ERIC Number: EJ1454963
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024
Pages: 17
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0954-0253
EISSN: EISSN-1360-0516
"Laughing off" Modernity into a Daoist Movement in a College Classroom in China: A Decolonial and Feminist Materialist Unpacking
Gender and Education, v36 n8 p845-861 2024
In this paper, I revisit a spontaneous "laughter" event in a college classroom in China to decolonize in three steps my/our otherwise naturalized modernity/coloniality assumptions about teaching/teachers, learning/learners, gender, objects, and classroom space toward a Daoist affective ecological imaginary. First, I invoke postcritical pedagogy scholarship to theoretically recast laughter, often taken as a humorous aberrance, as a mattering pedagogy. Second, I bring in feminist 'pedagogies of mattering' to attend to the materiality of the laughter event, further decolonizing hierarchical power and gendered subjectivities into an experienced democracy of flesh and affective movement of collectivity. Lastly, I reinvoke the Chinese Daoist notion "tianrénhéyi" [foreign characters omitted] as a hope-full alternative ethico-onto-episteme to reimagine education as cultivating ecologically responsible and responsive cosmic beings. I end this paper with some penultimate thoughts on theoretical-methodological challenges in decolonizing modernity-coloniality in a Chinese context, as an overseas-returning Chinese scholar, and with/beyond the Western scholarship.
Descriptors: Humor, Feminism, Power Structure, Philosophy, Religion, Decolonization, Foreign Countries, Higher Education, Females, Womens Education, Sex Stereotypes, Gender Issues, Cultural Influences
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: China
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A