Teaching Note: Teaching about Privilege and Feminist Research Ethics

This essay looks primarily at one approach to teaching about privilege in a feminist research course. I talk about the motivation to ask students to participate in this exercise and the potential as well as the challenges it has for raising awareness of one’s own privileges before setting out to do feminist research. Additionally, the paper outlines the preparation for the activity by attending to the learning climate and how student resistance can itself be made into a learning opportunity. The challenges and risks of raising student’s awareness of their position and of their privileges illustrate that no one single approach or activity, in itself, is sufficient. Embedded into a course where so many other aspects align to make it effective, the paperclip activity contributes to meeting the objectives of raising awareness. Still, the instructor needs to be cautious about how the activity is received by the students.

Feminist Methodology

Since one central feminist methodological commitment is to adopt a (self-)reflexive stance (Tickner), students in the course Feminist Theories and Practices II: Senior Seminar are asked to consider their socioeconomic context and to situate themselves in society to try and anticipate the ethical dilemmas they will confront in their research. Using this paperclip activity, students are able to destabilize privilege to look at their current position and understand the effect their social positionality might have on their research. Further, the activity demonstrates how this positionality may create blind spots in their epistemology and thus affect the direction of their work. The goal is to get students to think about the ways they are implicated in systems of power and privilege.

Teaching the Senior Thesis

Feminist Theories and Practices II: Senior Seminar is a senior-level course designed primarily for women’s studies majors and minors as their capstone in women’s studies. The number of individuals in the class ranges from fifteen to twenty students each spring semester, and the student population reflects the ethnic demographics of Metropolitan State University of Denver (Metropolitan State University of Denver). The majority of the students in the class are female-bodied, although we do have male-bodied students and male-to-female transgender students with a female gender identity who enroll in the course. The age of students enrolled in the class has ranged from nineteen to seventy-one years, which contributes to the richness of the class discussion. A significant number of students in the class are financially independent and therefore work more than thirty hours per week. Many students are first-generation college students who might come to MSU Denver academically underprepared for college but develop the skills needed to be successful in the course. The students in the class are often single mothers who care for children at home when not attending school. Overwhelmingly, the students in the class do not feel overly privileged, and they have experienced various levels of oppression in their lives. The visual recognition of a lack of privilege is often noted in their reflection essay, which is described later in this article.

The seminar provides students with an opportunity to examine the purposes of doing feminist research, the methods and designs of both quantitative and qualitative research, and the processes involved in writing a senior-level research paper. These papers reflect each student’s particular course of study and focus within the broader context of women’s studies and feminist theory. For example, students who are interested in applying a feminist analysis to a subject within the field of psychology are offered the opportunity to study the subject in a way that might not have been available to them in other coursework. This course is the second class in a sequence that students take ideally their final year as women’s studies majors or minors. The first course, Feminist Theories and Practices I, is taught in the fall, and students combine theory building with starting their research work. Feminist Theories and Practices II: Senior Seminar is specifically meant to teach students the essential components of feminist methodology. For example, one essential component of a feminist methodology is...