
Dr Joan Haran
IASH-SSPS Research Fellow, February - December 2022
Home Institution: Cardiff University
Joan Haran is currently an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University. She was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture, Cardiff University and the Center for the Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon, a Fellow on the Fiction Meets Science Program at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, Delmenhorst, and a Research Fellow in the Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics, Cardiff University. Her most recent research revolves around the concept of Imaginactivism.
Project Title: Feminist Stories in Movement
This project will explore and re-circulate feminist stories that make it clear that there is existing feminist theory and praxis across multiple movements and academic disciplines that provide the necessary resources to tackle grand challenges such as climate change, environmental justice and related challenges to security. In collaboration with Dr Niamh Moore (SSPS), I will look at the ways in which feminists within and outwith the academy have returned to the archives of feminist theory and movement to contest or complicate earlier iterations of the stories about theory and movement, as well as the ways in which feminists have worked with fiction to inspire movement work. We take archives then, to refer to both formal archives, as well as to archives in a more metaphorical, distributed sense in which shared public cultures also constitute collective movement archives.
We are particularly interested in the ways that the contemporary moment demands the creation of more generous and nuanced stories about feminisms as well as humility about prior exclusions to which we may have contributed. We will explore what feminist academics can learn from the story-telling practices of feminists operating beyond the academy such as Walidah Imarisha, adrienne maree brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs who re-story the work of previous generations of black feminists in a variety of compelling and inspiring ways.