ANTHR 7458 - Girls, Women, and Education in Global Perspective: Feminist Ethnography and Praxis

(crosslisted) EDUC 7458, FGSS 7458

Fall. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Co-meets with ANTHR 4458/EDUC 4458/FGSS 4458.

S. Villenas.

This seminar explores the educational lives and schooling experiences of women and girls through ethnographies conducted in the U.S. and different regions of the world. Drawing on the anthropology of education, and decolonial and transnational feminist theories, we explore how girls and women construct ways of knowing through prisms of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, nation, and citizenship. We examine how gendered–racialized discourses of development, and state sanctioned forms of structural violence, frame their educational experiences and opportunities. In turn, we consider girls and young women as active learners and pedagogues who craft their own lives and literacies across borders and diverse spaces of home, school, and community. Lastly, we interrogate what is feminist in ethnographic representations and identify the possibilities for liberatory pedagogies.