Author: Courtney Hopf, NYU London
As a Writing lecturer at NYU’s study away site in London, one of my ongoing challenges and enjoyments is discovering new ways of integrating pedagogical practice with our global, urban surroundings. In this post, I will outline the arc of one of my Writing classes and show how I enable student experiences of city environments to inform social and cultural criticism. Though it is taught in London, this series of activities could easily be adapted for any city.
Peggy McIntosh’s 1989 article, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, has become a canonical text for teaching concepts of social privilege. In her essay, McIntosh defines her privilege as a white person via the metaphor of an invisible, weightless backpack that she carries with her at all times; she writes that it is full of “unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious.” This essay is a key text in my Writing II class, delivered in the spring semester of my students’ freshman year, where we engage with notions of privilege in tandem with our focus on living in a global city like London. By this point in their year abroad, the students occupy a strange social and emotional space as “insider-outsiders”; they are familiar enough with the city to navigate it and feel a sense of ownership over it, but they are still removed enough to see it through the eyes of foreigners.
For this reason, they make excellent flâneurs and flâneuses. The flâneur, that wandering, strolling, lounging observer of city life, has his roots (and he was, historically, a “he” – a point to which we shall return) in 19th century Paris and was first explored in depth by Charles Baudelaire. My students and I begin the semester by reading the work of relevant writers, my favourite being excerpts from Joseph Roth’s What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933, in order to help them understand the observational perspective of the flâneur. The students go on practice walks and write exploratory pieces that lead to a full essay, and they are asked to venture beyond the confines of Bloomsbury where NYU London is located. We also take a class trip to the Victoria & Albert and Natural History museums, during which the students are tasked with observing not the exhibits, but the museum visitors themselves, interrogating how people behave in such environments and afterward writing up a short piece modelled on Roth’s Berlin writings.
It is at this point that we turn to the Invisible Knapsack. I ask the students to think about the assumptions they made in observing the people around them and how those assumptions played out in their writing. They write about their own experiences in social spaces and how those experiences are mediated by how they express their identity. We read pieces like “Just Walk on By: Black Men in Public Space” by Brent Staples and excerpts from Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and we begin to reconfigure the walking, looking, and observing we have been doing through the lens of social privilege. We begin to notice that all those wonderful flâneurs we read about at the start of the semester were universally white and male.
Notions of privilege and identity politics are not new to most of our students. But through activities like these that first and foremost put them out into an unfamiliar-but-familiar urban environment and ask them, simply, to look, they inhabit the concepts and theories before we actually begin to talk about and unpack them. Ultimately this experiential perspective changes how they interact with the academic material, and it allows them to think it through from the inside out – from the individual to the abstract. This reversal of common pedagogical practice is both enabled and enhanced by teaching with the city.