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Manipulation of the tragedy of / by both the U.S. government and the mainstream media has left its mark on academia. An unprecedented number of students have sought to enroll in Middle Eastern studies as well as peace and conflict studies courses, while scholars critical of U.S. foreign policy have come under attack from outside academia, especially when we question conventional interpretations of / (Bird ; Doumani ). September  has served as a pretext for acceleration of the U.S. government’s empire-building plans and for the overt remilitarization of both the United States and the global community (Eisenstein ; Roy ). This remilitarization has not bypassed college campuses. According to Margaret Stetz, “college campuses have been militarized—in some cases, re-militarized—under our noses” (, n.p.). Refusing to be intimidated and silenced and recognizing both the privilege and responsibility that come with inhabiting an institution of higher learning, I have made militarization a central theme in my teaching. My scholarly work on gender and militarization in the past two decades notwithstanding, my investment in the topic is not merely intellectual. It is fueled by a passion to create a space in my classrooms for students to critically reflect on contemporary issues, engage in critical conversations, and feel empowered and motivated to get involved in struggle for social and political change. When I have designed courses on militarization, I have drawn on my knowledge of and commitment to feminist critical pedagogy, and therefore pay as much attention to the experience I want to create for students as to the written syllabus, which often tends to become the blueprint for teaching. I decided to use militarization as a focus in courses because of its pervasiveness in our lives. I was intrigued that many people around me were unaware of the ways that we, in our personal lives, are implicated in current wars. In addition to addressing this topic in every class I have taught since /, I have designed and 259 16 Teaching about Gender, Race, and Militarization after 9/11 Nurturing Dissent, Compassion, and Hope in the Classroom SIMONA SHARONI ——————————————————————— ——————————————————————— CH016.qxd 5/29/08 10:50 AM Page 259 taught three courses on three different college campuses that focused on the relationship among gender, race, and militarization. While designing course materials and outlining the process for the classroom experiences, I had several objectives in mind: 1. to inspire my students to think critically about militarization by learning to recognize its presence in our everyday lives; 2. to distinguish among the military as an institution, soldiers as people who serve that institution, and militarization as a process that blurs the distinction between military and civilian life; 3. to highlight the commonalities and differences among militarism, sexism, and racism as systems that play a role in forming and transforming people’s individual and collective identities; and 4. to examine alternatives to militarization and strategies to challenge it effectively. In this chapter, I reflect on the materials and the pedagogy I have used in my teaching about gender, race, and militarization. I pay particular attention to students ’ reactions to the classes by drawing on their written work as well as their formal and informal evaluation of the class. Finally, I discuss some new ideas and examine various resources designed to inspire faculty to integrate teaching about militarization into both graduate and undergraduate teaching. Situating Myself: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Location It makes perfect sense to me that I have to tell you about myself before I tell you what I taught and how my students responded. Yet, because the practice of teachers and scholars speaking or writing explicitly about themselves is not yet common in academia, I draw on critical pedagogy and feminist theory to explain why situating myself is integral to my teaching and scholarly work in general and to this project in particular. I also hope that teachers who have shied away from this practice will embrace it. I was introduced to critical pedagogy in  by reading Paulo Freire’s seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed (). Critical pedagogy has come to be used as an umbrella term for a range of more specific educational practices such as feminist pedagogy, antiracist pedagogy, emancipatory pedagogy, and democratic pedagogy. All these educational practices have been informed by discourses that explicitly question and challenge existing knowledge claims and power relations. Further, they have as their basic purpose the empowerment and social betterment of marginalized, disadvantaged, oppressed, and exploited groups in society...

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