Maps and Fabulations: On Transnationalism, Transformative Pedagogies, and Knowledge Production in Higher Education

Abstract

Higher education has long been subject to feminist critique, contesting traditional practices, with calls for transformative pedagogies that empower marginalised students, address social injustices and promote gender equality. Despite this, most classrooms in Western European universities remain largely unchanged, with educators facing the difficulty of imagining and/or enacting decolonial futures within their curricula. However, some progress has been made, particularly the inclusion of transnational scholarship in syllabi and a turn to transformative pedagogies, which allow for alternative ways of interdisciplinary knowing to enter academia. In this paper, we examine this coming together of approaches which promote dialogue and personal reflection to restructure discussions on equality, gender and knowledge production in the ‘classroom’. Using a creative critical account of feminist ethnography conducted at a Western European university, we present and discuss two illustrative vignettes about cultural mapping and critical fabulation, considering how dissonant voices have challenged Western concepts, exemplifying transformative pedagogy working in tandem with transnational thought. Key insights from the study identify approaches for facilitation of more open and richer discussions to reshape staff and student perspectives of gender, equality and knowledge production.

1. Introduction

Much has been written about how academics across the disciplines can be left grappling with how to redress past inequalities and injustices in the classroom and to challenge the dominance of Western knowledge, pedagogy, and research (Adefila et al. 2022; Smith 2021). This is often aligned with universities’ moral and social obligations of educating students to be respectful and culturally aware when it comes to epistemological engagement in plural ways of knowing (see, for example, Du Preez 2018; Joseph 2012).

The contribution of transnational intersectional feminist scholarship has long argued for the adoption of transformative pedagogies that empower marginalised students, address social injustices and promote gender equality (Grosz 2010; Snyder and González 2021). Dealing with issues and themes associated with (de)colonisation, globalisation, postmodernity, and technology, transnational scholarship offers a critical analysis of dominant narratives and structures that perpetuate inequality on a global scale, highlighting the interconnectedness of struggles for gender justice, racial justice, economic justice, and environmental justice across borders.

Building on the widespread acknowledgement of how coloniality has had a significant impact on higher education systems and practices (e.g., Adefila et al. 2022; Bhambra et al. 2018; Lee and Gough 2020), our research—the inspiration for this paper—is focused on the contribution of gendered and transnational perspectives to interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies. This paper relates to a specific strand of a larger project concerned with the role of transnational literature in the decolonisation of understandings of gender within the European academe (EUTERPE). Co-written by a doctoral candidate and her supervisor, it is shaped by specific research sites, as well as our academic and personal backgrounds. More specifically, we use university gender studies departments and programmes as sites of ethnographic fieldwork. Here, multiple disciplines are brought together in curricula that span across literary and cultural studies, allowing, for example, explorations of literary texts such as Parable of the Sower (Butler 1993) in tandem with scholarly work of Sylvia Wynter (a Jamaican theorist whose writing draws from economics, Black studies, history, film analysis, and more). Additionally, interdisciplinarity becomes inescapable due to the variety in our scholarly backgrounds, which involve international relations, gender studies, education and literary studies. Our focus on curricula and the classroom relates to the coming together of pedagogical practices and learning communities as an active force of human educational experiences. We examine how the contribution of feminist pedagogy in higher education contexts can enable transnational scholarship to restructure discussions on equality, gender and knowledge production in the classroom.

By collaborating on this paper, we aim to provide an accessible overview of theory on anti-colonial pedagogies and practices, while also exploring the effects of a transnational turn on scholarship and higher education. In the following sections, we each bring a set of situated knowledges to the writing. As an educator, supervisor and researcher at a Centre for Global Learning, Katherine (second author) offers a rich discussion on transformative approaches to pedagogy and the ways in which Western institutions have changed over time. As a doctoral candidate, Ninutsa (first author) holds and examines an insider/outsider position of an early-stage researcher observing semi-familiar educational spaces and discusses how this in-between role of student/non-student can shape a feminist ethnography. Consequently, the creative critical vignettes and discussions presented below are molded by our unique standpoints, moving between differing subjectivities to better illustrate experiences in/around/adjacent to the university classroom. Moreover, the practice of co-writing allows us to engage in a collective mode of knowing, giving our discussion an additional layer and offering a glimpse of what feminist, transnational knowledge production can look like. In this way, our writing here is not only a creative critical examination of a classroom ethnography but also an example of how transnational thought and alternative ways of knowing can come together.

Our focus explores how critical, dialogic encounters which take place amongst students and staff and wider communities, confined not by national contexts, but with transnational perspectives, and in the interest of ethical spaces for learning, can create a more robust multiplicity of knowledges, which does not distance learners (Hlatshwayo and Shawa 2020). Still, this research is limited to Western Europe, and national contexts play an unmistakable role in the way that universities—our fieldwork sites—operate. (Re)formulations of nationalism are increasingly prevalent across the region, with contemporary political parties strengthening their opposition to multiculturalism (Eger and Valdez 2015). Gingrich and Banks (2006, p. 5) have defined this insistence on ‘traditional values’ as neo-nationalism, or a “nationalism of the current phase of transnational and global development”—an ideology focused on the us vs. them dynamic and entrenched in anti-immigration rhetoric. Because of this shift toward conservative, anti-feminist politics, both departments where this research was conducted have faced budget cuts and heightened criticism. Indeed, though universities can be sites where oppressive structures are contested, they have historically also aligned with and acted as an institutional arm of the nation-state, often striving to assimilate and homogenise the public into obedient citizenry (Green 1997; Grosfoguel 2013). Western European institutions generally define Western knowledge as legitimate, objective and universal (Akena 2012). And they continue to exploit epistemic privileges resulting from what Grosfoguel defines as genocides/epistemicides, “against Jewish and Muslim origin population in the conquest of Al-Andalus, against indigenous people in the conquest of the Americas, against Africans kidnapped and enslaved in the Americas and against women burned alive, accused of being witches in Europe” (Grosfoguel 2013, p. 73). By highlighting the prevalence of national ideology across the region, we point out that transnationalism is neither dominant nor always welcome, but it is here.

