ABSTRACT
In a senior-level/graduate course on “The Visual Culture of Women’s Activism,” I embedded a service-learning/civic engagement component in order to mount the annual “Take Back the Night” event on the University of Wyoming campus. My goal was to help students put their knowledge of the history of women’s activism into practice in their conceptualization of the march and in the march’s visual, educational, and emotional impact. Simultaneously I launched a Smart Girl Program at our University Lab School and was able to dovetail some events for those girls with our activist work for the march (William and Ferber 2008). Here I detail how we put the students’ activist, artistic, and/or artisan skills to work in communicating a feminist agenda to the university, secondary schools, and town communities through a historical feminist practice. As an academic who was new to putting activist history into a praxis mode, I was often conflicted about the balance of knowledge/production we achieved. As Rhonda L. Williams and Abby L. Ferber articulate, “Knowledge gained in the university classroom is often disconnected from action and from the practices of women working for change in the community” (2008: 47). While I will discuss here the ways we were able to take knowledge to the streets and community, I will also discuss the ways I was conflicted that represent the dilemmas of a feminist professor in a civicly engaged classroom who employs the four themes involved in doing feminist work: reflexivity, action orientation, attention to affect, and use of the situation at hand (Fonow and Cook 1991; qtd. in Williams and Ferber 2008: 47).
