[Main themes][Prof Liz Stanley][Dr. Katriina Honkanen][Ph.D. Karen Offen][Prof.Claire Midgley]
Keynotes and conference theme
The main theme of the conference "Gender and knowledge – gendered knowledge" will be discussed in the keynote lectures and in three main sessions:
I Gender and knowledge: Use, misuse and non-use of history in
women's studies
II Colonialism and nordic women's history - postcolonial challenges
III Women's history now - segregation, integration, reproduction
I Main session:
Gender and knowledge: Use, misuse and non-use of history in women's studies
In English
History and historicizing are included as central elements in many feminist theories. Ideas about "historically situated knowledge" and "historical contexts" have been essential to many feminist epistemologies. Against this background it is surprising to notice, how little attention the empirical works of women's history have gained within multidisciplinary women's studies. With a reference to this contradiction, Dr. Katriina Honkanen discusses the role of historicizing as an often self-evident but unproblematized part of constructivist feminist thinking. The presentation is based on analyses of Judith Butler's theorization. Honkanen will show how Butler's theories are grounded on the idea of "historicity".
On the basis of Honkanen's introductory analysis the panel poses and discusses questions concerning the complex relationship between feminist theory, women's history and various concepts of history. Researchers working on women's history often found their interpretations on interdisciplinary feminist theories. In this conference on Nordic women's and gender history, however, we would also wish to raise discussion on the concepts and uses of history within feminist thinking. How is history understood in feminist theoretical narratives? How are history and historical narratives applied as parts of theoretical arguments? Women's history and the philosophy of history can contribute to feminist thinking by offering reflections on concepts and meanings of history.
This session is organized by prof. Gro Hagemann (University of Oslo, Norway) (chair) and Dr. Ann-Catrin Östman (Åbo Akademi University, Finland).
II Main session
Colonialism and Nordic women's history - postcolonial challenges
In English
Questions of colonialism and gender have recently moved from the periphery of women's history towards the centre. The relationship between racism/colonialism, power and knowledge has been elaborated especially within the field of postcolonial theory. The second main session discusses the importance of colonialism for Nordic women's history and raises the question: Has colonialism, imperialism and racism been given enough attention within the Nordic women's history?
How do the notions of "femininity" and "gender" change, when racism and colonialism are taken into account? Are the foundations of women's history as a discipline fundamentally challenged when gender and race/ethnicity are considered as co-constructed? The panel approaches these questions from various empirical, theoretical and ethical points of view. What kind of new fields of research can be opened up by conceptualizing colonialism as a process, which is oppressive, but which simultaneously bestows privileges? Most importantly, the panel discusses how the Nordic and the national can be studied from perspectives that direct attention not only to notions of gender, but also to the notions of racism and colonialism as key-elements of research.
The session is organized by Phil. Lic. Seija Jalagin (University of Oulu, Finland) (Chair) and M.A. Marika Kivinen (Åbo Akademi University, Finland).
III Main session
Women's history now – segregation, integration, reproduction
In the Nordic languages
The panel discusses the 'history' of women's history in Nordic countries during the last few decades and reflects on future visions in the field of research. The debate is two-fold; the discussion focuses on theoretical and methodological characteristics of research on one hand, and on the institutional framework of the discipline on the other. What is decisively new about recent women's history as compared to the histories written before the 1960s and 1970s? What aspects represent continuity? Will women's history / gender history attract future generations of historians? The panelists evaluate women's history in relation to mainstream research: What are the theoretical and methodological implications of a women's history placed outside the mainstream? And in contrast, when women's history is integrated into the mainstream, how do feminist historians contribute to the theories and methodologies of the discipline?
The session is organized by Marianne Liljeström (Turku
University) (Chair) and
Dr. Tiina Kinnunen (University of Joensuu, Finland).
Keynote speakers
Liz Stanley
Professor, Research Chair of Sociology, University of Edinburgh, UK
homepages: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/geps/staff/profile/l.stanley
For a Nordic audience, Prof Liz Stanley is probably best known for her publications on feminist theory on one hand, and her theorization on biographical research on the other. Her publications have concerned questions of epistemology and methodology as considered from a feminist and sociological viewpoint. The conjunction of power/knowledge is in the core of many of her publications, around matters such as what is seen as 'knowledge', who is seen to have it, how competing knowledge-claims are dealt with, who are gatekeepers, and so forth. Stanley has focused for example on the formation and reconstitution of those local knowledges we call 'the academy', 'sociology' and 'academic feminism'.
Stanley's acclaimed study The Auto/Biographical I (1992) has been used and quoted by many historians involved in biographical research. Stanley has introduced the concept of 'auto/biography' to direct attention to the complex relationship between biography and social structure. 'Auto/biography' is a technical and theoretical term which indicates an analytical recognition that the supposed binaries of self and other, fact and fiction, past and present, reality and representation, autobiography and biography are actually multiply traversed in stories, narratives and other accounts, including those produced by 'method' through surveying, interviewing and so on.