So, we begin with exploring the concept of transnationalism and the transnational turn in academia as influenced by transnational feminist scholarship, before turning to ways in which transformative feminist pedagogies can serve to influence curriculum practices in gender studies and beyond. The adoption of feminist ethnography is explained as the study methodology with case study vignettes then presented and discussed, illustrating transformative pedagogical methods which make room for dissonant voices to authentically decentre the hegemony of Western epistemologies, working in tandem with transnational thought. What we seek here is a better understanding of how feminist ways of knowing can come about, epistemologies critiquing existing truths that claim universality, instead opting for perspectival and partial understandings that are situated in specific contexts and histories (Haraway 2013; Grosz 1993; Hawkesworth 2012; Tuana 2017). Grosz writes, “The fact that a single contested paradigm (or a limited number thereof) governs current forms of knowledge demonstrates the role that power, rather than reason, has played in developing knowledges” (Grosz 1993, p. 210). Our main research question is: How might the influence of transnational literature and pedagogies creatively build and enhance a more feminist re-thinking and restructuring of knowledge production in the university classroom?

2. Concepts and Theoretical Perspectives

2.1. Defining Transnationalism

We, as feminist scholars, are exasperatingly familiar with the inability to produce definite definitions. It serves us right. If we aim to trouble all aspects of life, we must also give up illusions of unequivocal conceptualisation. Transnationalism is no exception. Though there is a plethora of writing about the term (as a descriptor, identity marker, or a field of study), our literature review reveals a scattered scholarship with no leading conceptual frame to delineate transnationalism or “the projects, relations and practices that it encompasses” (Yeoh et al. 2003, p. 215).

We could, for example, place emphasis on the early use of transnationalism to describe relationships across states and outside of direct government control (Keohane and Nye 1973). Patel (2004) argued that the term originated in the U.S., among discussions about identity and migration. Later, Basch et al. (2020, p. 7) defined it as “the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain simultaneous multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement,” emphasising the creation of webs across borders. For Clavin (2005, p. 434), it eventually became attached to historians’ quest to undermine “dominant national paradigms.” Meanwhile, the 1990s saw transnationalism as a challenge to conventional assumptions about the nation-state as a tightly sealed container (Kearney 1995; Hannerz 1996; Vertovec and Cohen 1999). Çaglar (2001, p. 607) presented a helpful double definition: transnationalism as an analytic tool for uncovering the “increasing intensity and scope of circular flows of persons, goods, information and symbols triggered by international labour migration” and a term for individuals with “complex attachments and multiple allegiances to issues, peoples, places, and traditions beyond the boundaries of their resident nation-states.”

It is also helpful to remember that transnationalism can act as a category of analysis. If understanding gender ideology as a force permeating all aspects of private and public life denaturalises the concept of gender, then perhaps transnationalism can do the same for the concept of nation. In the case of gender, Scott (1986) highlighted four major facets: (1) culturally available symbols; (2) normative concepts that set forth interpretations of the meaning of the symbols; (3) social institutions and organizations thus conditioned (ranging from kinship, the household, and the family to more formal institutions); and, finally, (4) subjective identity (pp. 1067–69).

Briggs et al. (2008) argue that these elements—with minor rewording—can also apply to the nation. In this way, transnationalism becomes a tool for finding and critically engaging with nationalist ideologies.

2.2. Feminism and the Transnational Turn

Transnational feminists have argued for a focus on experiences that take shape in-between or at the margins, going beyond national boundaries (Zerbe Enns et al. 2021). For example, by resisting colonial narratives that seek to flatten all experiences of oppression, transnational feminists highlight both intersectionality and the distinctive contexts of women’s lives (Zerbe Enns et al. 2021). Criticising the conflation of ‘Western’ with ‘global’ in certain feminist movements, transnational feminists discuss all gendered bodies as subject to scattered hegemonies (Grewal and Kaplan 1997). In this way, plurality becomes integral to transnational feminism, with discordant power relations taking centre stage. Emphasising grassroots activism, reflexivity, alternative knowledge production, and collaborative research methodologies, transnational feminisms accept the heterogeneous narratives, welcoming both the specificity of experience and connections formed “across the various borders that race, nation, empire, capital, and class construct” (Parikh 2017, p. 235).

So, transnationalism defies simple categorisation. Yet, it has amassed significant influence in multiple fields of study. In economics, literature, law, and history, transnationalism has unmoored the modernist tradition of accepting the nation as an immutable framework of study. Instead, it encourages scholars to question the nation as an ideology that affects “wars, economies, cultures, the movements of people, and relations of domination” (Briggs et al. 2008, p. 627). Feminism and transnationalism, working in concert, “call into question and destabilize the boundaries of nation, race, gender and sexuality that were built into earlier feminist internationalist and globalist theories” (Mendoza 2002, p. 302). By exposing the discrepancies between marginalized groups embedded in distinct historical and social contexts, transnational feminists theorise from difference (Kaplan et al. 1999). This, in turn, allows for ways of knowing outside of the patriarchal, essentialist and campist paradigms. A clear example of such knowledge production is the writing of and engagement with transnational literature.

