Abstract
This article draws upon the experience of inhabiting the disciplinary space of Gender Studies (GS) as faculty in a newly founded social science and humanities university, Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD). It attempts to formulate the challenges in and potential for giving shape to this specialised discipline in a neo-liberal context. It grapples with some of the complexities of the originary moment and how they have affected the discipline. Issues and linkages with Women’s Studies also foreground some of the tensions that have characterised our brief disciplinary history. These themes are explored by drawing upon the experience of curricular review and design of the Master’s programme in GS and the pedagogical dilemmas that constantly crop up in this age of celebration of ‘difference’. The first section focuses on the larger context of higher education in which a university like AUD was set up along with a discussion of the specific context of the location of GS within AUD. The second section looks at the various transactions and negotiations needed to run the GS programme.
In this article I will share some thoughts on issues related to discipline formation, academic production and the relations with power that are inscribed in such processes. I shall do this by way of discussing the dilemmas and struggles of developing a Gender Studies (henceforth GS) programme in Ambedkar University Delhi (henceforth AUD) that has meant working within and against the disciplinary terrain that demarcate any body of knowledge that seeks a disciplinary status to survive in academia.
Much has been written on the dilemmas that arise while transacting and framing courses of Women’s Studies (henceforth as WS) in classrooms. The dynamics of the classroom, trajectories of the students and pedagogical challenges that confront a WS classroom have been discussed before by scholars. Here, the focus is on the dilemmas, potential and struggles that we, the faculty appointed to shape and run the programme, have faced in setting up GS and designing the curriculum of the Master’s programme in the contemporary moment.
Designing any curriculum is an ongoing process, but it has been especially so at GS as AUD is a very new university and GS an even younger programme, barely six years old. 1 The larger context of higher education and its link with the state and capital bears significantly on the goals and vision of such programmes, which are reflected in the curriculum. I want to discuss the process of curriculum designing in GS at AUD from two vantage points. In the first section, I focus on the larger context of higher education in which AUD was set up along with a discussion on the specific context of our location within AUD. The second section looks at the various transactions and negotiations required to run the GS programme. It briefly takes into account classroom dynamics and the as yet unclear future trajectories of pass out and drop out students to mark some of the energies that the GS programme is generating. Our fraught and tenuous links with the disciplinary terrain of WS and some of its debates have also shadowed our discussions and programme structure. Indirectly, this section then also interrogates the extent to which this history is relevant or not to our emergence and current predicament and its implications.
Setting up AUD: Neo-liberal Imagination of Social Sciences and Humanities
AUD was set up as a part of the Indian state’s policy of expanding the number of universities, both public and private, albeit with a mandate to implement several neo-liberal policy imperatives to create what is called ‘quality cutting edge’ education which as a sector can compete internationally and attract foreign students from all over the world. 2 In this quest to become a ‘hub’ of quality higher education, AUD was set up exclusively for the social sciences and humanities with a commitment to social justice, ‘non-professional’ critical education and excellence. 3
Taking such a commitment literally, the founding members envisioned a university which would be non-hierarchical, diverse and interdisciplinary. 4 Structurally, the location of faculty within campus spaces, and concurrent appointments (with every faculty member teaching in both undergraduate courses and post-graduate and research programmes) sought to break the vertical hierarchies characteristic of the Indian field of higher education. Similarly, discipline-wise attempts were made to push the boundaries of core and often congealed social science disciplines by conceptually imagining new schools such as School of Liberal Studies (SLS), Centre for Development Practice (CDP) and School of Human Studies (SHS). In SHS, foundation courses across disciplines have been conceptualised to deepen its vision of exploring the human. All disciplines are designated as programmes and not departments. All these attempts are framed with a commitment to rigorous interdisciplinarity and ideals of social justice.
The idea was to produce quality education and impart it to students from all backgrounds, especially to those who come from deprived backgrounds and to say that public institutions can also do it (or that only public institutions can have such an ideal). However, this was always perceived as a paradox. Not the ideal itself but the practice of higher education. This paradox came to be reflected in several ways:
Despite repeated admission drives and complete fee waivers under financial assistance policies (full tuition fee waivers to SC/ST/PwD selected students)
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, the high fee structure has a deterrent effect on the number of students who are able to apply for admission. This is changing very slowly though steadily. The semester fee is based on credits in courses that the students are required to complete or opt for additionally. For instance, the fee paid for one semester in 2016 admissions to a 64 credits MA GS programme was about ₹28,000/- (tuition fee—₹22,080 (₹1,380 per credit; 16 credits in first semester); student welfare fund—₹500/- (per semester); caution deposit (refundable)—₹5,000/). AUD remains the only social science and humanities university in a city like Delhi where all other state universities are more specialised, profession-oriented and charge much higher fees. If we take another state university set up also in 2008 the comparison is easy to see. National Law University, Dwarka (also set up by a Delhi Act in 2008) offers its BA, LLB (Hons.) Programme ( AUD is a non-affiliated university with its founding members having decided that AUD will forego the model of affiliation of colleges/institutes. This has also meant foregoing a hefty amount of fees that affiliating institutions give to the university they are affiliated to. This fee nowadays has come to cover a large proportion of the costs of many state universities in the country, whereas a non-affiliating university such as AUD has to raise the money for its expenses. This means raising a portion of that money from student fees. Unlike the high government subsidy given to the prominent central universities that surround AUD (Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Millia Islamia) it has to depend on funding from a variety of sources. The constraints placed on a new formation such as AUD have been crucial in shaping its direction. ‘Quality education’ is constantly sought to be made accessible to ‘weak students’, but wide gaps, drop outs, heavy silences and sparse attendance remain consistent trends in almost all programmes. This is sought to be resolved by framing a curriculum that is ‘of a level’ that can be accessed by students in general more easily. However, this is a double-edged process as it is felt that this compromises the demand of excellence and standards. That makes the business of producing ‘cutting edge’ knowledge a more difficult task. Equality versus quality becomes the line of tension. This is hardly a new dilemma. Sharmila Rege (2010a) has rigorously covered the ground while recounting the disciplinary history of sociology and the perceived crisis brought on by a more heterogeneous classroom including a discussion of language issues.
