Tamar Hager

Making Sense of an Untold Story: A Personal Deconstruction of the Myth of Motherhood

This article critically explores the modern myth of motherhood through my personal life story as a mother. Feelings of rejection of the demands and expectations of my motherly role led me to research social histories and feminist analyses for common maternal images. My explorations made me believe that the myth of motherhood is a relatively new social construction aiming, among others, to oppress and exploit women. Surveying the institution of motherhood as a mechanism of control, I openly discuss what I perceive of as my own oppression.

Jewish Arab activism through dialogical encounters: changing an Israeli campus

This paper introduces a Jewish Arab dialogue model of national encounters which has been developed at Tel Hai College in Upper Galilee in Israel. These planned encounters, which have taken place for eight consecutive years within the framework of a course entitled ‘A Jewish–Arab dialogue – action research’ are recognized as part of the bachelor degree requirement within the Department of Education. Group meetings designed to build mutual acquaintance and understanding between Jews and Arabs have been taking place for several decades in various locations, including Israeli academia. This model is unique as it consciously directs its participants towards activism in the institution where it is located. Conceived as a process of reflexive identity study and research, jointly examining power structures, the course has aimed for extended, on-campus dialogue between Arabs and Jews, studying, and attempting to reduce the college reality of structural inequities between these groups, thus effecting actual social–political change on campus. In this paper we will describe this encounter model by outlining its characteristics – its objectives and facilitation methods – in comparison with recognized models, demonstrating how by challenging established structures of interventions, we created a different model which has mobilized participants into changing their immediate environment and consequently their lives.

From marginalisation to integration: Arab-Palestinians in Israeli academia

The Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel, one-fifth of the countrys population, has been underrepresented in Israeli institutions of higher education since the establishment of the state. This article focuses on the authors’ shared aim of promoting diversity and multiculturalism in institutions of higher education in Israel. It first introduces Arab marginalisation within Israeli society as a whole. Subsequently, it offers a critical overview of existing data and research on the challenges faced by young Arab-Palestinians in higher education institutions in Israel. Based on this indispensable analysis, which clearly shows the numerous obstacles that await Arab-Palestinians on their path to graduation, the article goes on to suggest some required changes. Presenting some useful policy transformations and courses of action, it subsequently introduces multicultural academia as a better conceptual and practical framework for achieving inclusive education.

Maternal Autobiography as a Site of Feminist Negotiation and Resistance

How can I use my writing to tackle my conflicting experiences as a writer, a mother, a feminist activist in Israeli academia? How can words combine the routine exhausting work and pleasures of motherhood; my struggles against injustice done to the Arab minority in my country, torn by unrelenting conflict; and the need to turn my back on all these obligations and efforts to write? As the normative expectation of mothers is to identify with the maternal role, activism which involves resistance and thus social and political hazards may be considered a threat to maternal work. But whereas one could argue that activism is, in fact, a social and communal extension of motherhood, writing is over and over again perceived as a neglect of maternal duties. In this article, I introduce feminist autobiography as a literary form which has enabled me as mother-writer-activist to create a space where social, cultural, political, and psychological conflicts and contradictions can intermingle, creating an alternative maternal subjectivity and voice.

Changing consciousness: autoethnographic mapping in a dialog group

This article introduces a pedagogical tool for raising critical consciousness and nurturing resistance to discrimination. ‘Autoethnographic mapping,’ integrating guided cognitive mapping and autoethnographies, has been implemented for a decade now within the framework of a college course occasioning dialogue between Palestinian Arab and Jewish students in Israel. Participants using the tool in an extended encounter between students from groups embroiled in political conflict have begun to theorize the microgeogrpahies and stories of their everyday existence, gaining nuanced, non-standard insights into how conflict informs lives and selves. Employing the technique in the contact zone of guided encounters, students tend to re-inscribe identities upon a socio-political context, discovering the fluidity of belonging and destabilizing discursive structures. The paper outlines the course, sketches the tool and its theoretical underpinnings and describes some of the results it’s achieved through a spectrum of illustrative instances.