2.3. Transnational Literature

In many ways, the above-mentioned strands of transnationalism reach a crescendo in transnational literature. Pushing the boundaries of transnationalism even farther, Azade Seyhan (2001, p. 10) describes this type of writing as a genre that “operates outside the national canon, addresses issues facing deterritorialised cultures, and speaks for those in what I call ‘paranational’ communities and alliances.” In addition to issues of deterritorialisation, Lukić et al. (2019) also point to migration, language and translation as important facets of the genre. Much like transnational feminism, this body of writing does not deny the existence or importance of nationalism or national literature. Instead, it offers an opportunity to examine such notions critically while also considering emerging identities, cultures, knowledges, and ways of being (Lukić et al. 2019).

2.4. Transnational Feminist Pedagogy

The pedagogical relationship has long been a subject of substantial interest and critique. Ranging from a relationship framed around academic authority to centring on care and learner needs, scholarship on this topic illustrates a spectrum of practices along with the fragility of such a relationship considering issues of temporality and the subjectivity of the ‘pupil’ and ‘educator’ when confronted with their own experience and partialities (see Friesen 2017; Friesen and Su 2023).

Joseph (2012) identifies how inclusive anti-racist, postcolonial and feminist pedagogies need to interrogate philosophical underpinnings, epistemological and ontological positionalities, which are linked to cultural hierarchies, to enable the curriculum to be transformative. Focusing on “curriculum as praxis,” Joseph identifies with making visible the relationships between theory, practice and policy through transnational activism made visible in the classroom (p. 242). Framed within restorative justice commitments and circle pedagogy, Parker-Shandal’s (2022) ethnographic studies identify with the importance of dialogue as constructive engagement as students/pupils with their teacher(s) speak, listen and reflect upon one another’s perspectives. With an aim to build a culture of care and (political partisan) connections, such transformative pedagogies, whilst acknowledged as not straightforward, nor readily implemented, can promote “literacy-relevant skills, as young people learn to analyse information and communicate their experiences” (Parker-Shandal 2022, p. 24) as part of critical consciousness raising.

Despite the above-mentioned influence of transnationalism on European academia and the increasingly diverse nature of contemporary higher education institutions, university curricula remain rigid, clinging to the Western canon that is mostly made up of American or European, white and male writers (Zidani 2021). Understanding academic spaces as sites where knowledges are contested, Alexander and Mohanty (2010, p. 41) encourage three interrelated moves:

The first is to demystify and destabilize the old cartographic binaries set up by the academy and by the pedagogic and spatial practices within our syllabi so that we can think about the transnational, specifically transnational feminism, by looking at the ways cultural borders are crossed and the way hierarchies of place are normalized. The second attends to the hyper-racialization and sexualization of the various ‘elsewheres.’ Precisely because the academy fetishizes these ‘elsewheres’ in the service of its own identity formation, race and sex must be central to our thinking about the transnational. And the third would require that we ask very specifically what kinds of border crossings we want and what their ethical dimensions are.

In their earlier work, Mohanty reiterates that rethinking the curriculum is integral to a transnational approach (Dua and Trotz 2002). Though she also highlights that locality is not to be discarded but instead contextualised among specific dynamics of power and inequality (Dua and Trotz 2002).

Bringing together several of the critical interventions made to pedagogical practices by feminist, decolonial, postcolonial and transnational theorists, Zidani calls for a pluriversality in education that accepts alternative modes of knowledge production, arguing that through an “embrace of difference”, we can create “a more accurate representation of how knowledge is organized—or, rather, disorganized—in the world” (Zidani 2021, p. 972).

In practice, Zidani’s embrace of difference deals with syllabus structure and the participatory nature of university classrooms. It requires us to abandon belief in monotheistic knowledge, purposefully integrating marginalised voices across syllabi (Dennis 2018). This then makes it possible for students to relate, build on and understand concepts through their varied backgrounds and ways of knowing. When discussing the ways that a classroom can be more participatory, Zidani also encourages facilitators to involve students at the “meta-pedagogical level” by telling them how the syllabus was created and being open to adjusting as needed (Zidani 2021, p. 975).

In the following sections, we aim to explore transnational feminisms and literature as collaborative forces that have the power to affect how pedagogies function in university classrooms to allow for multiple ways of knowing without creating epistemic hierarchies. Keeping the concepts and theories above as analytic frameworks, we approach classroom discussions, presentations and interventions as sites for the possible embracing of difference and contesting essentialist or monolithic truths.

3. Materials and Methods

3.1. Feminist Ethnography

Informed by feminist ethics, feminist ethnography—a method that strives to describe and systematically analyze cultural experiences—produces research that varies significantly across disciplines (Ellis et al. 2011, p. 273). It often pays close attention to power dynamics, encourages reflexivity, highlights the pitfalls of othering research subjects, debates the legitimacy and production of knowledge and questions objectivity (Skeggs 2001). In the field of education, for example, feminist ethnographers have “challenged accepted theory, put feminist issues onto an agenda and provided new knowledge” about educational practices and institutions, often employing intersectional frameworks (Skeggs 2001, p. 6). Our research aims to exploit the method’s ability to push against claims of neutrality, objectivity and authority—married with an understanding of meaning as unstable and up for interpretation. By firmly embedding personal voice in the process of research, this ethnography favours openly acknowledging and making space for subjectivity and emotion (Skeggs 2001).