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Those issues have found a reflection in AUD also. The challenge is framed in terms of making higher education accessible to all while maintaining its international ‘quality’. Curricula designing and pedagogical practices become crucial to such goals. In our case, the gap produced by the paradox is compensated with new labour practices and a production of a zealously dedicated professional teacher who is committed to the agenda of social justice. This professional is then drawn into the vision of creating new knowledge and seeks to deliver it to students. Often these ‘new’ conceptual categories and knowledges are created by rejigging older disciplinary locations and combinations to encourage new entrants from the margins who can then become a ‘voice’ of their own marginality as a part of this project of commitment to social justice.
Gender Studies in School of Human Studies
The decision to house GS programmes in SHS was taken prior to faculty recruitment in the programme. 7 The school began with psychology offering an MA programme in Psychosocial and Clinical Studies (itself a marginal branch of study within mainstream psychology) followed by GS. The collaborative MPhil programme in Development Practice was set up followed very recently by Disability Studies in SHS. It was one of first schools set up at AUD apart from the School of Development Studies. SHS is also one amongst other non-traditional fields and is premised on marginalised and exclusion-based identities. Another academic initiative called the Queer Collective formed by interested individuals has decided to be housed in SHS.
In short, we can say disciplinary fields with special/historical minority differences and new discourses are sought to be brought to the centre of the vision of AUD in general and our School in particular which imagines itself to be ‘different’ from the mainstream public universities and social sciences. 8
Our first few years at SHS were spent in trying to interpret our own location in terms of the larger vision of the School engaged in explorations of the category ‘human’. This endeavour has had its limitations for several reasons, some of which are the historical legacies of ambivalence regarding the disciplinary status of an area like GS, its somewhat marginal status in terms of faculty strength, who were only junior faculty members, lack of funds and so on. Such conditions of existence have consistently hovered over our heads inducing uncertainty and an anxiety to chart out a ‘legitimate disciplinary status of GS’. Therefore, the occasions to engage in a productive critique of the human are few since the disciplinary ground from which to mount it is always precarious and waiting to take shape.
This has rendered the requirement of having to fit into the vision of the School somewhat problematic and fraught with silences. It is also reflected in the teaching and designing of four (each of 4 credits) foundation courses, three of which are core courses for Psychology yet also foundational for all the other programmes in the School. 9 GS faculty were not part of any engagement in developing these courses which were philosophy, anthropology, politics and psychology based. This has caused a significant imbalance in the way certain thematics came to be distributed across courses especially since all the foundation courses are based on foundational texts. Very recently, we have begun to participate in teaching these courses and are partially teaching at least one foundation course.
AUD also puts forward the ideal of producing cutting edge knowledge that has at its heart an imperative to compete with international standards and knowledge production. With a renewed focus on internationalism, AUD is emerging as a major player in rethinking international faculty and student exchanges, in conceptualising virtual classroom mechanisms, information sharing and student-centred research collaborations, and in general ‘internationalising’ the higher education experience in India.
The self-proclaimed goal and vision of the university also impinges upon what shape and name disciplines will take. How do we explain such decisions and choices in today’s context of higher education which envisions social justice and a specific idea of ‘quality’ education at the heart of its goals? Also, what are we re-inventing and what critical tools are we replacing the older forms with in our claims of production of quality education? How is the ‘new’, still steeped with the old, managing to deliver and what are we moving away to? These are some of the questions that have framed our experience of inhabiting and shaping GS in the given context.
WS to GS in Times of Neo-liberal Celebration of ‘Difference’
The project of higher education and its link with capital and the state 10 is crucial in determining the ‘standards’ that need to be met and define the necessity of acquiring skills supposedly imparted to the student through ‘balanced and efficient’ curricula and knowledge production. Who is able to compete and reach these standards and who falls through the cracks is also revealing. Economic efficiency, employability and demarcating a ‘legitimate terrain of Gender Studies’ remain at the core of institutional logic and curriculum designing.
Equally crucial have been our debates regarding the programme structure. To start with, the need to conceptualise the courses under the larger rubric of a programme and the AUD vision is also riddled with tension. On the one hand, the ‘signature’ of a programme signals the specificity of the product offered. The idea is to evolve and present our programme in such a way that we can catch the specific constituency of students who are looking for a particular training that promises a global future. On the other, it may also bind all courses offered in the programme under a single curricular umbrella thus curtailing the choice of courses to the students which is amply afforded by global universities.
As a mark of this tension, there have been suggestions to do away with programmes altogether and to give degrees according to the School instead of specific programmes. Another debate that signals this tension is the decision to minimise programme-specific core and elective courses. How many courses should be called core and how many elective? Does being a discipline entail a minimum core that can give a specific training to a student in that terrain?
