An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Radhika Govinda (Sabbatical Fellow, 2026), delivered in-person and online.
Archiving Feminist Knowledge Production: Voices from the Early Days
In this presentation, I share findings from a Una Europa-funded project that seeks to recover the histories of doing gender studies in European universities. I reflect the process of collaborating across differences, archiving as feminist practice, and the significance of engaging in this labour in the current moment. I explore what lessons can be gleaned from tracing these histories of institutionalisation to re-imagine and secure the future of gender studies. To offer a window into the project, I present a collective biography of both the origin and development of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Edinburgh and also the emergence of feminists as change agents or ‘critical actors’ on the inside. This collective biography draws on the voices of six pioneering women academics who were instrumental in introducing gender and sexuality studies at the institution. Specifically, it delves into their pathways into the academy, activism and feminism, and reflects on their experiences of being a woman in the academy in those early days. It excavates their accounts for the origin stories of the first women’s and gender studies courses at the institution, and engages with questions of legitimacy and ‘mainstreaming’ of gender and sexuality studies, and feminist pedagogical approaches within the curriculum and across conventional disciplines in the institution. It examines their insights on the changes and continuities regarding how women academics, gender and sexuality studies as a field, and feminist pedagogical practices and research have been treated in the institution, and in the academy, as such.
Meeting ID: 387 413 976 148 588
Passcode: jk7Dn2rE