Last week we spoke to Jon Braddy at Florida Gulf Coast University about the virtual exchange on Queer Theory that he undertook with Norway and Brazil.
This week, his VE partner in Norway, Kari Jegerstedt joins us to tell us more from the Norwegian perspective.
Kari has been Head of the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research at the University of Bergen in Norway for the past four years, although she has been at the university for much longer. She has a background in literary studies, and a PhD on the work of Angela Carter, the feminist science fiction writer. Kari is also interested in South African literatures.
Queer Theory and psychoanalysis form an integral part of her work and it’s the queer theory aspect that we will focus on today. Currently, she is busy trying to get more funding for further gender programmes within her institution.
A shout out for a virtual exchange partnership from across the pond
Kari came across the shout-out and reacted pretty swiftly at a time when Jon Braddy was looking for a Norwegian partner to take his Queer Theory onto another more international level and develop it into a virtual exchange.
“Norway was interested in COIL models and was keen to provide some funding for this. When this landed on my desk,’ she says, ‘and I just thought it was a fabulous opportunity. I was also interested in the situation in Florida and felt it was important to engage as an act of solidarity. At the time, Florida was imposing restrictions on the gay and trans community. There was a high degree of animosity surrounding the teaching of gender and racial issues. We’d been discussing this a lot in Norway too, so I thought it would be an excellent topic to engage with on an international level.”
Kari says she also looked at Braddy’s previous courses and thought they were interesting from the perspective of the way of teaching and how he assessed the students.
“I did my research and found the perfect match!” she laughs.
Designing a COIL for the first time
“This was my first experience of a VE. I had never heard of this way of teaching and learning before’, says Kari. She had very little time leading up to the application. But Jon had done most of the work and she jumped on the bandwagon. Fortunately, her institution accepted to take it on. Then the intensive period of preparation began. Florida invited her to a conference on virtual exchange. She flew over and met Jon in person. “Virtual is great, but it’s always best to meet in person!” she adds.
“But we had to design something for students who would only meet virtually. In the future, this may change, but we have no funding so far unfortunately.
“We want to broaden out this international collaboration with Brazil too, so it’s quite an undertaking.”
Jon’s students were very concerned about security, but Kari explains the climate in Norway is different and her students had no concerns at all on this level. Although there were some shootings at a Pride event in Oslo, so this meant ultimately more police came onto the streets for protection. She says that the terror alert was heightened during this time. Despite this, her students did not feel afraid because none of them had experienced any harassment on a personal level.
“Interestingly, when we talked about going to Florida, several of them said that, no, they would feel afraid going there,” she adds.
Experiences and ideas that stood out during the virtual exchange?
“My students had a strong experience of someone being in a precarious situation. But they were only becoming aware of this by talking to the American students. It made it more personal.
“There were some academic differences too’, she explains. “My students were more educated in gender theory and Jon’s were communications students. Mine were more prepared on theory than the Americans because the theory is already incorporated within their course. For Jon’s students, this was like an introduction to Queer Theory.
“My students were very happy to spend a whole semester on this topic’, she continues, ‘but also they needed more in-depth discussion of the texts and less focus on the personal stories”.
As a result, Kari says they need to design the course in a more interdisciplinary way in the future, so the Norwegians can gain more from the American students’ communication skills and the American students gain more theory expertise.
Kari says her students didn’t know about all the different digital tools on offer to make the podcast for example. “The American students were very well versed in the digital platforms and mine learned a lot from that. Mine, on the other hand, are stronger on the theory, so we need to highlight this more next time”.
High points during the VE
Kari says a high point was working together for the Queer archive. But next time, she would like to dedicate more time for this as the students were quite slow to get started. She says the group work needs to start sooner in the collaboration.
Despite the challenges, Kari was amazed at the range and quality of work that came out of the collaboration. Especially the podcast they made together that discussed the violence in both Florida and Norway, and how communities came together to deal with the fallout from it and reacted to the danger. A lot of independent research was done for this which was incredibly valuable.
Challenges during the VE
“We were also very aware of the time needed to build trust in the relationships, and so we designed icebreaker activities all the way through. There were discussions every week. But we need to redesign them because I think we maybe spent too much time making sure everyone knew everyone before they decided who they were going to work with. Next time we would ideally assign the groups sooner”.
Due to administrative difficulties, there were more US students which Kari says, wasn’t ideal. She says this would need to be ironed to make it more balanced.
“I hope to get more students next time”.
Personality wise, she says, the US are more talkative and social, whereas the Norwegians are more reserved on the whole.
“We talked a lot about this and my students want to improve their communications and want to be more ‘American’ in this. They were very supportive of each other. We are going to be more outspoken, they said”.
Finally, even though the Norwegians speak very good English, it is not their native language, therefore there was the issue of the language barrier in terms of how to express themselves more freely.
This meant that in plenary, the Norwegians were reluctant to speak out. Kari hopes this will change in future iterations.
Decolonising the curriculum
Kari (and Jon too) felt this iteration was rather too ‘American’ in its perspective. She says her students sometimes felt they were learning about American pop culture.
But, she explains, it was interesting as they became aware of the differences. From the Norwegian stance, they ended up doing more research themselves to find out what Norwegians are thinking about Queer Theory.
“We don’t even have a good translation for Queer, she says, ‘our translation means ‘bended’ theory or ‘crooked’ theory, so it’s not really adequate. We have different historical associations with the word so I was adding a Nordic context to the readings during the exchange. Next time we need to bring that back to the American students so they can see things from our perspective too.
“This question of translation is very interesting when things just don’t mean the same. For example, we don’t have separate words for ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. As a result of this reality, I made a slide to demonstrate it and explain it to the Americans. This is a whole other discourse, of course.
“We have just one word – but it is based on a different trajectory……’sex’ and ‘gender’ and ‘queer’ are all untranslatable and have different histories. Delving into this would broaden and deepen the VE, I think.
And our Brazilian colleague is a linguist and translator and that would make the virtual exchange more interdisciplinary and add whole new dimension to the course. The issue of different languages, different histories and theories will be a wonderful thing to explore on so many different levels.