Wednesday 13th June 2018
Access Means It's Not For You: Art and Protest
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Wednesday 23rd May 2018
Girls' Tales by Melissa Wolfe - film screening and discussion (information about the film here on Vimeo).
followed by
Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University: Feminist Flights, Fights, and Failures (Edited by Yvette Taylor and Kinneret Lahad) (publishers info here) -
Book launch reception.
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Wednesday 2nd May 2018
Wednesday 2nd May 2018
Transgender challenges: Identity, equality and community
Prof Sharon Cowan (Edinburgh Law School, University of Edinburgh)
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Wednesday 7th March 2018
'The Scar that stores the Story’: Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts.
Prof Alison Phipps (Education, University of Glasgow)
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Wednesday 7th Feb 2018
Joe Orton, Women and Rape
Dr Emma Parker (English, University of Leicester)
Discussant: Dr Churnjeet Mahn
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Wednesday 31st January 2018
Pacts
Lou Dear (Comparative Literature, University of Glasgow)
Pacts is a short story which draws on the tradition of queer/feminist science fiction in order to consider the future of the university and higher education in Scotland. Lou will adapt the short story form into a performance.
Wednesday 6th December 2017
Class Politics in Glass heels; East London Strippers fighting gentrification
Dr Lisa Mckenzie (Sociology, London School of Economics)
Discussant: Prof Yvette Taylor
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Wednesday 15th November 2017
Teaching Gender: Pedagogy, Practice and Activism
Dr Claire Duncanson, Dr Radhika Govinda, Dr Meryl Kenny (School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh)
This roundtable discussion aims at critically and reflexively engaging with the opportunities and challenges involved in teaching gender in contemporary British Universities. Are feminist classrooms engaging with the raging discourse on decolonising the curriculum in British higher education? How is neoliberalism affecting feminist activism and knowledge production, and are feminist classrooms addressing this issue? Where do we, as feminist academics, stand now on the long-standing debate on interdisciplinarity and engendering of disciplines? And, what place do foundational feminist pedagogical practices of collaborative teaching, safe classrooms, and co-production of knowledge occupy in teaching gender today? These are some of the big questions confronting feminist academics in the UK today. The speakers on this roundtable will share their reflections and experiential narratives on these questions, in an attempt to facilitate a wider dialogue on them with the audience.
Discussant: Dr Maddie Breeze
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Wednesday 27th September 2017
‘Just a big sexy joke’? Seriousness in Women’s Roller Derby
Dr Maddie Breeze (Chancellor's Fellow in the School of Education, University of Strathclyde) will be discussing her book Seriousness in Women's Roller Derby (Phillip Abrams Memorial Prize, 2016).
Departing from bodies of work on sport and gender, feminist sport sociology, and theories of institutionalization and professionalization, I explore how participants in women’s roller derby pursued ‘serious recognition’ for themselves and their sport. Roller derby is an emergent full contact team sport; self-organized on a not-for-profit, do-it-yourself model it developed as a women’s sport outside sports institutions and thus occupied an ambivalent and gendered position relative to a broader cultural field of sport, where women’s struggles for sporting legitimacy are well rehearsed in the literature. Existing research interprets roller derby as uniquely positioned, particularly conductive to gender subversion and to challenging the prevailing hegemonic masculinity of contact sport. Despite such distinctiveness, and skaters’ initially ambivalent relationship to ‘sport’, research participants increasingly claimed roller derby’s similarity to other sports, become concerned with its recognition as a ‘real, legitimate sport’ and orientated their practice towards getting taken seriously and being included in established sports institutions. The research developed a continuum of ‘insider’ ethnographic methods (including in-depth interviews, a collaborative film-making project, participant observation, auto-ethnography) embedded in five years of participation in one roller derby league of approximately 100 members. The paper responds to a broad question, ‘how is getting taken seriously negotiated in practice?’ and documents how skaters deliberately, collaboratively, and reflexively re-worked their representational and organizational practices so that roller derby became more recognizable as a ‘real, serious, legitimate, sport’. The analysis focuses on moments when participants’ claims for serious recognition refuse and rework the gendered terms of such a recognition, arguing that a sociological analysis of seriousness is crucial to understanding mid-levels of social action, between polarized extremes of voluntarism and determinism, the ambivalence of ‘being included’ in processes of institutionalization and professionalization, and gendered social change in sport.
Discussant: Dr Catherine Eschle
