambient, even atmospheric?
In this course, we considered that there is a two-way, dialectical relation between the conceptual and theoretical understandings of violence, abuse, and harm that inform the ways in which we understand such experiences, and our visions and practices of justice and accountability in response to them. Through reading, listening, and sharing views, we will develop an understanding of this lexicon, with a view to unlearn the epistemic violence inherent in the ways we are often habituated to talk or think about gendered, racialised, and sexualised violence. We will also try to imagine, cocreate and perhaps even experiment with other ways of addressing violence.
Guiding Questions:
What is “gendered” about gendered violence? How does violence enforce normative genders? Is gender itself violent? How is the violence of gender implicated and co-constitutive of the violence of race, and how are they sexualised?
How do we integrate the lessons around the ways in which dominant approaches to “gender-based violence” reproduce carceral feminist approaches to justice, for instance by either supporting racist policing or masculinist forms of protection?
How can we heal from the effects of state violence by prefiguring alternative conceptions of justice that do not rely on state control and punishment or carceral logics? Such as: transformative justice, communities of care, and feminist self-defence.
How can transformative justice approaches illuminate pathways of resistance to and abolition of gendered, sexualised, and racialised violence?
Abolition Feminisms
(Autumn 2022)
Call for Participants
Course description: Since the Black Lives Matter uprisings in the summer of 2020 in the aftermath of the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, calls to defund the police and abolish the prison industrial complex have resonated with many people around the world.
Abolition, today, circulates widely as an idea; increasingly, people identify their politics as “abolitionist.”
While the verb “to abolish” seems negative, abolition feminists insist that abolition is not just about tearing the current system down, but rendering it obsolete.
“Abolition is about presence, not absence” as geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore has said: “it’s about building life-affirming institutions,” in place of current ones, which reproduce, normalise, and proliferate violence.
Abolitionist feminists seek to prefigure alternative conceptions of justice that do not rely on state control and punishment or carceral logics (including transformative justice, communities of care, and feminist self-defense).
In this community course, we engaged with Black feminist theories of abolition, including, notably, the work of philosopher and former political prisoner Angela Davis.
We asked: What are the implications of abolition feminisms for our own political subjectivities, collectivities, and movements in the here and now?
Course Objectives:
- To learn about abolitionist feminist theories, which originate in Black feminist praxis;
- To engage deeply with feminist arguments in favour of abolishing the prison industrial complex and develop informed positions on the political imperatives they raise;
- To understand the abolitionist critiques of carceral feminism, on the one hand, and police/prison reform, on the other.
- To reflect on the implications of abolitionist arguments for an intersectional feminist theory of justice;
- To understand the intellectual lineages of abolition feminisms (including intersectionality, Black Marxism, Black Power, communism, and anarchism) as well as the socio-historical contexts in which abolition feminisms arise (including the legacy and afterlives of slavery in mass incarceration);
- To become acquainted with the underpinnings of contemporary struggles for prison abolition, police abolition, and border abolition;
- To consider how carcerality, control, and punishment has been theorised by abolitionist feminisms as infusing social relations and institutions beyond literal prisons (such as education, asylum/migration, welfare, health care, family, etc.), constituting a carceral continuum;
- To free and expand our imaginations and orient ourselves toward the normative horizons of abolition feminisms (including transformative justice).
“Let’s Talk About ‘Sex’, Baby”: Histories and Theories of Gender and Sexuality
(October 2019 – February 2020)
Course description: The course examined theories of gender and sexuality, placing them in historical, political, social, and cultural context.
More specifically, we referenced the historical context in the US and France from the post-World War II period until the emergence of new social movements in the 1960s.
We focussed on the flowering and transformation of feminist and LGBTQI+ movements in Greece in the post-dictatorship period, investigating how desires, subjectivities, and identities were being formed, negotiated, and transformed.
The course examined aspects that are often marginalised in dominant historical narratives, such as, for instance, how trans activists militated for gender, racial, and economic justice from the very beginnings of the new social movements; or, the existence of lesbian desires and communities in the post-World War II era.
With this historical background, we studies the emergence of queer politics and theory, and its relationship to the activism of HIV+ people and their allies.
We screened the documentary film United In Anger: A History of ACT-UP (dir. Jim Hubbard, USA, 2012, 90′), which is based on oral histories with HIV/AIDS activists and archival footage.
We also studied contemporary ontological and political theories of gender and sexuality.
