AustLit

'This article considers the violences of identity-based privilege in university teaching. Pedagogical practice bears both possibilities for undoing privilege and risks for reperpetuating it – even when the educator intends otherwise, for privilege is often invisible, and educators may not always recognise its operations in their classrooms. Creative writing research can usefully make invisible privileges visible, which creates scope for questioning privilege and realising (making real) more livable ways of being. Following previous creative writing-based research into privilege and/or marginalisation (Kon-yu 2010; Bellette 2013; Williams 2013; Gandolfo 2016b), this article engages knowledge-generation practices of writing and self re-reading: I present and discuss Meeting Ms. Logos, a narrative penned five years ago, about teaching offshore in Singapore for an Australian university. At the time, the piece disturbed me, so I shelved it. But now, heeding privilege scholar Peggy McIntosh’s call for academics to ‘map our experiences’ of both privilege and marginalisation (2012: 197, 203-4), I re-confront Ms. Logos in order to avoid becoming Ms. Logos. This process is one I share because the exchange of narratives about coming-toawareness of privilege ‘allows us to know ourselves better, know others better, and recognise the matrices of power we are all in’ (McIntosh 2012: 203).' (Publication abstract)