In a way both these perspectives offer the possibility of resolving the dilemma by doing away with most of the compulsory courses offered currently or to at least curtailing the ambit of the category of ‘core’ or ‘compulsory’ courses, leaving the students ‘free’ to choose any number of combinations of courses that they may be interested in. 11 This may potentially leave the faculty freer to teach and innovate in courses more suited to their specialisations and backgrounds rather than disciplining their own backgrounds through an interrogation and exploration of the interdisciplinary enmeshing each one of us brings to the specialised disciplines in which we are appointed. Such moves may create a certain kind of interdisciplinarity freely, without the constraining hand of the programme, at least in the unstructured open-ended training of the student without having to tax ourselves in knotty questions of epistemic entanglements of our own and the programme’s disciplinarity.
The contrary position to stick to a larger core promised by the specialised disciplines bases itself on identification with the history of struggles that mark the emergence of some of these minority disciplines such as WS, which asserted their claim in academia and also challenged the epistemic domination of unmarked and universal ‘father’ disciplines. 12 The fact that the standpoint of these histories is crucial in knowledge production and that it cannot be subsumed into the larger academia once again also lends force to this position. This position imagines a coherence of feminist energy that the disciplinary terrain of GS should generate.
Our particular location may render such a debate moot by implicitly making GS people feel threatened that they are lagging behind and becoming outmoded. We work in the face of newer and more exciting combinations with constantly mutating and emerging new disciplines and social actors who are actively engaged in producing global knowledge in our programmes and in other well-funded institutes or organisations. We are then, required to present a ‘judicious balance’ between the two as if it was always a question of finding the right balance of a variety of skills that can be imparted to the students who come to us and have to go out again and face a very diverse and dynamic job market.
This balance also demands a space to network at once with a combination of market friendly options and activist-NGOs that are becoming the more recognised face of the women’s movement, at least in urban centres like Delhi. The dilemma faced by WS centres of working, under pressure to take up more ‘action-oriented projects or research’, with NGOs and their disconnect with issues raised by women’s movements in the past has been explored by Sreerekha (2016, pp. 65–66). She points to the complications and impact of such linkages for WS centres and its agenda of generating a political and radical feminist space. Without going into the debate on the relevance of making distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ NGOs, it can doubtless be said that NGOs and the significant work they are doing are legitimate sites of production of gender knowledge which also has a bearing on our programme.
For summer projects, as interns for example, students are frequently sent to various NGOs to engage with ‘on the ground’ social realities and action in tandem with emergent courses like ‘Masculinities’ and ‘Bodies’ combined with ‘Feminist Movements in South Asia’. The privileging of some courses marked as ‘theory courses’ is also a part of the tensions produced while we seek such a balance. Such courses are then more directly seen as legitimate bearers of academic rigour and quality.
The curricular discussions then confront the challenge of addressing the mixed trajectories of such courses and how their translation in the classroom transforms the students and us. It also entails a closer scrutiny of earlier conceptual tools that critiqued abstractions like gender and are now fast being replaced by newer vocabularies. However, a productive tension is generated as each discussion becomes the ground of contestation within and without.
Disciplining Gender?
At a different level, the added administrative workload (due to the severe paucity of administrative support staff) is increasingly becoming the primary task of faculty and is turning teaching into a kind of sweatshop training. Faculty constantly feels exhausted, overworked and alienated from their own work and workspace. Under these circumstances, it is easier to focus on the job by way of thinking about ‘our own’ courses and transacting them as critically as possible in the classroom. It becomes almost impossible to keep in mind the larger picture of what a programme like GS means in terms of presenting an epistemic challenge to other social sciences. No time is available to attend to critical questions like the relationship between newer terrains like GS and the critical conceptual tools provided by WS.
There remains the problem of containing the challenge of interdisciplinarity and what it may mean in forging GS, that is to say, a reflection on what our own backgrounds have brought and what new critical frameworks are being put in place. The possibility of interrupting the neoliberal mandate set for us becomes the biggest challenge of all.
GS has been beset from the start with the problem of managing with a very small number of faculty members to transact and bring in a ‘new’ discipline such as ours. To make up for the obvious shortage, we were joined by colleagues on contracts of 3–5 months, precarious and always uncertain, who join within days of a new semester. These colleagues put in heroic efforts and unpaid labour into helping us create a super efficient and dedicated programme which always accomplished all its tasks well in time. This efficiency was always premised on the short-term nature of contractual labour and the lack of any protection of most of their labour rights. Combined with the fervour of our dedication to build a new institution this labour worked well, having been disciplined on both counts of precarity and commitment. Their presence was instrumental in bringing a rigour into our curriculum-related discussions as some of these colleagues had studied in gender-related fields. The courses designed by this bright young but transient contractual faculty has become part of the archive and institutional history of GS and continues to be drawn upon, if invisibly, either by way of using the programme data collated in conditions where it has been difficult to track it from the first year of admission when records kept were not so systematic, course descriptions or readings they put together.
The disciplinary background of the regular and contractual faculty is also varied and may or may not have anything to do with the analytic of gender. For instance, all regular faculty who have been recruited have varying disciplinary backgrounds ranging from political science, sociology, foreign languages; literature, women’s studies, international relations and so on. The contractual faculty similarly come from Humanities, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Political Science and Gender Studies. What this has meant is that we chose to teach courses that aligned most closely with our disciplinary backgrounds and interests and modified courses based more on what we already were familiar with rather than present the supposedly ‘newly’ demarcated disciplinary field of GS.
The question of the object of our disciplinary enquiry is also framed in relation not only to the disciplinary ground of WS/GS but also to other disciplinary objects that were constantly brought to bear upon our discussions, emanating from our diverse disciplines. This was significantly augmented by the unstinted support given to us by feminist scholars, engaged within WS or outside, to help make sense of our predicament. The first few years reflect inputs from precisely such disciplinary sources that are housed in social sciences and WS. Therefore, the alleged ‘newness’ of GS was steeped in the older conceptual categories of WS, social sciences and humanities that were thus brought into our discussions and classrooms.
