Relationship, power, and care in feminist pedagogy: our theory under construction

The paper presents a collective project doing a “creative literature review” about relationships, power, and care in feminist pedagogies, conducted with a feminist approach based on duoethnography (Sawyer & Norris, 2012) and visual ethnography (Pink, 2013). Feminist pedagogies were formalized to offer several principles for educational (formal and informal) settings: reciprocity, shared responsibility, community building, individual voice, respect for diversity, and challenging fixed ways of doing or thinking (Webb, Allen & Walker, 2002), but these theoretical principles can be realized only through concrete and vital relationships involving different subjects in material and symbolic spaces. In fact, in feminist practice and research, relationships and relationality are central to knowledge production; this may entail working together in groups of peers, or in pairs, starting from one’s own experience and using cooperative and creative methods to investigate the social reality as well as to flourish as an adult subject. These relationships are complex, never given for granted, always presenting asymmetries - i.e., themes of power and care - due to gender, age, class, social roles, profession, and previous learning. In our creative literature review, we interrogate the literature to illuminate the interplay of these dimensions in the learning process, using an ecosystemic framework to define a feminist pedagogy of care and power as a reciprocal, circular process, based on difference (Bateson, 1979). More specifically, we will focus the feminist notion of “entrustment”, or affidamento (Cavarero, 2000), a relationship based on the embodied encounter and dialogue of people of difference. Our methodology is duoethnographic, hence based on our different interpretations, on writing as a collective form of research, and on using photographs from feminist archives that are evocative for us, and iconic in showing the role of materiality and bodily communication when adults learn from each other.