Moreover, doing feminist ethnography is a process of embracing “an affective and diffractive turn”; therefore, it attempts to reverse the compartmentalisation of heart, body and brain in the practice of experiencing and writing (Mackinlay 2022, p. 333). Here, writing is readily acknowledged as Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) conceive it—“a method of inquiry”, providing a way for ethnographers to process their lives. Building on this idea, “what actually happened is only raw material; what the writer makes of what happened is all that matters” (Gornick 2003).

The writing of Hélène Cixous (1994) is invaluable here. By ensuring that feminist ethnography does not “seek to master. To demonstrate, explain, grasp. And then to lock away in a strongbox. To pocket part of the riches of the world”, we are free to practice research that aims to “transmit: to make things loved by making them known” (Cixous 1994, p. 57).

3.2. The Site of Study

This paper is an early result of a feminist ethnography conducted at a Western European university for the duration of six months. The fieldwork site was not isolated from wider institutional, national and transnational environments. As an institution, it has often clashed with the student body on issues around funding, discrimination, and protest, in a country that not only has a long history of colonial conquest but also currently engages in modern colonial practices. Therefore, on the one hand, ethnographic observations were influenced by diverse perspectives cultivated in the gender studies department with students who were eager to learn and act about transnational issues. On the other hand, all learning and action took place in the context of a metropole, the occident, coloniser nation-state.

3.3. Conducting Feminist Ethnography as Praxis

Bringing forth the lived experiences and worldviews of ‘others’ and remaining true to the ethics and epistemology shaping feminist ethnography in practice (Manning 2022), I (Ninutsa) undertook this ethnography with the second author as my supervisor and guide, as shared below.

I was encouraged to embrace my in-between positionality: first, as a transnational scholar with multiple localities, communities and languages informing my ways of knowing; and second, as someone who completed a master’s degree in gender studies at a Western European university, understanding student experience with the newly gained position of a doctoral candidate. For these and a variety of other reasons (such as chronic pain affecting my everyday life and colouring my interactions with the world), feminist ethnography—with its allowances for the personal, sensory, and uncategorisable—emerged as the instinctive path. This involved: (1) observing seven modules offered to gender studies master’s students (approximately 120 hours); (2) holding, recording and transcribing three focus groups of 8–10 master’s students; (3) conducting six one-on-one interviews with the facilitators of chosen modules; (4) conducting a textual analysis of relevant syllabi; (5) attending non-classroom activities, such as protests, additional lectures, film screenings, and art performances with students and staff. Permission was given by the gender studies department and each module facilitator, as well as all students and staff involved in observations and interviews. While students involved in the focus groups volunteered to be part of the project, modules and interviewed staff members were chosen based on the relevance of transnationalism in their syllabi, personal background or academic work. Ultimately, six months yielded a large array of data that will—in time—become a feminist ethnographic account. For the purposes of this paper, since our focus is on classroom activity and its impact on knowledge production, we used journals and fieldnotes taken during classroom observations of the above-mentioned seven gender studies modules. Meaning, that the creative critical pieces offered below are mainly a result of the fieldnotes taken during my classroom observations. Whilst more specific data excerpts from focus groups and one-on-one interviews are not included in this article, they inevitably shape the way that the vignettes were purposefully written, selected and discussed. Also, following Manning (2022), my feminist ethnographic research practice focused on the dialogic relationships I was able to create with the student participants. Part of this was my continuous reflexivity regarding my researcher role in this dialogic interaction, with recognition of the intersections of voice, place and privilege throughout the research process (Manning 2022, p.39). Additionally, the interweaving of our lived experiences was also influenced by the textual analysis I conducted of assigned texts and non-classroom activities that were organised by the department.

The two vignettes that follow were thus formulated through my ethnographic notes in creative critical pieces of storytelling (Cook 2022). This is not an attempt to establish an absolute cause-and-effect relationship between certain transnational texts/pedagogies and transformative epiphanies in the classroom, nor was I aiming to generalise discussion of the vignettes to a larger population that would undoubtedly exist in a different context, institution, department, and classroom, not to mention the fact that a different ethnographer would be taking the fieldnotes. Rather, the goal in writing these vignettes is to discuss how transnational writing can be explored in the classroom setting and what effects it makes possible if paired with a transformative feminist pedagogy. Further, as significant classroom experiences, these vignettes were turning points, exemplifying how critical thinking can be fostered through the interplay of transnational feminism’s theoretical concepts and concrete pedagogical approaches, all while situated in specific national, spatial, temporal, and intersectional contexts.

3.4. Details on Methods

My ethnographic notes were taken during seminars of modules offered to MA students at a Western European university, belonging to the departments of comparative literature and gender studies. Drawing on a textual analysis and close reading, I took account of spoken language and identified key words, phrases, and instances the meanings of which could be explored further, analysing their significance as part of the diverse cultural experiences at play within specific classroom contexts. Later, noted patterns and relationships were rewritten as first-person, reflexive pieces. These excerpts accommodate the personal, emotional and sensorial in their narrative, attempting to create a more robust image of the classroom dynamics. The vignettes are both descriptive and analytical, processing my journal entries and fieldnotes into narrative pieces that highlight cases where I noted transnational text working alongside unique, innovative and unconventional classroom practices to allow for embracing of difference and collective knowledge creation.

