Not a Luxury, But a Necessity: Toward Transgressive Thinking

I still remember the excitement I felt two years ago about the prospect of participating in the "Teaching for Change" conference. I was excited about the conference; as a "brand-new," struggling teacher, I hoped and expected that the conference would shed some light on the many questions I had regarding teaching and scholarship, and their relationships to the transformation of both the academy and religious institutions. Two years later, I still have many and maybe even more questions. However, what has changed since then is that I am asking different sets of questions: questions that challenge me to become more accountable and (self-)critical in the process of producing and reproducing knowledge, and that urge me to reexamine my own commitment to teaching and scholarship that seeks to change society. In this brief reflection on my experience and thoughts about feminist "Teaching for Change," I focus on three interrelated conference highlights as a guidance to affirm what I have learned from the conference and to address some of the issues with which I continue to wrestle.

First, the call for an ongoing critical analysis of the institution and the renewed vision of teaching for change the conference participants articulated challenged me to reexamine my own teaching context more critically. Many feminist/womanist teacher-scholars and/or activists who were at the conference voiced their concerns over the increasing corporatization of the academic institutions in U.S. higher education. The conference was an alarming call for me to be aware of institutional aspects of teaching context as a site where knowledges are manufactured as well as contested.

In this light, I realized that reexamination of my teaching context includes understanding not only who my students are but also what kind of academic institution I am situated in. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty has explained, the academic institution is one of the few "contested sites crucial to feminist struggles" and, at the same time, the space that "determines the everyday material and ideological conditions" of my work as a teacher and a scholar.¹ To what extent does this institution provide spaces for feminist engagement and practices when global market economy, U.S. imperialism, and the religious Right is forming evermore-solid alliances? What are the institutional supports for or roadblocks to teaching and engaging in feminist studies in religion, especially when technology savvy "generation Y" students and their "helicopter parents" view themselves as "rightful consumers" of the academic institution, where they can get necessary credentials to become "successful" global consumer-citizens? Does this institution affirm the teaching that "enables transgressions—a movement against and beyond boundaries"² when education tends to become another "commodity"? Asking these questions, I continue to struggle over what my roles and responsibilities are as a teacher at this historical juncture in which students expect to become "winning players" in the competitive global markets, and how I can challenge students to engage in critical thinking and enable the classroom to become "the most radical space of possibility in the academy."³

A close examination of my own teaching context in relation to the broader social, political, and economic context has also pushed me to look more critically at how I am implicated in this contested site of struggle through my teaching and scholarship. In other words, examining teaching context also includes a critical assessment of my participation as a racialized-gendered person in the production and reproduction of various forms of knowledge in the U.S. academy.

The second issue I'd like to address is how the conference reaffirmed the importance of the ongoing examination of the relationship between knowledge production and its relationship to power. To what extent does our work challenge or reinscribe the politics of knowledge that "naturalizes global capitalism and business-as-usual in North American higher education"?⁴ How do we implicitly and explicitly maintain the status quo or even inadvertently serve the interests of the religious Right in conjunction with global capitalism through our engagement in the production and distribution of knowledge? As bell hooks and many other feminists have critically explained...