Book Forum: Aerin Lai on Feminist Politics, Intersectionality and Knowledge Cultivation
I loved this book: how Radhika interrogated the concept of privilege and power across the different spheres that are focused on. In particular, I related to the insight about not wanting to transcend your privilege, while suspecting that you have tried to in the past. I think I have sought to do the same. I guess the question remains regarding what we do with our privilege - just because I recognise it or even self-flagellate, does not make the power go away. In this piece, I want to engage with the book through this question and theme. I want to draw attention to the ways in which Radhika weaved her experiences of vulnerability and struggle in the classroom. It was not only beautifully written, but resonated strongly with me, especially as a tutor teaching about race and colonialism in this neoliberal university.
Chapter 3 is on decolonising classrooms and the difficulties of using intersectionality as pedagogy when teaching in the white world. Radhika begins by asking important questions about experiencing the classroom as an educator, and about navigating the power dynamics that infuse the classroom. After all, the classroom, as Radhika rightly points out, is a microcosm of the broader society that we live in:
“How do I engage with predominantly white students without calling out the elephant in the room – my own racial and cultural differences? How am I to expose to the students the dualistic politics of knowledge production without implicating myself as often the only obvious other in the classroom? How do I make them interrogate the ‘God trick’ (Haraway 1988), in which they are routinely trained to engage in other courses? And if there are other visible others in the classroom, how do I teach in a manner that is self-affirmatory for them and that does not reproduce the very marginalisation I want all my students to recognise and challenge?” (Govinda 2025: p,106).
The rest of chapter 3 addresses these questions through an intersectional and decolonial lens. Drawing on other feminist scholars, Radhika suggests that using an intersectional pedagogy “to decolonise the learning process requires that we explore how ‘power is enmeshed in the discourses and practice of the more mundane everyday of the classroom’, how claims to knowledge cannot be viewed as uninfluenced by our embodied selves and how emotions come to bear on the learning process” (p. 121). She traces how taking an intersectional approach to knowledge production and cultivation in the classroom can shed light on the ways in which we are complicit in reproducing coloniality and the very structures of power that we seek to interrogate. For example, she very insightfully points out how using the metaphor of “waves” when teaching students about feminist history and knowledge inevitably positions the Euro-American world as the origin for feminism, and occludes the role that racialised women played in the push for gender equality and women’s rights across the globe. Even in critical courses on international development, Radhika demonstrates clearly how often the conditions of the majority world, framed as “undeveloped” or “developing”, remain uninterrogated. Discussing intersectionality and its embeddedness in lived experiences, Radhika demonstrates how to teach intersectionality by using the “privilege walk” in class to show, viscerally, to students what it means when privilege and marginalisation intersect and shapes one’s lived experiences.
What resonated with me most strongly was the emotional labour that underpins constructing a feminist decolonised classroom with one’s students. As Radhika writes, “Intersectional pedagogy takes this into account in terms of both the planned and the transacted curricula, that is, not only what is meant to be taught but also how it is taught” (p. 114). The question for me is: how does one teach about race and intersectionality in very white classrooms? As a tutor, I related very much to these conundrums when teaching very white classrooms. It’s so much better now, but when I first started teaching, I remember talking about colonial history and its violence in dispossessing and extracting resources from the colonised, being the only person of colour. At the same time, when there were more racialised students in my class, I did not know how to navigate the classroom in a way that, like what Radhika pointed out, taught in a manner that was self-affirmatory for them. How do we not turn our students into case studies? I’ll complicate Radhika’s story and experiences further, by also pointing out that the students who are the ‘face’ of the ‘Other’ in these white classrooms, often embody privilege in various ways as they are middle or upper-class international students who ironically, become mediators and gatekeepers of what authentic Indianness or Otherness looks like (cf. chapter 5 of Radhika’s book).
How do I show solidarity with my racialised students, while simultaneously not wanting my white students to leave the classroom about race with only guilt? At the same time, what happens when my white students do not see beyond my race? (see Lai 2020). This brings me to the last section, on “safety” in classrooms. As Radhika points out, the classroom is uncomfortable. There is discomfort in acknowledging the privilege that one experiences in their everyday life. She offers an example of turning moments of tension and anger into “teachable moments”, drawing students in rather than pushing them out. For example, when a student in my classroom made remarks about ‘Africa’ being ‘uncivilised’ and ‘undeveloped’ (and this being why Marxism does not work there), I was very angry and upset. Radhika’s experience of turning these moments of hurt into teachable ones was inspiring. Like the title of her poem, Mirror Mirror on the Wall, there is also an element of holding up the mirror to oneself, to think about how we too perpetuate and reproduce ideas of coloniality. I really do share in the struggles and contradictions and maybe, on my end analysis paralysis trying to figure out how to teach about race, knowing that in this context, I am racialised and seen as the Other. This is complicated further as I have power as the tutor in the classroom, but also back home I’m privileged in so many ways, and want to acknowledge these transnational aspects to intersectionality which complicate how we teach about privilege and marginalisation.
I end my interventions with a story of two white working-class Scottish students, who asked me in class, why, despite being Scottish, studying in a Scottish university in Scotland, their peers could not understand them. I did not know what to say. I still do not. In this neoliberal university where international students who are racialised in this city are also people who can afford international tuition fees to the sum of £26,000 a year, and Scottish students are ‘priced out’ of higher education, it was difficult to say anything. The same structures of oppression that prevent Scottish students from enrolling in university are the same structures of oppression that ensure that only wealthy students from the ‘majority-world’ can gain admittance to this university. When these students arrive, like racialised staff, they serve only one purpose - to be the token splashes of colour to an otherwise white space.
Being self-aware and being critically reflexive does not make the privilege go away. What then do we do with our privilege that works towards a more just world?
Bibliography
Haraway, Donna. 1988. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Feminist Studies 14, 3: 575-599.
Lai, Aerin. 2020. “Tutoring while not-white.” Teaching Matters. Accessed July 10, 2025. (https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/teaching-matters/tutoring-while-not-white/)
Aerin Lai recently completed her/their PhD from the Department of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. Her work focuses on masculinities and race, using a decolonial intersectional approach. She is currently a research associate on the CCINDLE project, examining activists’ resistance against the far-right and anti-gender movements at the University of Sheffield.