Classroom

Abstract

Radical approaches to the classroom must account for the socio-spatialities of power, violence and inequality that characterise its political geographies. Decolonial approaches to knowledge production are part of a broader effort to contest the classroom as a space invested with supposed neutrality and objectivity-key characteristics of normative forms of Western epistemologies. The feminist geographer Gillian Rose has noted that masculinist epistemologies suffuse geographical knowledge production, an insight that should be extended to classroom spaces where geographical epistemologies and methodologies circulate and reproduce. Recognising the centrality of the classroom as a teaching space to the mandate of universities, recent labour actions in UK and Canadian universities have publicised the reality of the classroom as a site of unfair work conditions, thus articulating its utility as a space for dissent and collective organizing.