Unlearning War in the Classroom is our first conversation in a series centering the Warscapes anthology Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War. Featuring panelists Sherry Zane, Veruska Cantelli and Bhakti Shringarpure.
Wars, conflict and histories of violence have been continually framed as binary narratives between winners and losers, nation and non-nations, and armies and non-armies. Additionally, in a saturated media landscape, violence and war is often represented as a form of entertainment and this generates a numbness about suffering, pain as well as the psychological and material costs of loss. Prevalent narratives of neutrality, both-sideism and objectivity can legitimize violence towards certain groups of people. Panelists with extensive teaching experience discuss ways in which war can be unlearned in the classroom and disrupt existing ways of producing knowledge about war.
Sherry Zane is a Professor in Residence and the Director of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her main research interests include the history of gender, race, sexuality, and U.S. national security. She is the author of, “’I did it for the Uplift of Humanity and the Navy’: Same-Sex Acts and the Origins of the National Security State, 1919-1921” in the New England Quarterly (2018). She is currently researching art activism in Belfast in Northern Ireland and also working on a feminist pedagogical project to make classroom experiences more inclusive.
Veruska Cantelli is Associate Professor in the Core Division at Champlain College. Before that, she was an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Global Communication Strategies at the University of Tokyo and also taught Comparative Literature at Queens College, CUNY with a focus on literature of war and women's autobiographies, particularly on non-western narratives of the self. She is the translator of Lettere Rivoluzionarie by Diane di Prima (2021), and the author of "The Dance of Bones: Tomioka Taeko's Stage of Reprobates" in Otherness: Essays and Studies (2021), "The Maternal Lineage: Orality and Language in Natalia Ginzburg's Family Sayings" for the Journal of International Women's Studies (2017) as well as several articles and interviews for Warscapes magazine. She is the co-editor of Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings (UpSet Press) and Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press).
Bhakti Shringarpure is an Associate Professor of English and Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has taught at Hunter College (CUNY), Baruch College (CUNY), Stern College for Women, and the University of Nairobi. She is the co-founder of Warscapes magazine which transitioned into the Radical Books Collective, a multi-faceted community building project that creates an alternative, inclusive and non-commercial approach to books and reading. Bhakti is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (2019) and editor of Literary Sudans: An Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan (2017), Imagine Africa (2017) Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings (2018), Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (2023).
Buy the book here: https://darajapress.com/publication/insurgent-feminism-writing-war