Currently Stanley is working on topics related to memory and remembrance on one hand and narrative practices on the other. The research in progress is concerned with the aftermaths of the concentration camps of the South African War (1899-1902). By focusing on women's testimonies of their experiences and on state commemoration of those who died in the camps, she problematises the relationship between memory and victimhood and the political needs of the present around state formation in what became apartheid South Africa. Stanley has also worked on theorizing epistolary practices in letter-writing. She has recently published a book on the social theory of the feminist theorist and writer Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), and is currently editing a collection of Schreiner's letters.
Selected publications:
Mourning Becomes... Post/Memory, Commemoration and the Concentration
Camps of the South African War (Manchester University Press, Rutgers
University Press, 2005 in press)
Imperialism, Labour and the New Woman: Olive Schreiner's Social Theory
(Sociology P. 2002)
Knowing Feminisms: On Academic Borders, Territories and Tribes (Sage
Publications 1996)
Sex Surveyed, 1949-1994 (Taylor and Francis 1995)
Breaking Out Again: Feminist Ontology and Epistemology' (with Sue Wise)
(Routledge 1993)
The Auto/Biographical I: Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography
(Manchester University Press 1992)
Katriina Honkanen
PhD, Senior assistant, the Institute of Women's studies at Åbo Akademi
University.
Katriina Honkanen's doctoral thesis in women's studies - Historicizing as a Feminist Practice. The Places of History in Judith Butler's Constructivist Theories - is an analysis of the ways that notions of history are used in Butler's constructivist theories. Honkanen has publiced articles on the hegemony of equality-discourses in the writing of Finnish women's history, on feminist separatism in Mary Daly's thinking and on equality discourses as hegemonic sites for constructions of sexual difference. At the moment Katriina Honkanen is working on a project concerning the concept of experience and its continual relevance both for feminist theories of materiality and for feminist philosophies of history.
Karen Offen
Institute for Research on Women & Gender, Stanford University
Karen Offen (Ph.D., Stanford University) is a historian and independent scholar, affiliated as a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Stanford University. She is a founder and past secretary-treasurer of the International Federation for Research in Women's History, and is past-president of the Western Association of Women Historians (USA). She has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for study and research (1995-96), the Rockefeller Foundation (1985-86), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (1980-81). She has directed four interdisciplinary NEH Summer Seminars for College Teachers on the "Woman Question," organized around clusters of original historical texts in translation, and co-directed a fifth on "Motherhood and the Nation-State" at Stanford in 2002. She has recently taught master classes at the Central European University in Budapest and at the University of Konstanz, in Germany. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the International Museum of Women (San Francisco), where she chairs the Exhibition Development and Educational Programming Committee. In May 2004 she was awarded an honorary doctorate in humane letters from her alma mater, the University of Idaho.
Karen has co-edited three volumes of interpretative documentary texts, Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women's Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States (1981), and the two-volume Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, 1750-1950 (1983), both published by Stanford University Press. Her monograph, Paul de Cassagnac and the Authoritarian Tradition in Nineteenth-Century France, appeared in 1991. She has also co-edited the 1991 volume, Writing Women's History: International Perspectives (with Ruth Roach Pierson and Jane Rendall), on behalf of the International Federation for Research in Women's History. Karen's latest book is European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History (Stanford University Press, 2000). She is completing a book on the "woman question" debate in modern France and an edited volume, Global Feminisms, 1789-1945.
Karen's recent articles focus on the comparative history of feminism (including "Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach," which has been translated into five languages); the historiography of women in the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the European Revolutions of 1848 ; the feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft in comparative perspective; and the campaign for women's suffrage in France.
Abstract: "Plucking the Apple from the Tree of Knowledge: European Women and the 'Knowledge Wars'"
This theoretical paper will address the issue of how the new knowledge, especially historical knowledge, gained by and about women in the twentieth century by putting women & gender at the center of inquiry effectively transforms what it is possible to understand about the past. Both from my own work and that of colleagues, and in conjunction with my current work as head of the exhibition development and educational programming committee for the International Museum of Women, now under development in San Francisco www.imow.org , I have been thinking a lot about two aspects of this Tree of Knowledge. The first aspect is to consider how tall and broad this tree has grown lately, with wonderful new information and insight coming from scholars in many different lands. The second aspect is more perplexing: how to compress these fresh fruits of knowledge in such a way as to deliver the best part to public audiences without sacrificing the richness and complexity of the whole apple.
Director of the Research Centre for Gender Studies, London Metropolitan University, London, UK Home page: http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/depts/hal/staff/clare-midgley.cfm
Clare Midgley MA (Edinburgh), MA (Essex) and Ph.D (Canterbury) joined London Metropolitan University after having previously taught at Staffordshire University. Clare Midgley is specialized in women's history and British history. She is also the British co-editor of Gender and History, and a member of the national coordinating committee of the Women's History network. Clare Midgley's research interests focus on the link between women and empire in the nineteenth century. Her publications include Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870 (1992), which is a comprehensive study of women anti-slavery campaigners. Clare Midgley has also co-edited the book Gender and Imperialism (Studies in Imperialism), 1998. Midgley has also published extensively in scholarly journals, including Slavery and Abolition and Women's History Review. Midgley is currently working on a new study on British Feminism in the Age of Empire, to be published by Routledge.