Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award 2022-23

JENNIFER KELLY

Associate Professor of Feminist Studies & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

Recipient of the 2022-23 Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award

"In my teaching, I guide students toward study and struggle, with neither supplanting the other. In my classes, we work together to diagnose and historicize the colonial present and imagine decolonized futures. My courses hinge on a feminist pedagogical approach that encourages students to design their own research projects on subjects that matter to them, think carefully about their research methods, and cultivate confidence in their writing. In order to encourage students to take ownership over their words and articulate their investment in their research through their writing, I devote substantial time—inside and outside of class—to helping students pursue complex and nuanced research projects. At the same time, inextricable from the emphasis I place on study is the significance I place on the revision process. I position the vulnerability that revision requires as an integral part of both study and struggle: the vulnerability to share our ideas and allow them to be reshaped and to, in turn, reshape us. In this way, my aspiration each quarter is that my students leave my classes with a growing conviction in their own capacity to tackle difficult topics with care, nuance, creativity, rigor, and thoughtfulness. Because my courses require students to read carefully, think capaciously, and write clearly in order to better articulate the racialized and gendered violence(s) that animate this moment, my hope is that they leave our time together with a deeply felt understanding that scholarship, including their own, has an important role to play in the remaking of our world."