NCID-1158
Nesha Haniff
Director of Pedagogy of Action and Lecturer
University of Michigan
Education/Degree:
1 Social Foundations of Education (University of Michigan)
About
Dr. Haniff's work has focused on empowerment pedagogies and marginalized populations which have been centered on HIV, gender and innovative education for low literate populations. She has developed several educational modules on HIV/AIDS, violence, and women's reproductive health. Her work has been located in the Caribbean, South Africa and the US. Her over all project speaks to the imperative of integrating race, gender, and social consciousness (both practice and theory) as knowledge development using the challenge of highly educated students attempting to teach in communities using a Freirean approach. Students must understand that empowerment methodologies do not eschew the rigors of ideas but those ideas must include a praxis that engages them in human rights advocacy at every level. Human rights advocacy includes shaping the students' consciousness in two other areas - the limits of science in developing appropriate technologies that will both protect women's health and women's agency and the pedagogical challenges of true empowerment that will critically examine who is empowered. Is the privileged the biggest beneficiary or the community? Thus, human rights become advocacy for new technologies that will put women's sexual health in their own hands and as well as self-criticism and reflection on participating in the many so called empowerment projects. The two path breaking courses that result are The Pedagogy of Action, Activism in race gender and health, and Women's Agency and Sexual Safety: Advocating for the new science (or Putting Women's Bodies at the Center of Science). Students are engaged in transformative work and in turn transform themselves.
Current Work
The Gender Consciousness Project (GCP) is a grassroots program that builds confidence and agency in young women in order to create a foundation for the struggle against injustices faced by women. Utilizing the essential principle of women's empowerment-that women themselves must understand their own oppression and, more importantly, how they themselves participate in their own oppression-the GCP engages high school females in conceptualizing how gender, combined with other aspects of their identity, impact various facets of their life. During the summer of 2016, Dr. Nesha Z. Haniff launched this dialogue-based discourse with young women, primarily women of color, in the metro Detroit area. The program consists of 6-8 curated 90-minute discussions over 3-4 months, alongside a final technology-based project. The discussions utilize Freirean techniques, in which the participants are co-creators of knowledge; facilitators encourage participants to examine their own thoughts and experiences as material for critical reflection and action (Freire, 1970). Since the 1970s, consciousness raising has faded as an explicit form of activism. Some suggest that as feminism evolved largely into an academic project, it "replaced the consciousness-raising group as the primary site for the transmission of feminist thinking and strategies for social change, and the movement then lost its mass-based potential" (feminism is for everybody, bell hooks, p. 10). We also speculate that the achievements of feminism, at least among better-educated groups, have diminished the appetite for consciousness raising. Through discussion and analysis of gender-based experience, the GCP hopes to bring participants to a level of critical consciousness at an earlier stage in their life, allowing participants to resist the exploitation of their own bodies themselves.
Research Area Keyword(s)
conscientization, gender, Health, praxis, race