In 2013, we formed the Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative (FAAC), a research group committed to revisiting the art and architectural history survey course with a feminist approach to both content and pedagogy.1 Our aim was to advance the critical approach of “contestation,” which we understand as a constant, open-ended debate and an active, conscious inversion of the power relations that have shaped the value judgments of our disciplines. In doing so, we sought to elide the logic of the canon as a relatively stable roster of names and greatest hits. This proved no small feat: we wanted our process to be practical and implementable in today's university, and, at the same time, we wanted our syllabus to serve as a corrective to the problems we see facing that system.
In a moment when higher education is still a major site of inequality, we wondered, is a true “pedagogy...
University of California Press