Forthcoming GRID Seminars

Spring 2017

"Radical Unlearning: Feminist Reflections on Transgression, Humility, and Chaos," directed by Professors Ivy Schweitzer and Pati Hernandez.

In "Radical Unlearning" we will address how, in the words of bell hooks, "our ways of knowing are forged in history and relations of power," and how this recognition shapes social experiences, our academic approaches, and our performance of community. Feminist theories have allowed us to analyze and critique the workings of social power, to see that our institutions, communities, and intimate relations are full of unseen, unspoken, and unheard dynamics. These hidden social behaviors contribute to building and maintaining visible and invisible walls. Behind these walls, a growing population has found a way to social visibility through addiction, violence, and crime. There is, for example, a spiraling opioid epidemic in New Hampshire and Vermont, but the Dartmouth community rarely engages with these issues or communities, except abstractly. We see our campus as immune and insulated from these dangerous trends. Dartmouth more so than most, because of our location in rural New England, a relatively non-diverse area far from large population centers. In reality, our community is quite diverse, but we gloss over our differences rather than acknowledging them as a means "to enrich our visions and our joint struggles," as Audre Lorde counseled back in 1984. Despite several decades of work on feminist and critical pedagogy, we have not fully integrated these insights and practices into our teaching and classrooms. This GRID seminar asks: what are the pressing and invisible inequities facing the Dartmouth community and the communities around us, and how can we shape our teaching and learning to prepare our students to address them? How can we embrace the whole of students' intellect and experience, actively transform knowledge rather than simply consume it, and unlock the genuinely transformative potential of teaching? What kinds of new research methods and questions does this kind of learning and teaching facilitate?