Our link with WS and its chequered history and debates remains unclear and unstructured. 13 We find ourselves neither in a position to bask in the glory of the struggles that WS has waged and continues to do so in inserting and asserting disciplinary challenges in the academia and their attempts to conceptualise feminist pedagogies, 14 nor to be simple inheritors of the foreclosures that mark a number of WS developmental programmes.
As a part of the pressures of becoming commensurable with WS programmes in the West and meeting international standards, we have courses such as ‘Masculinities’, ‘Bodies’ and so on that are often not found in a ‘standard’ WS curriculum. This has led to us often being perceived as having ‘moved on’ from the disciplinary confines of WS and its narrower focus on women, with GS seen as more ‘inclusive’ with a broader spectrum of ‘all’ genders. At the same time, we work hard to enact a recreation of the WS space by bringing in activists/scholars as guest speakers; re-iterating our commitment to the women’s movements by inviting NGOs/women’s organisations and retaining ‘necessary’ courses on women’s movements so that the students remain ‘in touch’ with the political feminist energies that are more clearly identified, albeit fraught with debates, within WS and women’s movements.
Locked somewhere between the two in some senses then, we are in what Zimmerman (2002) has called a position ‘defined by very different social formations and political challenges’ (p. 15). We therefore need to explore what precisely this ‘moving on’ to the ‘new’ specialised discipline like GS implies. More attention is needed to understand the contemporary moment that frames our emergence in the recent years marked by an intensification of state-led liberalisation and struggles over resources and resultant dilemmas and energies. Many contextual aspects that require greater exploration are beyond the scope of the present article. A major one that calls for rigorous study is the re-configured link between the state, capital and academia in this age of transnational capital flows, which in turn influence the movement of knowledge around the world. Related to this is the need to further explore the shifting dynamics of knowledge production in academia and its links with how women’s movements are framing the challenge not only in response to repeated onslaughts by a neo-liberal state whether it is through attempts to starve and shut down WS centres across the country (Sharma, 2017) or shrinking space for activists and NGOs working in ways that critically examine the multiple effects of these trends. The onslaught of the state can be seen in the way research programme admissions, and WS centres are being pressured to close down; further, the contents of these programmes are being monitored. The ‘National Convention on Women’s Studies Centres’ held in Delhi on 23 August 2017 in response to the UGC notice that it would stop funding WS centres saw a coming together of hundreds of faculty members, students and representatives of women’s organisations to resist this move. Immediately after, UGC issued a public notification denying any such move on its part to stop funding WS centres (reported in The Wire (Khullar, 2017) and Times of India (2017)). It would be interesting to examine how the energies generated by this moment are also impacting the day-to-day decisions pertaining to the programmes and their future.
In the next section, I will focus on our experience of shaping GS curricula to mark some of the impasses, contestations and daily struggles which have also been instrumental in destabilising the mandates set for us. Our formation, on the one hand, and the tenuous silent link with WS, on the other, have characterised our heated yet energising debates on framing the curricula.
Burdens and Challenges in Designing the Gender Studies Curriculum
It has been six years since the MA programme in GS was started in AUD. Since then seven batches have taken admission and the student strength in each batch has increased from 12 to 42, out of a total capacity of 50 seats that are now offered in MA programmes. The process of data collation is on its way and is still in preliminary stages. The GS programmme decided to make an attempt to gather what was available and draw some inferences which could be factored into our programme and curricular discussions. This is therefore provisional data culled from our own files, office and experiences.
In the first batch in 2010 there were a very small number of applicants who came to the programme (12 were enrolled out of which 3 withdrew and 9 completed the programme), after which subsequent batches saw an uneven but overall rise in the total applicant and enrollment number (admitted students rose to 20 in 2011; 33 in 2012; 48 in 2013; 25 in 2014; 29 in 2015 and in 2016 out of admissions offered to 55 students 42 took admission). However, the dropout rate has also been high. (Out of the total of 113 enrolled over the years only 58 successfully completed the programme. Two students repeated and completed the programme and the rest dropped out.) In some cases drop outs were due to programme transfer. Since almost all applicants fill applications in multiple programmes and in multiple universities many students leave on getting admission in another university.
Out of the enrolled students, the reserved category seats have mostly remained vacant. At the moment we do not have the number of applicants for reserved seats for the first few admissions. However, in spite of repeated special admission drives and fee waivers the enrollment in these seats has been very low. This number has risen marginally along with the rise in the overall number of seats filled. Provisionally, out of 113 enrollments from 2010 to 2013, 96 were in the ‘general’ category, 2 in Scheduled Caste (SC), 7 in Scheduled Tribe (ST), 5 in Other Backward Classes (OBC) and 3 in other categories. This has risen in 2016 when, out of 42 seats filled, 19 were reserved seats (3 ST; 9 OBC; 7 SC).
The MPhil/PhD programme in WS and GS offered as part of the collaboration between AUD/SHS and CWDS (Centre for Women’s Development Studies) has steadily increased the enrollment in reserved seats. It can also be seen that in both MA and MPhil/PhD programmes there is a slow but somewhat steady trend of applicants from ‘reserved’ categories qualifying in the ‘general’ merit list.
The composition of students in the GS classroom has therefore been predominantly urban, mostly from Delhi (since 85 per cent have a domicile requirement or at least their qualifying degrees must be from Delhi to make them eligible), upper caste and middle class women, though this composition is slowly changing. The contributing factors can be many, ranging from a more durable reputation being acquired by the GS programme, leading to a much higher number of applicants with a preference to opt for GS, complete fee waivers for SC/ST/PHD selected candidates, repeat admission drives, together with the Delhi Government policy to keep 85 per cent seats for the NCT (National Capital Territory) region and so on.