Flowing naturally with the material of the two vignettes is my intentional storytelling approach used throughout as a method that does not solely describe or analyse. I use this as a creative critical method—as intentional narration, synthesis, a (re)formulation and probing of collected data (Judd 2022; O’Neill and Roberts 2019; Hartman 2008). The reworking of my ethnographic notes into creative critical pieces is a practice of analysis and reflection, offering insight beyond mere regurgitation or description. The vignettes also pay particular attention to my positionality and personal background, accepting subjectivity as well as the complexity of worldviews and ethics in my research. They are written through interpretation and meaning-making of our (researcher and student participants’) lived experiences, serving to dismantle ‘otherness’ (Manning 2018) whilst attempting to do evocative storytelling—vital to feminist ethnography (Bochner and Ellis 2016).

4. Vignettes

The first vignette—cultural mapping—discusses a creative assignment that asks students to reflect on the colonial/oppressive nature of cartography and how they can formulate new transnational connections (geographic, cultural, historic) that do not ignore the asymmetry of different locations and contexts. The second vignette—critical fabulation—is an exemplification of how student-led discussions can use transnational literature to create an environment where specificity is highlighted in a way that facilitates dialogue and collaboration.

4.1. Cultural Mapping

On the first Tuesday of this semester, I struggled to find the elevator and ended up nearly crawling up three flights of stairs, an out-of-breath apology on my lips as I entered a crowded room with desks arranged in an L shape. Thankfully, I was not the only one running late, so I caught most of the introductions and could play a game I made up. It went like this: If, during the introductions, even one student mentioned that they were from the country we were in, I would lose. There were no repercussions to the game. Still, I always won. Most international students presented themselves with their names and nationalities. Those from the university country opted for other identity markers—interests or academic backgrounds. I had tried to purposely disrupt this trend in previous meetings by not mentioning my birthplace in introductory snippets. More frequently than not, I caved to the urge. Putting on my American affectations—a touch higher in pitch than usual—I repeated: “Hello everyone, my name is Ninutsa, you can call me Nina or Nutsa. I’ll respond to ‘hey, you!’ even. I’m from Georgia…” I’m unsure exactly why this bothered me to such an extent that I wrote several notes about it in my journal. Maybe it was the fact that all the classes I observed were centred around transnationality, transcultural perspectives, diversity, etc., and yet, some of us did not feel displaced, in-between, strange. Some of us seemed to belong to those L-shaped desks and knew exactly where the elevators were. Some of us never used the elevators at all. This was home to some of us, and it did not even need a declaration. It was as obvious as a missing ending to an introduction or an unspoken “I am obviously from…”.

This class was offered to gender studies students as an elective. It focused on Caribbean literature, understanding it as something transcultural emerging across postcolonial settings. The syllabus included academic theory, poetry, fiction, and an unconventional assignment. In the final two weeks of the semester, students were expected to create and present cultural maps with “historical, literary, geopolitical, ecological or artistic dimensions”, encouraged to be creative in their chosen form while tracking a particular phenomenon, its transculturality and “entanglement with the wider world.”1 The lecturer introduced this assignment as a conscious act of resisting the use of cartography as an instrument of colonisation, an opportunity for the students to understand the relationship between Europe and the Caribbean in a new, upturned way.

When students heard the word ‘creative’, they were obviously anxious, and the weeks leading up to presentations were peppered with their questions and concerns about the assignment. Yet, the final outputs included some of the most interesting pieces of knowledge creation I had seen during my months there: a cross-stitch piece focused on the environmental factors of an island, analysis of a national anthem to better grasp the relationship between coloniser and colonised, an interactive webpage, a zine about the travels of a statue, maps on top of other maps to link revolutions, and even a pop-up book on an aspect of island history that connected with that of the student’s place of origin (despite the two locations being continents apart). What stood out to me most was the way that local students—those who had neglected to mention their nationalities during the introductory session—came to critically examine links between their location, the Caribbean, Europe and our world at large. This assignment—I think—brought the silent introductions to the forefront, made the belonging of some over others obvious and jarring, uprooted even those who felt settled by upturning directions of travel and centring the islands, and confronted every student’s conception of location, not just of those who were already homesick.

4.2. Critical Fabulation

It was a surprisingly clear-skied Wednesday, and I co-led a seminar with an MA student. No one else had signed up for that week’s presentation, and both the student and lecturer asked if I would assist. In the first month of this research, I would have said no, clinging to the idea that I needed to remain ‘aloof’. But I had long given up on that, actively engaging in discussions, smoke breaks, and protests.

So, I spoke about Maaza Mengiste’s (2019) The Shadow King, highlighting the novel’s transnational elements and its use of multiple languages, points of view, and narrative voices. Then, introducing Saidiya V Hartman, I asked students to think of gaps in history that could be treated with critical fabulation, allowing new knowledge to emerge. Responses were fascinating, and my only regret was a nagging feeling that I had shaped the discussion in a way that would work best for my data collection, pairing transnational text with classroom practices that poked at conventional understandings of knowledge production. Imagine my delight then, when an hour later, in a second seminar of the same module, the presenters—completely unaware of what I had done with the previous group—posed a nearly identical question.

