Theory as Embodied Practice in the Classroom

A feminist academic of color who was, until recently, located in the Global South and whose practice and scholarship are also situated there, Dr. Goswami was in a unique position in Fall 2023 in her new classroom in the US South where she was teaching critical ethnography and autoethnography as advanced qualitative research methods to a domestically and internationally diverse student body. Most of the students, including Iye Ogbe, her collaborator here, were schooled primarily in quantitative approaches of traditional conflict management and peacebuilding from Western/Global North perspectives. This article is an autoethnography of both instructor and student where they retrace their semester-long journey together to reflect—from their respective, and sometimes interchangeable, positionalities of marginality and power—on the course content and classroom practices as well as learning pace, process, expectations, and outcomes. The emphasis of the course on reflexive praxis forced students to look around at their immediate surroundings and question white spaces in academia and the “white theory boys” who dominate scholarship and practice in the field of conflict management/resolution. While there is a growing push within the discipline toward reframing conversations around peace and decolonizing conflict theory and practice, this semester was the students’ first embodied exercise of living and doing critical decolonial feminism. They learned about critical feminist ethnography and autoethnography in the classroom while being simultaneously engaged in it as method and product.