Language remains an important issue in the classroom and several students struggle to read and critically engage with texts in English. So far, AUD’s policy has been to take English alone as the medium of instruction. Curriculum design, especially in academic institutional spaces such as ours, has undergone remarkable standardisation, a significant factor and marker of which is the continuing dominance of English as the language of scholarship worldwide. It is the language in which the students and faculty must make sense of their disciplines, transact them and put them into international circulation, making possible careers and a future in the global job market. Curricula, names of programmes/departments, individual courses explicitly signal a university’s and individual programme’s ‘signature’ and its promise of fulfilling the mandate with which it has been set up. Such choices are translated into assessments, vision statements and goals that the university sets for itself. Curriculum design is therefore another challenge in terms of selection of texts, jargon and negotiating epistemological interdisciplinarity.
Simultaneously, the ‘aesthetic objectification’ (Spivak, 2012, p. 81) of knowledge in terms of curriculum design that is ‘appealing’ to the Board of Studies and the Academic Council, also caters to the market and gives shape to the writing and transacting of the programme. How does a product of this industry qualify as a ‘successful’ one?
For example, our internship programme and experience is seen as an intervention in the social and the political spheres that fits into the larger institutional vision of outreach through socially productive knowledge translatable into jobs. Internship in one way is a pedagogical strategy of teaching feminist praxis through an experiential approach (Naples, 2002). It also is an exercise in writing ‘legibly’ for non-academic purposes like report writing for NGOs or research organisations, being part of projects and learning the application of research methods like transcribing, translating, archiving, experience in publishing, etc. These experiences cannot escape the imagined future prospects of employment for a student of GS as being rather few. This economic rationalism/utility test creates pressure for other social sciences and humanities disciplines but becomes acute in the case of a seemingly feminised constituency (Dever, Cuthbirt, & Pollak, 2002).
Any curriculum design exercise is already operating within certain institutional logics, sanctioned or not. The attempt can be to stay alert to the terms of that engagement and which frames are made available and to whom. Operations of power and hierarchies are constitutive of such ‘disciplining’ exercises and any assumption that assumes a position free of such operations is already complicit in creating/reinforcing universalities. No knowledge is purely critical or free just as no curriculum or pedagogy can be, especially if it is drawing from and carrying the burden of the energy of movements and their urgent questions. It is always already in a charged field of modalities of dominations and subversions. It is also not a coincidence that high fees for higher education as a strategy has meant being able to refuse the pressures from those who are kept out. The market has stepped in with student loans, of course with returns guaranteed that are expected in any reasonable business transaction. A huge fund is spent through various donors, government grants and philanthropies to encourage local and minority cultures that are immediately put in international circuits of capital through conferences, seminars and anthologies.
Together then, both specialised and mainstream disciplines get drawn into requirements from the state, ministries and central regulatory and funding agencies that the university has to fulfil to grow, thrive and stay stable. The most obvious example that comes to mind is the accreditation requirement by agencies like NAAC which expects certain criteria to be fulfilled in order to justify continued funding. These are defined as five ‘core values’ and include how much the university is ‘contributing to national development; fostering global competencies among students; inculcating a sound value system among students; promoting use of technology and quest for excellence 15 to which is added a focus on internationalism’. The former HRD minister Ms Smriti Irani had stated the need to expand and revise accreditation criteria to more explicitly include social justice and industrial linkages 16 (The Indian Express, 15 January 2016).
Not the least crucial to this project of higher education is the celebration, incorporation and reproduction of ‘difference’ by way of introducing specialised minority disciplines. Academia then can also be seen as an archive that collects, classifies and orders all in their proper place. In a move that Ferguson (2012) calls ‘archival tactics of power’, he shows the ‘rise of a mode of power organized around the absorption of heterogeneity’ (p. 23). This is not an insignificant burden placed on curricula which must make the language and terms of negotiation available to students. Closer attention to the process of curriculum designing, keeping the priorities of the market and state in mind and marking the shifts can be helpful in understanding the burdens and possibilities that lie in such tasks. For instance, it can open up the several ways in which concepts such as ‘interdisciplinarity’ operate to accommodate the market pressures indicated in the above discussion and simultaneously also provide a ground for enabling a critique. While I have been able to explore these linkages minimally, this could be a fruitful line of enquiry in the future.
All these are useful ways to understand the grounding of GS in contemporary global times in a university like AUD. The buzzword called ‘interdisciplinarity’ has come to denote an inclusive and morally defensible grand vision which has come about simultaneously with LPG (liberalisation, privatisation, globalisation) in the early 1990s. Capital’s turn to local cultures and difference in its third world avatar can be one way to understand the seeming paradox that AUD represents. That it struggles to stay afloat in the midst of an inimical external environment becomes an even more legitimate ground to enlist the support/complicity of the ‘different’ minorities to fulfil the larger (nation-building; resolving the crisis of national culture/state) national goal. It could also enable us to better understand the accompanying vulnerabilities that people inhabiting these centres/programmes live within their everyday university life. Importantly it also shows that such sites are also seats of power which get drawn into nation-building exercises often eroding the oppositional and critical role that they can bring to the academy.
