Feminist pedagogy through the small fieldnote

Abstract

This collectively written essay reflects collaborations between three graduate students and their dissertation advisor. We turn to inspirations like Zora Neale Hurston to make our fieldnotes central to collective writing, thinking and translation across language and discursive traditions. We use small fieldnote in a subversive sense to illustrate a feminist mode of this pedagogical exercise and to refuse foreclosure of our analysis. We push back against the burden of working with complete pieces of writing, and the anthropological commitment to the thickness of description. Anthropological pedagogy conventionally attributes to thick description and completeness, not just scholarly superiority but also a moral one. Using a feminist pedagogical approach that centers the small as possibility troubles presumptions of conventional anthropological pedagogy. Instead, we picked notes from one or two ethnographic encounters or a single day of fieldwork to experiment collectively with where they could lead us. The essay that has resulted from this collective feminist classroom is what we see as a feminist-dividual piece of pedagogy and writing. We anticipate that it will provide others a hopeful way to begin and sustain intellectual collaborations and writing across scholarly generations by celebrating the potential of small, incomplete, and otherwise uncelebrated pieces of writing.