Event Details

Seminar

In this seminar, Suzette will present a collective autoethnography (co-authored with Fiona Hurd, Mary Simpson, & Gemma Piercy-Cameron) examining the experiences of feeling vulnerable and unsafe while teaching sexual harassment within the management classroom of four women faculty co-author-participants. Spanning over a 12-year period, reflections and analysis are presented in a layered approach interspersing academic commentary with personal vignettes through four phases. Each phase applies a different theoretical lens to analyse our experiences of and pedagogical responses to student hostility, including feminist pedagogy, psychic safety, difficult knowledge, and gender-based violence. This multi-layered analysis suggests structural accounts of sexual harassment trigger a sense of lost agency for students prompting reactions that can be experienced as hostility. The analysis challenges assumptions regarding classroom power dynamics favouring faculty over students and exposes women faculty’s heightened vulnerability to gender-based violence within neoliberal academic work settings. Safe teaching spaces free from violence, we argue, is a fundamental human right, and creating safe spaces is the responsibility of Higher Education management and government.

Suzette has kindly offered to have informal drop-in sessions during her time here. She will be based in LUMS WP C58. Please email me - Sophie Alkhaled s.alkhaled@lancaster.ac.uk or Suzette directly suzette.dyer@waikato.ac.nz to book a time.