Ferguson (2012, p. 35) cites the black literary critic and scholar Barbara Christian who notes that
…in the moment in which subjects minoritized by race, ethnicity, and gender become both the subjects and objects of representation, canon formation emerges as the ironic repetition of disciplinarity, but a repetition within interdisciplinary contexts. (Christian, 2012, p. 35)
She gestures towards the need to be alert while not losing sight of the enabling and troubling aspects of interdisciplinary transformations ‘even as we promote them for institutional change’. This is where the role of critical pedagogies becomes crucial. Critical pedagogical strategies and a critique of institutionalisation may, as Christian notes, create new conditions which instead of representing the confirmation of power’s totalising character interdisciplinarity connotes a site of contradiction, an instance in which minoritised differences negotiate and manoeuvre agreements with and estrangements from institutionalisation (ibid.).
The impulse to both stabilise the discipline and destabilise the institutional/national logics reveals a more complicated side of the role of academia. From being predominantly understood as a site of critique and critical engagement with the world the role of academia can also be seen in managing such crisis for the unity and integrity of the nation-state. The mere inclusion of marginal groups and disciplines alike is being questioned in the face of the severe limitations and failure we have experienced in our struggles to transact international curricula in a social justice and nation-building milieu.
Inclusion, in the frame of social justice, is a hard fought—for entitlement by oppressed minorities and in spite of its obvious limits continues to be fought for by all of us as a legitimate claim and a necessity in an unequal world. However, it also signals a move towards a consolidation of the nation building agenda in which the impulse is ‘unity in diversity’. Even in our contemporary experience the celebration of ‘difference’; of ‘local cultures’ and specific ‘identity based injuries’ are sought to be brought together in an alliance between social justice and an unquestioned quest for ‘excellence’ and ‘merit’. How does this celebration and inclusion turn the critical edge of asserting ‘… the means by which minority difference is brought into regimes of representation and (is) fundamentally reconstituted’ (Ferguson, 2012, p. 12) is an important question.
Normalisation of this modality of power is also visible in our courses and pedagogies. The knowledge that is transacted in various courses is often a translation of what is considered relevant critical theories into local and specific cultural and social contexts. The reverse direction of this flow of knowledge is often inadmissible given the underlying logic of the ‘catching up’ of backward knowledge and thought worlds into a more advanced conceptual world. If the terms of translation are not meaningful and guided by what the student knows then there will be the kinds of erasures where all that is left is an identity, an exclusion, a difference or as Rohith Vemula, the dalit research scholar who committed suicide, put it, a number. 17 This struggle, between normalising role of curricula and simultaneously destabilising the mandate pre-set for GS, is clearly reflected in discussions of the content and level of the curricula; special drives in admissions and discussions such as what kind of questions should be asked in the entrance exam to enable admissions from marginalised categories.
Our connection with WS, or the lack of it, comes from our engagement with the sharp debate that has marked the emergence of WS and institutionalisation of the radical critique of gender in the Indian academy. These debates in WS have been re-configured in our contemporary setting. Specific forms of institutionalisation to fulfil the neo-liberal mandate have made generating a radical critique a different challenge. Our credentials, nevertheless, as a radical minoritised discipline, draw its legitimacy from our connection with the political feminist histories of WS which may not have any direct relation with our formation. We carry these tensions which shape us.
Curricular Dilemmas: Complicities and Possibilities
The choice to name the programme Gender Studies and not Women’s Studies signals the tension that has been discussed above. The displacement of the objects of enquiry of WS onto the new matrix of GS has not elucidated the newness of GS. It has rather worked as a sleight of hand whereby earlier debates are subsumed and presented as ‘resolved’ in a happy co-existence of the old and the new. The new avatar then is seen as ready for the more contemporary epistemic challenges to the foundational conceptual categories used in WS such as patriarchy, woman and so on. The terms of this resolution remain unclear even as they impart productive energy to disciplinary and pedagogical questions.
An example of this lay in our transactions in the attempts, at least initially, to chart out a specific terrain of ‘Gender Studies’ which often veered between sliding into the WS mode and gearing ourselves up to teach courses like ‘Masculinities’, ‘Bodies’ which are taken as the vague markers of belonging to the new terrain of GS. The unsaid general assumption we inherited was that GS has evolved/expanded in a more inclusive turn from the exclusive focus on women in WS to ‘include’ other genders. This simplistic and flawed popular conceptualisation of GS masks the neo-liberal framing of gender as a mainstreamed category within global circuits of knowledge production.
Curriculum review is an ongoing exercise and it is becoming evident that more clarity and time will be needed in setting up a field called GS and exploring the productive possibilities that the contemporary moment affords us. The discussions in the review have helped us frame questions and expand the disciplinary boundaries of what we call ‘core’ categories significant to the project of unveiling gender.
In the first year, all courses were mostly in a mode whereby activism, politics, issues thrown up by the women’s movement and key categories figured prominently. It was considered necessary to carefully select ‘key’ issues of the women’s movement not only to establish the movement as identity producing but as a knowledge producing site. We never kept a separate course on feminist theory and had two courses on women’s movements; one on Feminisms in South Asia and the other on Global Feminism. Tracking the place that the category of theory has had in the founding texts of WS, Zimmerman (2002) sees it ‘… as an articulation in tension, if not in contradiction, to the activist’ (p. 15). We wanted to retain both and our new location as GS easily gave us the autonomy to keep a mix of such courses without the need to interrogate this mode whereby such dichotomies were consolidated rather than examined.
A colleague who joined us about two years ago marks our programme as having taken the ‘cultural/linguistic’ turn. Whether or not this is an accurate or even desirable description, this journey has entailed a continuing tension of our commitment to the body of feminist literature we have been teaching to having to respond to the demands of critical theories and our location in a ‘re-invented’ social science and humanities university in the age of global capital. This tension was evident in discussions on the programme’s intellectual relationship with women’s movements in India.