Answers ranged across levels of personal, familial, communal, and national histories. For example, one student brought up the combined use of Nepali and English languages in contemporary literature from Nepal and how this practice was a way of combating colonial erasure while also making them feel understood on a level that exclusively English-language novels from Nepali authors were unable to. Another participant mentioned the unvoiced histories of Indigenous populations in Chile and how critical fabulation would be necessary to retrieve even a semblance of information lost to violent acts of conquest. My fellow presenter chimed in with an example of a mixed media archive about the often ignored or forgotten AIDS crisis and the ongoing activism of queer individuals to end it. Students were at once frustrated and newly aware of the gaps in their own individual, familial, communal, and national histories. The presenters had asked targeted questions, creating a classroom exercise: students had to come up with something that would benefit or require critical fabulation as a methodology due to gaps in archival knowledge, and they were also asked to formulate methods through which they would be able to implement Hartman’s process. Some spoke of families that withheld information deliberately: grandparents who kept silent out of fear, shame, sheer stubbornness. They hoped that perhaps these secrets could be gleaned from family recipes, worn-out pages of well-read Bibles, and diaries left in cobwebbed attics. The novel, paired with this classroom exercise, allowed for a discussion that was deeply personal, singular and yet, collaborative and shared.

Though I had been the one to pose a similar question hours earlier, it was only after the collective discussion that I thought of my own family. Following the ethnic cleansing of our people from the country’s western region by Russian-backed forces, my great-grandfather—Shaliko—refused to fully resettle, sneaking across occupation borders, in a perpetual process of being exiled. Where could those stories be found now if not in the homes, kitchens, gardens, smoke-filled living rooms and apartment building corridors of the refugees? How could those gaps be at once filled and spotlighted if not through fictional narratives cobbled by those like me, with vague memories in our blood? The physical archive in Georgia’s western region was burned in 1992. Shaliko outlived it by several decades.

5. Discussion

These vignettes aim to illustrate the opportunities that transnational literature brings when used in tandem with transnational feminist thought and intentional pedagogical approaches.

In the first vignette, cultural mapping served as “a process of collecting, recording, analyzing and synthesizing information in order to describe the cultural resources, networks, links and patterns of usage of a given community or group” (Duxbury et al. 2015, p. 1). We suggest that, as a tool, it enabled the students to define themselves with tangible cultural assets, through their selection of artifacts, and their memories (Duxbury et al. 2015). Cultural mapping offered an alternative discourse that challenged conventional special knowledge and representations. It was both representative of ‘what exists’ and a way of ‘knowledge-making’, offering ways into new epistemological perspectives and ontologies, with “the potential to be critically revealing of the processes of enclosure, partitioning, coding and ranking… of experience through the research process itself” (Mannion et al. 2007, p. 19). We suggest/contend that cultural mapping, in the classroom and beyond, was also an interdisciplinary practice that encourages “hybrid, mixed, multimodal, or alternative” research methods and intercultural collaboration (Duxbury et al. 2015, p. 2). Expanded on in the discussion below, cultural mapping was used as an assignment and pedagogical tool in a class on postcolonial literature—specifically Caribbean writing— and called on students to critically explore the transcultural.

The second vignette presents an exemplification of how student-led discussions can use transnational literature to create an environment where specificity is highlighted in a way that facilitates dialogue and collaboration. This vignette illustrates a gender studies module focusing on postcoloniality, where students were required to organize and facilitate weekly seminars during which they were asked to present, expand on and critically engage with assigned readings for the given week. Though much of the syllabus consisted of theoretical writing, there were notable exceptions, including films and fictional novels. Critical fabulation—a concept introduced by Saidiya Hartman (2008) in “Venus in Two Acts”—was brought forward by students leading the seminar during a week when the assigned reading was Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King—a transnational novel set in 1935, during Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. “Venus in Two Acts” opens with Hartman discussing the figure of Venus, common across slavery archives: “she is found everywhere in the Atlantic world. The barracoon, the hollow of the slave ship, the pest-house, the brothel, the cage, the surgeon’s laboratory, the prison, the cane-field, the kitchen, the master’s bedroom—turn out to be exactly the same place and in all of them she is called Venus” (Hartman 2008, p.1). Though not a figure, Venus here acts as a veil over “real women and girls who have been reduced to the anonymity of myth, denied the dignity and singularity marked by their proper names, and tossed carelessly into the archives as throwaway lives” (Cardillo and Silverbloom 2024, p. 116). Conventional methods of gathering data about these women can only provide the narratives of their enslavers and masters. Instead, Hartman provides a new methodology that combines archival research with critical theory and fictional storytelling. Through critical fabulation, Hartman challenges authority over narrative, generating counterstories that at once fill the gaps in knowledge and starkly highlight their existence.

Our discussion herein is how the selected vignettes illustrate turning points in the ethnography, and in the following sections, we explore two themes we see as vital to transnational feminism and transformative pedagogies: namely, alternative ways of knowing and embracing difference. By discussing how these themes are nurtured through the classroom activities narrated in vignettes above, we argue that transnational literature and pedagogies—when paired in the university classroom—can creatively build and enhance a more feminist rethinking and restructuring of knowledge production. Moreover, the mere addition of transnational reading to syllabi—or the lone use of transformative pedagogy with Eurocentric thought—is unlikely to encourage or yield collective knowledge-making that is as rich, intersectional or in search of greater cultures of equality.

