CSL in the Women's and Gender Studies Classroom

I’m glad that so may of you have taken the opportunity to write about your CSL work this week.  I know that it may often seem disconnected from the class.  I need to confess that I was once reluctant to make this class a CSL course.  My initial reluctance relates to rationales for service learning in WST that construct CSL as an unproblematized a mechanism repairing the separation between academic feminism and feminist political activism.

The neophyte Women’s and Gender Studies CSL instructor looking to connect academic knowledge with activism confronts a serious problem in the context of contemporary Alberta.  Those of you doing activism have had to create it for yourselves.  (How sad it is that the space of activism created by the Gender Based Violence Prevention Project is about to disappear when funding for the project runs out next year!).  A few years ago, I chaired a meeting of Canadian feminist run rape crisis centres and was the only person from Alberta sitting in the room.  If Canadian feminism was pushed to the margins of political influence as an effect of the elaboration of neoliberalism, this silencing took a particularly spectacular form in Alberta.  The radical cuts to social programs enacted by the Klein government in the mid-1990s was the model for neoliberalization in other jurisdictions.  The privatization of social responsibility occurred at a dramatic pace in Alberta with the non-profit, voluntary sector left to shoulder the burden of social problems and inequality. Feminist organizations found themselves not only delegitimized, but also under violent attack.  There is shrinking space for feminist activism within anti-violence agencies and a restrictive emphasis standardized programming, preventative education and the provision of services to individualized victims.  I worried that making volunteering a course requirement might in fact reinforce or even endorse the offloading of social problem of sexual violence to the voluntary sector – a sector that runs the unpaid or underpaid work of women.  I also worried that volunteering at professionalized rape crisis centres, women’s shelters and anti-sexual exploitation agencies would teach students more about the management of social problems than about feminist politics or resistance.

These worries prevented me from taking on CSL for quite some time. As soon as I took the plunge, however, my thinking about the purposes of CSL quickly shifted away from the simplistic notion that it forges a connection between theory and activism.   What students taking this class have taught me over the years is how, through concrete experiences, observations and sometimes difficulties, they learn about the ways sexual violence is constructed, managed, contained and addressed in the in the context of the present.   In the context of this class, CSL becomes a tool for developing a concrete understanding of the constraints on activism in a context of neoliberalism and, most optimistically a mechanism for rethinking resistance.

Sometimes I wish that I could spend time with you in your placements.  The problem with this model of CSL is that the exchanges between community and classroom are experienced only by students, but not by instructors or community mentors.  In order to deepen the exchange, CSL would need to be a lot more resource intensive, buying instructors and community mentors out of other obligations so that we too could experience how knowledge is built, disrupted and challenged in the space between the classroom and community.