Some of the debates regarding the link of WS with women’s movements overshadowed many of our initial elaborate discussions. Courses that we were teaching in the initial years were brought under the scanner. These courses were structured more with an activist figure in mind and the need to contribute to the movement from the academy. Almost all our courses therefore, were heavy in terms of detail, dealing with work done in various important domains such as labour, sexuality, health, family, culture and methods. The attempt in our discussions was to bring this richly descriptive and exhaustive analytical and critical feminist material into a dialogue with critical theories and challenges coming from new disciplines. Or at least that is how we saw what we had to do and were doing.
Our course in the first semester, Introduction to Gender, was a case in point. We divided the course into several categories which have had an important structural role in constituting patriarchies such as nation, class, caste, community, gender and patriarchy. We brought in readings of feminist work which had examined closely the connection between these categories and their co-constitution. Predominantly, we were working with the conceptual frames of standpoint theory and intersectionality albeit in a way that suggested that these may not be adequate to setting up gender as an analytic category. After our review discussions the course has now changed substantially with its priority shifting to unpacking the category ‘woman’ into its many productions and resisting its conflation with the operations of gender ideologies. Such productive engagements and reformulated courses did present our programme in a new light. However, the feeling of teaching faculty persisted that while we had junked the political subject ‘woman’ and unpacked it as a problematic category, we were at sea within what appeared to us now as an abstract field of power.
Another example can be taken from the course ‘Sexualities’. The first two course outlines were rigorously opening up the regulatory role of sexuality in constituting gender. Therefore, we discussed the control of sexuality as central to endogamy and the reproduction of caste and gender. This was done through a close analysis of diverse texts. In the review discussions, it was pointed out that Sexuality Studies has brought in critiques of the heteronormative framing of the terrain that has developed at the cost of exploring the pleasure and perils of ignoring moralising censorship. It also meant that sexual violence and the feminist critique of it needed to be more nuanced in relation to framing sexuality as a more complicated terrain of our own investments. In some ways the emphasis shifted almost solely to the latter at the expense of the former and a conversation was attempted without a sufficient understanding of what the overtly regulatory regime of sexuality meant in terms of our identification and investments in gender and vice versa. However, these efforts have again opened up rich possibilities of exploring the links between sexuality, class, caste and our identifications.
Such deliberations around the subject of feminism, activism, the political and theory also led us to interrogate courses like ‘Masculinities’ which problematised the question of men in feminism and foregrounded problems with stable identities, even gender. We have moved away from looking at masculinity as merely an ideology or an identity produced by a set of practices to also question the seemingly natural relationship between the male body and masculinity. This has been the productive aspect of our transactions with the course which has also oscillated between the way feminists have analysed the oppressive and hegemonic constructions of masculinities and the way these courses were designed in the West from where also came most of the readings.
Similarly, the course on ‘Gender, Work and Labour’ was framed through Marxist and feminist analyses of women’s labour, its links with capitalism, and the production of the housewife. We covered the vast literature on the domestic labour debate, movements linking class and gender and labour’s constituting role in the production and reproduction of social identities. This has moved on to what labour may mean to opening up other crucial categories like culture, sexuality, affect and so on. This has enabled us to push the boundaries of both labour and gender as marked categories in their operations of capital accumulation. However, we continue to retain a large part of this beginning in this course as well.
These discussions took up a large amount of our time and produced not insignificant anxieties as they threatened to unmoor us from our learned disciplinary roots and throw us into the uncharted waters of the unknown. However, the productive potential of these discussions, if continued in the long run, was not only to explore creating a critical feminist energy which would move towards an interruption of its happy location in AUD but would also enable a dialogue with WS to forge important epistemic energies which could begin to contend with the contemporary challenges faced by us. Such critical discussions almost completely stopped a couple of years ago. Now, with all of us engaged in multiple responsibilities, we are fast moving in the direction of work through the e-mail/whatsapp culture which does not have the time or energy or indeed the politics of such deliberations.
After the initial engagement with WS scholars in designing our courses and programme structure, we have steadily moved into a space where we are expected to evolve courses and programme structure ourselves. This has substantially reduced opportunities of a sustained dialogue or consultation with WS scholars. Also, our efforts to design courses and struggles to shape GS have not led to a critical exploration of these efforts by WS scholars and departments. For instance, there has not been much inquiry on what implications a formation like ours in a neo-liberal context has for the larger field of WS/GS. What does the emergence of ‘Gender Studies’ with the constellation of new courses and reformulation of older courses mean for the debates that frame WS? What does the neo-liberal conjuncture’s investment in re-presenting the ‘gender question’ and the effects of our efforts of interruptions to that agenda mean for the political feminist energies of WS? Do the researches and problematics generated by a formation like GS also address the WS constituencies? These are some of the questions that can become the ground for a more sustained inquiry into the predicament of feminist endeavour of asserting our agendas, educational or activist, in the face of contemporary neo-liberal challenge to feminist politics.
Pedagogical Challenges in Individualised Courses and Classrooms
Designing curricula is at heart always an arbitrary exercise with canonising propensities. Linked with the question of pedagogy it may have a destabilising potential that can push the conservative boundaries of institutional practices and normative demands. At one level, questioning disciplinary exclusions and universals, curricula designing can become an epistemic challenge forcing a greater porosity of knowledge, expanding the conceptual grounds of critique and making knowledge amenable to more defiant narratives. At another, critical pedagogies can exceed the domains of individualised knowledges, overturn and bring chaos from the interstices into the ordered formats of formulating a problematic. Inhabiting this contradictory space is the challenge we must face every day.