5.1. Alternative Modes of Knowledge Production

Our vignettes depict transformative pedagogies at play, creating inter/transdisciplinary foci questioning and prompting student-tutor-peer dialogue and reflection for embracing how alternative cultures of equality can be produced within and out of positions and situations of marginality. Indeed, the challenge to “embrace difference” (Zidani 2021, p. 972) and displace dominant Western narratives evolved over the entire exercise of critical fabulation, especially as the questions posed by pairing transnational literature and Hartman’s concept were discussed between two different seminar groups of students sitting the same module. With time, conversations became more attuned to non-conventional ways of knowing and leaned heavier on personal and emotional elements. Hartman (2008) is also familiar to students in the comparative literature module and substantially links the vignettes. Here, we can see transnationalism’s ability to pose questions about history, objectivity, and gaps in collective knowledge. Hartman describes critical fabulation as the creation of a speculative narrative that critically engages with historical archives. She writes, “I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling” (p. 11). This impossibility is highlighted in students’ responses to the seminar questions—the desire to explore gaps in histories and the inevitable failure of producing a single, ‘objective’ account of that which has been erased.

Here, we can turn back to transnationalism and transnational feminists who argue that transnational thought and literature can be a category of analysis, denaturalising the concept of nation and the narratives or ways of knowing that nationalist ideology places at the top of epistemic hierarchies (Scott 1986). The critical fabulation vignette displays how a focus on unconventional or untold experiences of the in-between—something encouraged by transnational feminists—can also be encouraged in the university classroom through the productive pairing of literature that centers colonized narratives instead of flattening them and pedagogical methods that approach these narratives as singular, intersectional and distinctive. Theorising from difference, like transnational feminists, can be performed in seminars that are collaborative, student-led, and allow for alternative modes of knowledge-making (Kaplan et al. 1999). So, if plurality is integral to transnational feminism and the perpetuation of gender and other equalities in the classroom, then the push for both transnational reading and transformative pedagogies is a worthy strategy to undertake (Grewal and Kaplan 1997).

An inherently creative endeavour, critical fabulation shares the act of speculation and the burden of erasure with cultural mapping, leading to students’ flipped/upturned cartographies depicting alternative, reintroduced, revoiced, and reconfigured presentations of relationships between Europe and the Caribbean. Drawing on the creative was an integral aspect of knowledge production here. As an aesthetic expression or application of human skill and imagination, drawing on a wide range of forms (material/non-web-based, digital, writing), the creative task prompted agency amidst discomfort, as well as ways to amplify metaphoric relationships. As Sullivan (2006) notes, insights are often constructed from creative and critical practice. Similarly, Manicom and Walters (2012, pp. 3–4) acknowledge the value of approaches paralleling the creative process and “what might be thinkable and actionable when prevailing relations of power are made visible, when understandings shake loose from normative perspectives and generate new knowledge and possibilities for engagement.”

Being with academics and students in these classes consciously disrupting knowledge production brought forth a transformative learning process that unfolds and enfolds, simultaneously interweaving the personal with the social, the local with the global, the past with the present. The intentional character of temporality relates here to the idea that all experiences of intentional consciousness have a temporal aspect, a fluid nature of human time (and cumulative change) as a function of agency (e.g., Bryson 2007). Allowing that agency to flourish was integral to the success of these assignments. Students felt the freedom to explore material ways of knowing and found possibilities in the process of mapping/creation/reclamation. Equally important was their comprehension of the limits of knowledge production. Many experienced this as a painful dawning—their inability to reconstruct certain paths a sharp reminder of how some stories are privileged over others.

The syllabi, exercises, and subsequent classroom discussions of observed modules should also be linked to Mishra Tarc’s (2011) writing on reparative curriculums, those aligned to feminist pedagogies illustrated in the vignettes and serving to “provide the difficult forms, contents and affective means—the gift and promise of difficult knowledge inheritance that can resource an altered thinking on what it means and has meant to be human” (p. 17). Students, lecturers, observers, and writers of this account have been asked to engage with traumatic histories of colonisation, empire, and extermination. By engaging through creative and group activities, student participants were able to face difficult histories in a collective manner, perhaps altering the ways that they will go on to relate to the world.

5.2. The Personal as a Tool for Relating or Embracing Difference

Along with the use of the creative/speculative as a way of knowing, the employment of the personal was present across most cultural mapping presentations and responses to the critical fabulation prompt. Many of the ones who had previously omitted their national backgrounds from introductions were pushed to examine their locality, along with the position of the university as a Western institution. There was a feeling of discomfort when engaging with the colonial ties between the university country, local students and the islands they were reading and mapping about. Similarly, the differences stood starkly among students when discussing what gaps they would mend in personal histories—some gaping and some much smaller in scale. After all, “Venus in Two Acts” examines the archive of Atlantic slavery; personal engagement with it, and the in-betweenness of transnational texts, can and should be difficult.

In their analysis of university syllabi, Alexander and Mohanty (2010) highlight an easy-to-overlook aspect of transnationalism—the danger of it being utilised as a normative concept. For example, they found that chosen syllabi, while including subjects of colour, reaffirmed Eurocentrism by emphasizing concepts, stories, and the politics of the United States and Europe and at times exporting these to transnational locations (p. 34). The authors connected this tendency to cultural relativism and its presence in university classrooms, writing that all experiences had to approximate “the inherited categories of the West” to become “intelligible” (Alexander and Mohanty 2010, p.34). This is why transnational literature must be accompanied by careful engagement and discomforting pedagogies. When it comes to “Venus in Two Acts”, there is no ‘equal relating’ to be done for students. Instead, while the personal must be employed, it can also be set aside to accept difference, and this can only be performed by allowing an emotional and intellectual commitment to both.

