Cultivating Critical and Anti-Colonial Hope in the Feminist Classroom

Developing students’ capacity to think critically – about the social world we live in, about its complexities and contradictions, and about extant change agents and projects – has been a central feature of teaching and learning in feminist classrooms. However, students have often lamented about the cynicism, despondency, and sense of impasse they have experienced as a result of the relentless critique in which they are trained to engage and in the absence of openings for re-imagining the world we live in (Hogan 2014; Schwittay 2023: 2). At a time when courses, programmes and centres for gender and sexualities studies are experiencing severe backlash and threat of closure, given wider financial and political pressures, not least, the rising wave of political conservatism and anti-gender movements globally (Quilty 2024), it is all the more urgent to ensure that students are not disenchanted and disillusioned by what they learn and how they learn in feminist classrooms, and that their learning empowers them to imagine alternative, hopeful and anti-colonial feminist futures. This paper is a reflexive account of my attempts at cultivating critical and anti-colonial hope in feminist classrooms, and their transformative potential to contribute to decolonising the academy. In writing this paper, I situate myself as an anti-caste, anti-racist, upper-caste, middle class, woman of colour feminist academic from the global south, now teaching Sociology and Gender and Sexualities Studies at an institution of higher education in the global north. I interweave, in this paper, postcolonial, decolonial, black and Dalit feminist perspectives with my autoethnographic narratives and poetry, in keeping with a commitment to challenge conventional western forms of scholarship and to decolonise feminist knowledge production within and beyond the classroom.