Teaching gender under the rise of postfeminism: Re-integrating feminist perspectives into the Dutch undergraduate geography curriculum

Abstract

This paper discusses efforts to re-integrate feminist classroom perspectives and pedagogies within the undergraduate geography curriculum at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. As ‘feminist educators’ of this recently revised programme, we identify the mounting hegemony of postfeminist and neoliberal ideologies as key contextual challenges to our endeavour, coupled with the legacy of Dutch geography as a pragmatic, applied discipline. By zooming in on and collectively reflecting on our roles and practices in the courses we coordinate and teach, we delineate three strategies worth pursuing to achieve a feminist teaching agenda under the current political-institutional climate. The proposed strategies of valuing lived experiences, embodied immersive epistemologies, and partial local knowledges, are rooted in the main concerns of feminist-inspired research and help create and cultivate situated moments of connection, reflection, and learning. While these strategies are certainly not capable of subverting neoliberal and postfeminist tendencies on their own, we contend that they can be useful building blocks for feminist inspired teaching agendas beyond our discipline as they help expose traditional power hierarchies within and outside the classroom, as well as underscore the societal relevance of feminist thinking in times of increased social polarisation and reactionary politics.