‘Where do you know from?’: An exercise in placing ourselves together in the classroom

In a special issue of MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture devoted to “Feminist Pedagogies,” Dr. Eugenia Zuroski, Associate Professor in McMaster’s department of English and Cultural Studies, shares an exercise she developed for one of the core seminars in the Cultural Studies and Critical Theory (CSCT) MA program.

In her words, “I’ve been using this exercise at McMaster as a way of making the seminar room a productive space for thinking together across difference. This entails recognizing different ways of knowing from the outset, and establishing mutual responsibility to respect the complexities of how we relate to one another as we set out to learn with and from each other.”

Dr. Zuroski currently serves as the Faculty Co-Chair of the President’s Advisory Committee on Building an Inclusive Community (PACBIC), and sees this type of pedagogical innovation as an example of how the ongoing work of building community can and must take place in the classroom, among other spaces.

‘WHERE DO YOU KNOW FROM?’: AN EXERCISE IN PLACING OURSELVES TOGETHER IN THE CLASSROOM

Eugenia Zuroski
Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies

Editor, Eighteenth-Century Fiction