Eighteenth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

“Representing Race and Gender” is the only course in the undergraduate curriculum of the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney that foregrounds race. It shows how race intersects with gender, class, and sexuality and gives students theoretical tools to critique the reproduction of racism in dominant culture. This paper provides a critical reflection of our embodied experiences teaching this course as women of different racial, cultural, and generational backgrounds (Anglo-Australian millennial and Korean-American GenXer). We draw on feminist and cultural studies pedagogies as well as models of cultural competence to re-examine our memories of events, interactions, and emotions in the three years we have taught the course. We illuminate the strategic ways we have performed our own intersectional identities in lecture and tutorial spaces, in particular considering the different ways that students of various backgrounds have responded to the same material when it is taught by a white or non-white lecturer. Through this shared reflection, we hope to demonstrate the continued importance of acknowledging and using one’s own embodied experience to teach material on diversity such as race, gender and class in the university, especially in Australia where such courses remain rare.