Changing Against the Grain:Academy for Peace in a Reality of Conflict

This article recounts an attempt by administration and faculty to create a multinational and multicultural vision for Tel Hai Academic College in the Galilee in Israel. This uncommon initiative in the Israeli academia intends to transform the campus into a unique academic institution allowing equality and visibility for all cultural and national minorities and, above all, for the Arab minority. The article focuses on 1 instance of this complex and difficult process by outlining the distinct perspectives of 2 participants, an Arab and a Jew, the authors of this article, who were among the initiators of the endeavor. Their accounts, which uncover the obstacles, disappointments, and multifaceted insights experienced by each of them, demonstrate the unpredictable complexities evoked by such a radical scheme under conditions of a national conflict. The article also draws some inferences and suggestions for similar institutional processes.

The politics of neoliberalism and social justice: Towards a pedagogy of critical locational encounter

The neoliberalisation of higher education is gathering pace and momentum on a global scale, albeit with national differences. In this context, a number of challenges and conflicting politics are emerging especially in relation to pedagogical ethos of social justice. Our article analyzes the general characteristics of neoliberal policy and practices worldwide, looking in particular at their impacts on students and teachers alike mainly in relation to the license to exercise critical thinking and social justice. Subsequently, it suggests resisting neoliberal agenda by using radical teaching methods which consider diversity and difference as social and political assets which allow meaningful dialogue across social, ethnic, national and gender groups while working to promote equality and social justice. This theoretical background informs the five papers composing this Special Issue. The authors all introduce radical and critical research and pedagogies with a struggle for social justice and against inequalities at their core—as effective tools of resistance against the oppressive and unjust conditions created by the neoliberal agendas that are structuring education worldwide. Situated in a range of national contexts, the papers provide the ground for a pedagogy of critical locational encounter, recognizing this as a site of struggle while addressing multiple and complex relationships of power and their contestation.

Challenging the divide? Confronting a dialogue across political margins in a feminist classroom

My article narrates and theorizes one educational moment of speaking ‘across’ the social and political margins in a peripheral college on the northern border of Israel. I recognize the academic space as what historian Louise Pratt titled a ‘contact zone’ where peoples geographically and historically separated meet within radically asymmetrical relations of power. In the Israeli academia, secular Westernized Jewish students and teachers from hegemonic groups interact with students from political and social minorities. Despite continued estrangement and mutual hostility, these encounters at times lead to unexpected moments of multicultural alliances. Feminist critical pedagogies serve to identify and create occasions for such interactions that are missing from most academic locations. However, as I demonstrate in this article, these moments which create potential unforeseen resistance to the existing power structure can easily be overlooked. The article focuses on a moment of pedagogical failure to identify an attempt by two female students to cross national affiliations and overcome mutual hostilities, expressing unforeseen solidarity with each other. Reflecting on the political and social reasons for my failure, I end the article by imagining an attempt at amending the pedagogical damage, giving the two students another chance to express their solidarity.

The Quest for the Lost Story: feminist reading of Julia Margaret Cameron's ‘Mountain Nymph Sweet Liberty’

ABSTRACT This article suggests a feminist reading of the photograph ‘Mountain Nymph Sweet Liberty’ created by the early Victorian photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron. Examining this photograph in its historical context, it analyzes the unique encounter between Cameron, an upper-middle-class Anglo-Indian photographer, and her female model-subject, who came from the English lower classes. Whereas Camerons biography is well researched and her artistic endeavors are fully acknowledged, the information on the photographed model, Annie Keene, is scarce. This article aims to reconstruct the models life story. To fill the holes in the archival record, fiction is used to tell a detailed story of the unique professional meeting between Cameron and her sitter. The following is a feminist project intended to recover female subjectivities, whose relationships have been erased by art and history.

Justice, Morality or Politics: why did the British legal system execute Selina Wadge?

ABSTRACT Although infanticide was a capital crime, mothers who killed their children were seldom convicted of murder and, from 1849 onward, hardly ever faced the death penalty. In fact, between 1843—when the authorities began documenting the gender of offenders—and 1899, only five women were hanged for infanticide. This article follows the story of one of these women, Selina Wadge, who was hung in the prison yard of Bodmin Gaol in Cornwall on 15 August 1878. The author read depositions, trial proceedings, newspaper reports, letters, notes and petitions, attempting to understand why the court and the Home Office chose to circumvent the accepted lenient policy and apply the severe letter of the law. Was Wadge executed for infanticide? Or did her hanging serve other social and political agendas? Through analysis of the case, the article provides insights into the attitudes of the British establishment towards mothers living on the margins.