Deliberating Latina/o Studies and Latina Positionalities in the Neoliberal University

This talk centers on the pedagogical challenges, limitations and possibilities that Latin@ and other minority faculty encounter when engaging with Latina/o studies in the neoliberal university. The corporatization of many... [ view full abstract ]

This talk centers on the pedagogical challenges, limitations and possibilities that Latin@ and other minority faculty encounter when engaging with Latina/o studies in the neoliberal university. The corporatization of many public education institutions in the U.S. is growing at an alarming rate; in many of these same institutions, the enrollment and retention rates of many students of color and low-income students in is rapidly declining. Even more precarious are certain programs and departments – such as Ethnic Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies – that are affected be the privatization of the university system and their inability to adhere to a corporate model of teaching.

For many of us engaged in scholarship and pedagogy that critique social inequalities based on race, gender, sexuality, class, and so on, the rapid rate of privatization of public universities has affected our ability to reach the communities of students most susceptible to these inequalities. As educators who challenge the neoliberal institution of higher education in our work, we are faced with increasing limitations in continuing with our trajectories of scholarship-activism in Latina/o studies. Additionally, as junior faculty of color committed to Latina/o social justice in our research and in our classrooms, we are acutely aware of the precarious positionality we inhabit as minority bodies operating within this neoliberal educational space.

This talk explores the tensions and possibilities that have emerged in my experience teaching transnational Latino/a and Latin American feminist studies in a Gender and Women’s Studies department. I focus on my positionality as a junior Latina professor housed in a marginal academic space (Gender Studies Department), where my own (trans) and (un)disciplinarity focus in my classroom and in my scholarship can produce tensions among students and within my own discipline.

Thus, my talk will center on the following questions: How do we carefully navigate and respond to the resistance to (un)disciplinary perspectives in our courses? How do our positionalities as junior faculty from underrepresented background inform and shape the classroom dynamics and how do we navigate these challenges? Furthermore, how do we ensure that transnational, or Global South Studies, feminist courses, and Latino/a studies are not academically othered within– or worse, omitted from-- the curriculum of the neoliberal university? This talk seeks to engage in dialogue with other academics and educators who confront similar challenges in their deliberation of Latina/o studies and their scholarship-activism within the neoliberal academic institution.