Departing from genealogies of gender and sexuality (focussing on the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Michel Foucault), we examined conceptualisations of gender (including the sex/gender distinction); the relation(s) between gender and sexuality; the relation(s) between patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism; as well as the theory of performativity.
We discussed how certain conceptualisations of gender and sexuality have contributed to, or are based on political exclusions.
Finally, we sought to understand the intersections of gender and sexuality with multiple axes of oppression and exploitation.
What coalitional horizons are opened up when the gendered/sexual (b)orders of the political subject are contested?
On a methodological level, the participants in the course experimented with oral history methods, which have been used by feminist and queer historians to counter the obfuscation of marginalised subjectivities and collectivities in hegemonic history.
The participants conducted oral history interviews with individuals who have participated in social movements or activism in feminist and/or LGBTQI+ political spaces, or, whose lived experiences converge with the problematics of the course (focussing on the period 1974-2010).
Course objectives:
- Becoming familiar with key concepts in the study of gender and sexuality, or deepening one’s understanding of them
- Experimentation with the basic principles of the method of oral history
- Comprehension of central debates within social movements regarding gender and sexuality, and the relations and conflicts between feminist
and LGBTQI+ movements - Exploration of how various theories, narratives, and politics of gender and sexuality are in dialogue, or are translated across different
historical and spatial contexts
It has been published by FAC research in an open-access volume (in Greek) titled Έλα Να Σου Πω: Φεμινιστικές, λεσβιακές και κουήρ αφηγήσεις της μεταπολίτευσης (Come, Let Me Tell You: Feminist, Lesbian, and Queer Narratives of the Post-dictatorship Period) published in December 2021 as an open-access ebook and, as of September 2022 is available in print.
Intersectionality
(February 2019 – June 2019)
Course description: Intersectionality is a theoretical framework for highlighting the relationships between various forms of social exclusion and oppression (which also produce privileges) that some subjects experience simultaneously, but have been falsely separated from each other through the complex interplay of hegemonic and social movement discursive processes.
Intersectionality originates in black feminist theory in the United States. As a theoretical framework, it makes visible the mutual exclusion of racism from misogyny in the construction of not only hegemonic but counterhegemonic categories.
By criticising monistic approaches and social movement divisions (that is, politics that focus exclusively on gender or on race or on class), intersectionality suggests that oppressive systems (e.g. patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism) are interwoven and inseparable in experience.
That is, intersectionality contests the analytic fragmentation of system s of oppression, by revealing their mutual construction; intersectionality problematises the homogenisation of social groups, revealing their internal heterogeneity.
On an intersectional view, social groups seem to be cross-cut not only by vertical but also by horizontal relations of power, complicating past theories of social stratification, class exploitation, and gender oppression.
Our aim was to understand the pathways the concept of intersectionality has taken. Intersectionality is a concept that has “traveled” from social movement to academic spaces, but also to various legislative frameworks internationally.
This travel is often referred to as the mainstreaming of intersectionality. In addition, we examined criticisms raised by various theorists, and whether and how they may be answered.
We considered the analytic usefulness of intersectionality in our own social context(s), characterised by multiple, concentric or intersecting crises, but its political usefulness in social movements, particularly with respect to the generation of coalitional movements and coalitional subjects.
Guiding Questions:
How does an intersectional approach enable the analysis of interdependent systems of oppression?
How can gender, class, race, sexuality (and other categories of oppression) be considered simultaneously or deconstructed through an intersectional lens, not only in theory but also in practice?
How has intersectionality traveled (from margin to centre, from political praxis to academic theory, from the radical left to neoliberalism, from global north to global south, etc.) through various gendered, racialised, and class-determined registers of postcolonial contestation?
Course objectives:
- Understanding the historical emergence of intersectionality in the field of gender studies, and specifically in Black feminist theory.
- Reflecting on the contribution of intersectionality to historical social struggles and contemporary activisms (including those in which we have been ourselves engaged).
- Examining how intersectionality may be used to study forms of subjectification within the conditions of globalisation and late capitalism, especially under “crisis” conditions.
- Creating and exploring research questions that synthesise our own interests with the course material.
Experimenting with a collective writing process in a supportive, anti-oppressive space.
Outcome: Together, the participants created an open-access collective text, First Act, perhaps the first volume published in Greek on intersectionality, which was presented at the second annual Feminist No Borders Summer School (June 2019) and at the Philo/Sophia Conference at Panteion University (December 2019).
Funding: The Community Course on Intersectionality (Spring 2019) was generously supported by a grant from Feminist Review Trust, which enabled FAC Research to give scholarships to the 16 participants, as well as pay for course materials.