Conference Program

Drawing on my experience as an adjunct professor in Sociology of Education within a Primary Education program, this contribution reflects on the possibilities and limits of practicing critical and feminist pedagogy in contemporary higher education. My position carries a particular reflexivity: the students I teach are themselves training to become teachers, which means that any pedagogical choices I make concern not only our shared classroom but also their future professional practice.

In my lectures, I try to cultivate dialogical spaces that resist dominant logics, positioning myself in terms of class, gender, sexuality, pedagogical role, and personal and political experience. I draw on critical and feminist pedagogies that understand teaching as a political, situated, embodied, and relational practice (hooks, 1994; Freire, 1970; Lather, 1991; Lorde, 1984). My practice is often marked by frustration arising from the daily awareness of how neoliberal and managerial tendencies in higher education contribute to narrow possibilities for democratic engagement and dampen students’ willingness to participate in open discussion (Brown, 2915; Ahmed, 2012). Structural and material conditions – dozens of regular attendees, in a classroom where chairs and desks are bolted to the floor – further constrain the creation of meaningful dialogical spaces and magnify asymmetries of power and voice.

A further source of frustration concerns the emotional climate shaping students’ experiences, their fear of speaking in public, of making mistakes, of being judged – another consequence itself of neoliberal academy (Ahmed, 2004; Boler, 1999; hooks, 2004). In response, I struggle to build a kind of safer space, while also inviting students to speak from their own standpoint, foregrounding partial perspectives, and making room for discomfort and dissent — particularly when addressing charged topics such as whiteness, racism, and sexism (Boler & Zambylas, 2003; Zambylas 2003). This sometimes requires departing from the syllabus or suspending the planned topic, which can provoke resistance and anxiety. Yet discontinuity and unpredictability are, I argue, integral to committed, dialogical teaching — and especially valuable for future teachers, for whom uncertainty and interruption will be part of everyday professional life.

This approach also reveals a broader tension: attempts to practice "political teaching" and to foster critical professional self-awareness frequently clash with students' expectations, which are shaped by the internalized norms of the neoliberal university — efficiency, predictability, risk-aversion, and the outsourcing of judgment to metrics. Yet precisely here, small and situated pedagogical gestures can function as acts of resistance: naming one's positionality; negotiating shared norms for speaking and listening; reframing "error" as inquiry; and redesigning participation beyond physical and material constraints.

This contribution articulates the tensions inherent in cultivating micro-spaces of resistance and democracy in higher education — navigating frustration and fear, both mine and my students', alongside moments of genuine connection and fulfillment.