Audrey Fernandes-Satar

When working with teacher education students one of our aims is to look at ‘race’ and racism, and the implications that ‘being white’ has for teachers’ practice. Hence we develop conversations around who we are as gendered and racialised subjects who occupy specific socio-economic positions. Our students find this disconcerting, however, as educators we find the journey equally challenging, even painful. When students personalize their discomfort by attacking us, it is not easy to simply shrug off hurtful comments. What we want to do in this paper, therefore, is to share the stories of our ‘tragedies and triumphs’ and present a number of impressionistic snapshots that illustrate the effects that teaching about social justice issues has on us as teachers. The issues mentioned in our title form the basis of our narratives: we are firmly committed to retaining our focus on equity as a guiding principle without sacrificing academic rigour, while at the same time addressing student resistance and the sense of entitlement that some bring to the unit.

Milk, Dudh, dudh, dudh After the last ship embodies the critical incident that illustrates my own history as well as the connection to the history of other women, who like myself made the journey across the Kala Pani – the Indian Ocean and lived as migrants in other lands. In this project I aim to bring greater understanding of how subjectivities are shaped through embodied experiences of diaspora and the diasporising of home (Brah, 1996). I have explored my own passage from India to Mozambique and finally to Australia, to illustrate in a testimonial way how diaspora can be lived, embodied and experienced in the flesh. This has been achieved through a body of artworks that have been exhibited in galleries in Perth, Western Australia, exploring the medium of drawing as well as the compilation of poems and the writing of this thesis. In this project I bear witness to the oppressive policies of the fascist government in Portugal and the effects of displacement and exile. I bear witness to how identity and culture can serve as a vehicle of empowerment, how experiences of belonging can germinate and take root, post diaspora. This project is about shedding light, making sense of the act of diaspora and the journey that is diaspora. It is also about representation, about me as a body, as a racialised and gendered body living this journey, this trajectory. My diasporic space is pulled apart or deconstructed within a feminist, post colonial framework with the aim that this scrutiny will shed light on how I come to visualise myself inhabiting Hommi Bhabha’s Third Space (1988) a space of movement and enunciation.