Radical Teacher

Teaching Reproductive Justice

Sarah E. Chinn, Kimberly Mutcherson — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Teaching Taboo Topics: Menstruation in a Global Context

Madhu Kushwaha, Elisabeth Fost Maring — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Inadequate menstrual health education is a global public health issue. An innovative Global Classroom course, Teaching Menstrual Health: Dispelling Myths and Misconceptions, is situated at the intersection of gender, culture, and health. The course engages students from India and the U.S. in project-based learning on menstrual health and misconceptions that impact individuals and communities. Linking the fields of public health and education, students engage in lectures and discussions that address power imbalances and build cultural competency before working collaboratively on projects to address stigma around menstruation. The course was designed to address colonial narratives that marginalize menstruators and undermine women’s health. Student experiences are quoted to demonstrate how the five course development strategies create action for menstrual and reproductive justice.

Recurring Rhetorics and Cultivating Connections: The Transversals of Rhetoric, Sex, Freedom

Wendy Hayden — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Abstract: This paper considers how archival research pedagogies help students explore the history of arguments for reproductive justice and connect them with recurring rhetorics and exigencies. I assign students to research in curated collections of primary sources and digital archives and to create a digital archive that documents past and current rhetoric. The archive applies scholarship on how rhetoric circulates as it looks at topics across temporal and textual boundaries. Students draw connections between the rhetoric of freedom and the imposition of forced-birth, censorship, and anti-trans laws through their exploration of primary sources from several pivotal historical moments in the history of reproductive justice.

"I Took My Babies and Put Them Where They’d Be Safe": African American Women and the Continuum of Reproductive Justice Activism

Shelby Pumphrey — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0400

This article describes my pedagogical approach to teaching “African American Women and the History of Reproductive Justice.” It considers innovative ways to teach reproductive justice in the in Africana Studies and Women’s Studies classrooms in the contemporary moment. It highlights altar work and community collaboration as important pedagogical tools for liberatory education. The article points to various practices that both blur the lines between past and present while simultaneously transgressing traditional classroom boundaries and asking collaborators to collectively envision new reproductive futures. It highlights two projects, the Reproductive Justice Community Altar (RJCA) and Community Herbal Gathering (CHG), to highlight the utility of these transformative pedagogical tools.

Confronting Reproductive Injustices: A Discussion on Decolonial, Queer, Anti-racist Organizing

Mary Jo Klinker, Regan Kluver, TL Jordan, BriShaun Kearns — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0400

This dialogic essay builds from the critical teachings of women of color organizers in Sister Song and Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice that assert that reproductive justice is an intersectional framework tying together multiple social movements. We share our diverse perspectives to offer an example of coalitional solidarity by including perspectives at the margin often relegated to invisibility in mainstream reproductive rights conversations.

Post-Roe Abortifacients in a Gender and Health Classroom: Teaching Reproductive Justice in 2022 and Beyond

Rachel O'Donnell — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0400

This article argues that as radical instructors who prioritize the role of antiracism in the classroom, we can use Reproductive Justice to create both reimaginings for those resistant to the movement and space for those doing this work. In white male spaces and institutions, it is important for us to hold up racist and sexist institutions and structures, such as ideas around health and the practice of health care, as central to our understandings of the globe. The writer discusses how beginning from the Reproductive Justice framework radically changed the classroom in her course titled the Global Politics of Gender and Health.

Sharing Information as Political Praxis Among Activists for Self-managed Abortion

Naomi Braine — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Social movements are intrinsically involved in processes of knowledge development, teaching, and learning, but this has become a central form of political action among feminist activists for self-manged abortion. Activists engage with medical protocols at multiple levels, and have made the sharing of this information with people facing unwanted pregnancies into both a vital form of resistance and of the creation of feminist knowledge at the intersections of science, community, and the political. This work has been central to maintaining and expanding access to abortion throughout the world, including in the United States since the Supreme Court Dobbs decision. The sharing and learning practices of activists for self-managed abortion, and other community-based health activists, challenge rigid structures of health education and the health sciences in particular, although their ways of thinking may be useful to educators in any setting.

Teaching Dobbs to Disrupt U.S. Hegemony and Build Feminist Solidarities

Derek P. Siegel — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0400

The Dobbs decision has created both opportunities and challenges in the classroom. On one hand, Dobbs animated student interest, increasing awareness of reproduction. On the other hand, media coverage of Dobbs primed students—particularly those who had not been exposed to reproductive justice—to think about abortion access in isolation from other topics and from an exclusively U.S. perspective. In this article, I discuss my experience teaching the Politics of Reproduction in Fall 2022. Among other goals, I wanted to expose students to La Marea Verde, or the “Green Wave,” of countries expanding abortion access in Latin America. By teaching Latin American abortion politics in relation to the Dobbs decision, I aim to disrupt U.S. hegemony. Specifically, teaching about the Green Wave highlights the possibility of organizing for reproductive justice outside the parameters of the state and challenges the logic of American Exceptionalism, which works to justify and normalize intersectional inequalities.

I’d like to thank Dr. Laura Briggs & the Five College Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice (RHRJ) certificate program for their invaluable support developing the syllabus this article is based on (https://www.fivecolleges.edu/academics/reproductive-health-rights-justice). Dr. Briggs developed an original syllabus for the Politics of Reproduction with a grant from the RHRJ program, encouraging me to adopt a similarly transnational approach to this course (little did I know how important such an approach would be in the post-Dobbs classroom). While the activities I discuss in this article are my own, the structure of the syllabus is based on Dr. Briggs’, and the arguments I make would not be possible without the robust community of feminist and reproduction scholars within and outside the RHRJ program. The funding I also received from the RHRJ certificate program provided stipends for the invited guest speakers.

Teaching Reproductive Justice After Dobbs: A Forum

Sarah E. Chinn; Kimberly Mutcherson — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0400

A transcript of a forum at the AALS about teaching Reproductive Justice in law schools in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health.

Ghassan Kanafani’s “Men in the Sun”

Linda Dittmar — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Teaching Note on “Men in the Sun," a novella by Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani.

Playbook

Patricia L. Hamilton — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0400

The poem offers a feminist viewpoint on teaching composition.

Headed North

Amber Moore — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Poem by Amber Moore.

Is College Worth It? Class and the Myth of the College Premium

Bob Rosen — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Book review of Is College Worth It? Class and the Myth of the College Premium, by Richard Ohmann and Ira Shor (2024).