Feminist adult education, imagination and creative possibility

The 2021 Generation Equality Forum described gender discrimination as “the most enduring and defining inequality of our time” (n/p). Indeed, patriarchal status hierarchies “have proved far more resilient than any of us suspected” (Vintges, 2018, p. 165). Shameen’s 2021 study illuminates a disturbing new trend, a steeply rising “global patriarchal backlash [of] fundamentalist and fascist agendas” (p. 2). “Forces of extremism, cultural imperialism, ideological colonization...and the (re)imposition of patriarchal heteronormative family values...are shaping the parameters of public discourse and consciousness” (p. 10). Running alongside is a reinvigorated vilification of “feminism as the primary threat to public morality” (p. 10), understandable given that feminism, as a disruptive and transformative force, is what gives women “the strength to go on” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 3). To borrow from Solnit (2014), persistent gender inequity constitutes in part, “a failure of the imagination” (p. 14) and the imagination, is “highly consequential because control over it is control over the future” (n/p). For this reason, Mohanty (2012) positions the imagination as “the most subversive thing a people can have” (p. ix). Over the past decades, feminist adult educators have been mobilising the power of the imagination to give people access to what they have been denied or told they do not possess: the power to imagine the world differently on their own terms and to work collectively towards its (re)creation. This roundtable is based on our recent co-edited book Feminism, adult education and creative possibility: Imaginative responses that brings together feminism and the imagination. Using practices such as metissage we will explore the ‘feminist imaginary’ through four interwoven lenses. The first is representation. For Hall et al (2013) representation is the most powerful socially educative force of our time. Representations can reinforce problematic gender understandings and stereotypes but equally, they can disrupt patterns of “common sense making about the world and ourselves (Kidd, 2015, p. 3). How are feminists mobilising representations as knowledge creation, resistance and reclamation? The second lens is storying. Stories are important pedagogical tools because they bring experience to life, make it present and real. Andrews (2014) positions “narrative and imagination [as] integrally tied” (p. 1) because through our own self-authored accounts, we visualize, represent and (re)construct a sense of ourselves and the societies we want. What storytelling practices are feminists using? The third lens is decolonizing which for Tuck and Yang (2012) is not a metaphor but a political pedagogical strategy of redressing colonial/imperial injustices. Feminist practices of decolonization challenge inequitable power/gender dynamics and revitalize Indigenous women’s knowledge and practices. What is a feminist decolonized imaginary? The final lens is caring. Feminists underscore the importance of centring care and caring as core aesthetic concerns in a troubled world (Noddings, 2013). What if “we were to begin instead to put care at the very centre of life?” (Chatzidakis et al., 2020, p. 5). It is this ‘what if’ and the aesthetic of its possibility to reimagine that we will explore as a final element of the feminist imaginary.