In her valedictory lecture held on 16 March 2026, Professor Wendy Harcourt reflects on her experience of working as an intersectional feminist in the university environment, looking at teaching practices based on intersectionality, radical vulnerability, differential belonging and the ethics of care.
Harcourt's lecture was based partly on her new book, Conundrums of care: feminist entanglements in critical development studies, published Open Access by Bloomsbury Academic.
Embracing radical vulnerability
She talks of embracing radical vulnerability in her teaching - disrupting accepted hierarchies to open up the big questions around development. Radical vulnerability meant opening up the discussion on development topics away from the dominant Western narrative and the accepted hierarchies around the student-teacher relationship.
In her lecture, Harcourt also reflects on her own positionality as a white older woman with Global North citizenship. She notes that reflecting on her positionality required her to be aware of location and body/knowledge/status positioning and how age, race, gender and class converge through her role as an older white female teacher.
Care in the classroom
Harcourt thus questions the power and privileges which exist in the classroom and calls for more care in teaching. She argues that care is not soft or fuzzy; it is about taking risks, being attentive to power relations and, thus, being political.
In her teaching, Harcourt has aimed to unsettle the idea of university learning as expert abstract knowing and to recognise how knowledge is embodied and experienced individually and collectively. Students create together a sense of collective knowing which interweaves with the texts/videos/lectures they have read or watched or heard.
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Conundrums of Care: Feminist entanglements in critical development studies is available on Open Access.
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