Feminist Community Engagement

Contributors to this volume demonstrate how a feminist approach is strategically necessary for the community engagement movement in higher education to achieve its goals and illustrate the transformative potential of merging feminist theory with social action.

The authors draw upon their earlier research examining how feminists have negotiated identity and learning in international contexts or multisector environments. Feminism in Community focuses on feminist challenges to lead, learn, and participate in nonprofit organizations, as well as their efforts to enact feminist pedagogy through arts processes, Internet fora, and critical community engagement. The authors bring a focused energy to the topic of women and adult learning, integrating insights of pedagogy and theory-informed practice in the fields of social movement learning, transformative learning, and community development. The social determinants of health, spirituality, research partnerships, and policy engagement are among the contexts in which such learning occurs. In drawing attention to the identity and practice of the adult educator teaching and learning with women in the community, the authors respond to gender mainstreaming processes that have obscured women as a discernible category in many areas of practice.

In Feminist Praxis Revisited, Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) practitioners reflect on how the field has sought to integrate its commitment to activism and social change with community-based learning in post-secondary institutions. Teaching about and for social change has been a core value of the field since its inception, and co-op, practica, and internships have long been part of the curriculum in the professional schools. However, liberal arts faculties are increasingly under pressure to integrate community engagement practices and respond to labour market demands for greater student “employability.” That demand creates challenges and possibilities as WGS programs and instructors adapt to changing post-secondary agendas. This book examines how WGS programs can continue to prioritize the foundational critiques of inequality, power, privilege, and identity in the face of a post-secondary push toward praxis as resumé building, skills acquisition, and the bridging of town-and-gown differences. It pushes students to reflect critically on their own experiences with feminist praxis through critical reflections offered by the contributors along with examples of practical approaches to community-based/experiential learning.

Feminist scholars write about the dynamic ways they reach beyond academia to engage broader communities

As higher education is disrupted by technology and takes place less and less on campus, what does meaningful community engagement look like? How can it continue to enrich learning? In Community Engagement 2.0? , Crabill and Butin convene a dialogue: five writers set out theoretical and practical considerations, five more discuss the issues raised.

Self-reflexive, critical accounts of how feminist writing studies scholars variously situated within rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies plan, implement, examine, and represent community-based inquiry and pedagogy.

Underscoring the complex relationship between civic engagement and education at all stages of life, this innovative Handbook identifies the contemporary challenges and best approaches and practices to encourage civic engagement within education.