For example, cultural mapping involved participants critically examining links between personal and relational, local and national, European and worldwide, while also questioning the complexities of these dimensions and definitions. A map layering two revolutions (one European and one of the islands) brought forward the impossibility of a direct comparison despite their interrelated histories, instead raising awareness about the imbalances in transnational relationships. Meanwhile, a walk through the university city with the map of an island city created an eerie sensation when students realised that streets were planned in unmistakable likeness, bringing materiality to their knowledge of the university country’s colonisation of the Caribbean. In this way, relating and cultural comparison transformed into a necessarily disquieting process that gave way for rich contextualized accounts to be engaged with and narrated as part of reflection and conversation that was not seeking to ‘other’, nor impose a Western ontology.

Simultaneously, transnational literature encourages readers to turn toward the personal. This genre engages heavily with notions of identity, belonging, and home. So, students often felt encouraged to reflect and look inward. Finding connections between themselves, their communities, the assigned texts and transnational contexts, participants carried their readings and assignments far beyond the classroom. At protests and film screenings, during group dinners and game nights, students shared the ways that transnationalism touched the everyday aspects of their lives and thinking. Some spoke of sharing transnational recipes with roommates, and others were happy to have their politics challenged by non-Western scholarship. Several were frustrated but also found strength in the complexities of their assignments and readings. One student announced to the class with a comedic air: “When it comes to these things, I always end up making the projects about myself a little bit.” There are pitfalls to be avoided in that, yes, but there is also great potential.

In summary, through a narrative that embraces—as mentioned—the creative, personal, emotional and sensorial in its formulation of ethnographic observations, the analysis and interpretation which our vignettes depict, bridge theory and practice. As a means of grasping analytical conclusions, the significance of the two narrative descriptions lies in how they encourage alternative ways of knowing and knowledge production. There is a push here to go beyond established canons, reiterated ideologies and conventional sites of learning. Further, the argument here is that transnational literature lends itself to these pedagogical exercises aligned to theoretical discussions appreciating multiple intersecting identities and seeking ways to understand specific contexts and the ways in which unique experiences of marginalisation can be highlighted. What the chosen ethnographic vignettes illustrate is how transnational feminist pedagogical interventions must allow for transformative experiences by incorporating student-led, creative assignments that work with the transnational texts as transnational (complex, scattered, in-between)—leading with the texts’ particularities, instead of homogenising transnational works in the recommended readings sections or relegating them to the last week of the otherwise Eurocentric syllabi.

6. Conclusions

Returning to our main research question, this paper has shared the early findings of Ninutsa’s feminist ethnographic study conducted over six months at a Western European university. Involving the observation of modules offered to gender studies master’s students, the theoretical and practical insights have illustrated that when transnational feminist pedagogies are used in tandem with transnational writing and non-conventional assignments, transnational theory can operate in the classroom to push back against Eurocentric knowledge formation. Additionally, the first author’s embrace of her identity, position and requirement of close attention to the ethics of ethnographic research acknowledges the ‘social web of reality’ (Kincheloe 2005, p. 119) and the complication of researcher privilege in the production of textured knowledge. Engaging with other feminist scholars of pedagogy such as Zidani and Mohanty, this paper highlights how alternative modes of knowledge production—illustrated by the two vignettes—can be facilitated around transnational work and critical creative research practice that embrace difference, destabilise conventional cartographies and binaries, center the often fetishized ‘elsewheres’ without losing the specifics of locality, encourage maginalised voices while interrogating monotheistic conceptions of knowledge, and involve students in the shaping of their educational environment (classroom, syllabus, and beyond).

Further, in consciously engaging with transnational voices embraced as mattering within syllabi, students and tutors of diverse intersectional identities have valuable space to speak and relate with the transnational in ways that can create shifts in the educational dynamic that has been taken for granted through Western canon narratives (Gravett et al. 2024). Indeed, transnationalism—when employed by individuals who are attuned to the complexities of the concept and its shaping of our identities and knowledges, can offer invaluable insights into particular and global contexts, as well as histories of migration, colonialism and the dynamics of power across localities, races, genders, and other spaces of dis/belonging.

Additionally, the use of (aesthetic) creativity as well as how extracurricular events and experiences influence and play a part in in-class activities speaks to the contribution of holistic ways of knowing, relating and mattering as part of the pedagogical relationship. Non-conventional methods embedded in the syllabi of Western universities can serve to facilitate richer discussions around gender, equality, and the ways in which we know ourselves. Consequently, transnational literature, feminisms and pedagogies have the potential to shift how all parties involved in the facilitation of university modules understand knowledge.

This paper works with carefully chosen vignettes, and the ethnography Ninutsa engaged in is inherently hers, not shying away from subjectivity and specific positionality but instead bringing the two narratives to the forefront as a purposeful learning opportunity to identify under-reported learner experiences facilitated around transnational thought that has become part of gender studies syllabi. We believe this specific use of narrative with context provides a unique view into Western institutions and their gender studies departments and illustrates possibilities and limitations within university classrooms. Future ethnographies of educational spaces will and should vary from the one produced here, hopefully allowing us glimpses into different knowledge production practices and transnational perspectives.

To reiterate, we believe that: (1) there is a need for such approaches in the classroom to promote dialogue and reflection, leading to discussions that can serve to transform staff and student perspectives of gender, equality and knowledge production; and (2) the use of the personal by all parties in and out of the classroom enabled and encouraged by transnational thought and bolstered by a critical pedagogy attentive to relationalities has the potential to clarify the integral threads and painful tears in the fabric of our everyday existence.