Feminist Research Alliance Workshop
Founded in 2010, the Feminist Research Alliance Workshop advances and energizes interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration among feminist scholars locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. At our convivial meetings, faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars present and discuss research-in-progress. A fertile space for idea-incubation, the workshop also is community-building, enabling students and faculty to network with potential committee members, mentors, and colleagues beyond the boundaries of their home departments. All events are free and open to the public.
Spring 2025 Events
Thursday, March 27, 2025 - 12PM (ET) via Zoom
Cultivating the affects of place: Teaiwa’s canoe in the Oceanic classroom
Kevin Lujan Lee (Chamoru), Assistant Professor, Indigenous Studies, Â鶹´«Ã½o and Josh Campbell, PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, UCLA
In political theory’s introductory undergraduate courses, where the field reaches the most and most diverse range of students, course readings remain largely wedded to a Eurocentric canon constituted overwhelmingly by cisgender, white male authors. Amidst the rise of Comparative Political Theory as a subfield concerned with challenging the provincialisms at the heart of political theory, educators still struggle with the daunting task of case selection—which geographies, which intellectual traditions, which thinkers? Drawing on the pedagogical reflections of the late Black and Indigenous Banaban scholar, poet and critic Teresia Teaiwa (1968-2017), who herself grappled with analogous questions on how educators might navigate the vast and variegated context of Oceania (i.e., the Pacific Islands region), we articulate an Indigenous feminist pedagogy that shifts the focus of instruction from the short-term impartation of knowledge to the longer-term durable cultivation of affect rooted in the differential gendered politics of Indigenous place. Building on this framework and grounded in the first author’s experiences designing and teaching undergraduate introductory courses to political theory, we propose three interventions in the introductory political theory classroom to attend to the dialectical tensions between (Indigenous) place and political theory.
Kevin Lujan Lee (Chamoru) is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies at the Â鶹´«Ã½o. His current research focuses on (1) the Indigenous politics of decolonization in Oceania; (2) Pacific Islander social movements in the continental United States; and (3) Indigenous Oceanic political thought, in collaboration with Josh Campbell (UCLA). He was previously a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science at the University of British Columbia and holds a PhD in Urban Planning and Politics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Josh Campbell (they/them) is a white (American with familial roots in Ireland) non-binary Ph.D candidate in the Political Science Department at UCLA specializing in political theory and the history of political thought. Their work largely focuses on the interconnections between politics, religion, and populism through the lens of German exile writers around World War II, as well as collaborative projects with Kevin Lujan Lee (Â鶹´«Ã½o) on Indigenous political theorists in Oceania centered on questions of space, place, Indigeneity, and the cultural and intellectual manifestations of colonialism.