Page 55 - Šolsko polje, XXXI, 2020, 5-6: Teaching Feminism, ed. Valerija Vendramin
P. 55
r. šribar ■ study in the virtual class: doings of feminist pedagogy ...
I have been inspired to look for theoretical references for my own prax-
is in feminist and critical pedagogy1 and thus provide a firm theoretical
sub-disciplinary basis for elaborating the existing teaching attitude and
habits in class. Although my teaching subjects are of the SSH disciplines,
not all teaching objectives and students’ interests are restricted according
to the MINT/SSH gap.
In his authorial introduction to the monograph The word to young
people: Dialogue with the generation of active nihilism, Umberto Galimberti
(2018) claims that apart from the study objectives the pedagogic stress
should be put on the personal development and socio-cultural consider-
ations of the students. An elaboration of skills and knowledges is needed
for the inquiry into the contemporary socio-cultural conditioning of liv-
ing. The university is determined by both socio-cultural and political con-
ditions. Consequently, it should be in our pedagogic interest to define the
macrosystemic order, the “grey zone” of the intertwined democratic and
autocratic traits of our contemporary societies. This is the totality which
encourages and at the same time supresses critical, oppositional feminist
pedagogy. We have to deal with the intrusion of the governmental and in-
ternational macro political and economy orientation which contaminates
academia with autocratisation. The sensitivity to macro-systems, and the
transpositions of these systems to national and global structural phenom-
ena, inspire the interventions in the curriculum mentioned previously.
What has happened in Slovenia is that after a right-wing party won
the by-elections, “Orbanisation” started in the first quarter of 2020. The
Slovenian “democratic erosion” (Lührmann & Staffan, 2016, para 482)
has in its radical phase taken a form typical of contemporary de-democ-
ratisations: manipulative strategies performed without much effort of the
executors to hide them; gradually intensified pressure on the media, state
institutions and the public; a concentration of executive power in the pa-
triarchy; the subversion of accountability and other values; capital re-
quirements over nature and the destruction of national natural resources;
the breaking up of the public health and education systems; complex mil-
itarisation; the promotion of a discriminatory discourse and practices in
public life and politics together with other violations of human and citi-
zens’ rights; instability of work by way of massive precariousness, existen-
tial endangerment or anxiety due to poverty, violence towards gender and
1 Most of the references used here are freely available. Precarious research work does not
allow expenses for articles and books to be bought, which is a problem worth thematising
on some other occasion.
2 The part “In democracies: the third wave of autocratization has a legal façade”.
53
I have been inspired to look for theoretical references for my own prax-
is in feminist and critical pedagogy1 and thus provide a firm theoretical
sub-disciplinary basis for elaborating the existing teaching attitude and
habits in class. Although my teaching subjects are of the SSH disciplines,
not all teaching objectives and students’ interests are restricted according
to the MINT/SSH gap.
In his authorial introduction to the monograph The word to young
people: Dialogue with the generation of active nihilism, Umberto Galimberti
(2018) claims that apart from the study objectives the pedagogic stress
should be put on the personal development and socio-cultural consider-
ations of the students. An elaboration of skills and knowledges is needed
for the inquiry into the contemporary socio-cultural conditioning of liv-
ing. The university is determined by both socio-cultural and political con-
ditions. Consequently, it should be in our pedagogic interest to define the
macrosystemic order, the “grey zone” of the intertwined democratic and
autocratic traits of our contemporary societies. This is the totality which
encourages and at the same time supresses critical, oppositional feminist
pedagogy. We have to deal with the intrusion of the governmental and in-
ternational macro political and economy orientation which contaminates
academia with autocratisation. The sensitivity to macro-systems, and the
transpositions of these systems to national and global structural phenom-
ena, inspire the interventions in the curriculum mentioned previously.
What has happened in Slovenia is that after a right-wing party won
the by-elections, “Orbanisation” started in the first quarter of 2020. The
Slovenian “democratic erosion” (Lührmann & Staffan, 2016, para 482)
has in its radical phase taken a form typical of contemporary de-democ-
ratisations: manipulative strategies performed without much effort of the
executors to hide them; gradually intensified pressure on the media, state
institutions and the public; a concentration of executive power in the pa-
triarchy; the subversion of accountability and other values; capital re-
quirements over nature and the destruction of national natural resources;
the breaking up of the public health and education systems; complex mil-
itarisation; the promotion of a discriminatory discourse and practices in
public life and politics together with other violations of human and citi-
zens’ rights; instability of work by way of massive precariousness, existen-
tial endangerment or anxiety due to poverty, violence towards gender and
1 Most of the references used here are freely available. Precarious research work does not
allow expenses for articles and books to be bought, which is a problem worth thematising
on some other occasion.
2 The part “In democracies: the third wave of autocratization has a legal façade”.
53