The courses of the GS programme are fast becoming a conglomeration of several themes with their horizons set by the agenda of social justice within a specific potential of global outreach. A dilemma faced by specialised disciplines such as ours comes from the assumption of women being the ‘naturally interested/invested’ student of a WS programme. The ‘everydayness of Gender’ has led to an assumption of it being an easy or ‘soft’ programme (Sreenivas, 2015, p. 269). Valourisation of the experiential has at times attracted criticism of the terrain not measuring up to academic standards of excellence. GS is then seen more as an identity producing rather than knowledge producing site.
An Australian indigenous scholar Martin Nakata talks about precisely such difficulties which are in some ways peculiar to specialised disciplines coming from marginalities. Echoing some of the same issues such as how to confront the ‘other’, the assumption is that representation of and knowledge about the oppressed can best be produced by members of the ‘othered’ community. Nakata (2012) critiques such assumptions in the context of Indigenous Studies saying that here the assumption is ‘that this knowledge production is transparent and Indigenous participants are self-knowing, apolitical agents of knowledge when producing knowledge in their own contexts and on Indigenous terms’ (p. 125). While the task of unmasking the hegemonies of universal knowledge and its erasure of the ‘other’ is urgent and must be a part of these pedagogies, he warns us against setting up easy binaries in our goal to decolonise knowledge which is perceived as a significant part of social justice curricula.
In our classrooms composed largely of urban middle class women students combined with such potential pedagogical practices of unquestioned binaries, the courses often tend to collapse into a gender sensitisation exercise whereby ‘dominant’ 18 agential women attempt to acquire a more tolerant and sensitive perspective towards the ‘others’. This is often also reflected in the trajectories taken by students after completing their MA programme to join NGOs and social work. Even though our programme is gaining repute the admissions pattern demonstrate that GS is often the second/third/fourth choice for students and is considered a ‘soft’ option much in line with ideas of social work and social awareness agendas. The political investment in feminism that GS programmes tries to inculcate and demand is often translated in terms of being sensitive, guilty and liberal rather than/also being intellectually rigorous and critically analytical. Following Nakata 19 these may not ‘provide methods for critical examination of such assumptions or their limits in the contemporary space’ (Nakata, 2012, p. 127).
The language of negotiation and bargain is a shift in classroom dynamics which goes hand in glove with the current emphasis of turning classrooms into sources that impart ‘quality standard’ education with a humane touch. The classroom space and academic processes are translated in terms of a more formal and mechanical understanding of a client asserting his/her rights for better services and employability. Meanwhile those who come from ‘different’ locations remain silent and fall through the cracks or become exemplary open to circulation in global markets. Such trajectories make urgent the need for rigorous questioning and pushing against the disciplinary border with attempts to set up more relevant and challenging researches and problematics.
This has also been one of the fruitful directions that students have pursued after completing the MA GS programme. Many have gone on to do research, a few in Women and Gender Studies in Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and other centres, in Cultural Studies, Development Practice and so on. Some students have gone abroad after having developed some idea of the research questions that they want to work on. In the occasional feedback that we get from different sectors that our students have gone to we find that they are successful but struggling, each in their own way, to foreground gender and push the disciplinary boundaries of their own locations.
In such a situation, what does designing curriculum mean? Does it allow us to inhabit this standardising space while destabilising it simultaneously?
There have been occasions when we have felt acutely inadequate in negotiating disciplinary perspectives that are other than those coming from our own backgrounds. The students also have had problems in comprehending readings from a disciplinary location other than theirs. For GS, the challenge has been more pronounced as feminist theory thrives on skepticism towards disciplinary knowledge yet draws upon the intellectual traditions of these very disciplines (Blee, 2002). The struggle then has been between faculty expertise and the teaching of compulsory components of the courses.
The intimacy between the thought world and the experiential is a difficult pedagogical question. Nakata (2012) advocates making teaching a ‘practice of suspension’ where all pre-supposed beliefs are put on hold and a practice of ‘thinking’ can be created which may be
disruptive but [an] intellectualised practice of a less personalised nature which still engages students in the politics of knowledge production and ultimately the politics of their location and of social reproduction. (Nakata, 2012, p. 135)
Here I have focused on the Masters programme in GS only. The process of curriculum designing and pedagogical practices have a very different dynamic for research programmes such as the MPhil/PhD in Women’s and Gender Studies that we offer jointly in collaboration with CWDS. The low priority at which research is kept in the contemporary neo-liberal context of higher education amongst many others factors frame the challenges differently and need close attention in future work. Similarly, the intensifying regulatory regimes in higher education being acutely felt by more vulnerable disciplines like WS/GS are bringing women’s movement activists, scholars and the academic community into close collaboration strategies of resistance generating productive energies and are signalling a new moment for WS/GS and women’s movements. The implications of such collaborations also need to be closely explored in future work. In this rapidly shifting and challenging contemporary context, the possibilities afforded by political and radical curricula and pedagogical practices assume an urgency. It may enable us to not only respond to our current predicament, but may also help us recalibrate our relationship with institutional power.
These are also the sites from where are emerging ideas for a better, sustainable and humane world. That such possibilities exist comes from the hard ground built by feminist, dalit and indigenous activists and critics who are not only dismantling and unveiling the politics of knowledge production but are also rethinking pedagogies of resistance. Curricula designing and pedagogy can be powerful ways to challenge or consolidate institutional logics, provided they are nuanced to gestures of their own power and the modalities that they seek to challenge.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Professor Mary E. John for encouraging me to write this article, and offering comments for revision. I also want to thank my colleagues at AUD, Dr Shad Naved (Comparative Literature) and Dr Rachna Chaudhary (Gender Studies) for long discussions and critical comments.