Michaelmas 2019 term card
Call for Papers – Michaelmas Term 2019
Michaelmas 2020 Term Card
Inclusive Pedagogy at the Modern British Studies Conference University of Birmingham 3-5 July 2019
Meg Foster
As the self-proclaimed ‘Glastonbury of conferences’, the Modern British Studies (MBS) conference promised to showcase cutting-edge research, and it certainly did not disappoint. Quite apart from opening proceedings with an early-career researcher panel on precarity in MBS, one of the first plenaries was on ‘Teaching Modern Britain: inclusive pedagogies’. In the academic conference scene, it is rare to find any explicit reference to teaching practice, let alone in a ‘prime time’ spot like a plenary.
What is even rarer is the approach that the panellists took to the discussion. This was not an abstract debate about the curriculum or new classroom technologies (although these topics did come up); this was a discussion from the standpoint of four academic presenters about their own unique experiences, and how to represent, accommodate and translate these diverse perspectives into critical teaching practice. The panel, chaired by Matthew Francis, was composed of Mo Moulton, who spoke as a trans academic, Christienna Fryar as an historian and woman of colour, Lucy Robinson as an academic with an invisible disability and Susan D. Amussen as professor who taught disadvantaged students.
Gender and Sexuality @ ECAS 2019
Holly Ashford
Last week, I attended the European Conference of African Studies Biennial Conference at the University of Edinburgh. It was a spectacular conference: with over 1,400 delegates turning up to take their places in the end, the panels and cultural events were varied, fun and thought provoking in turn. The Conference also highlighted how important the study of gender and sexuality is in African studies. Almost all of the panels I attended interweaved questions of how these categories are, and have been, constructed in African society.
Women in Public Spaces, past and present
Holly Ashford
Whether it’s rape threats for remainers, the constant commentary on Theresa May’s shoes, or the misogyny that seems to follow Dianne Abbott wherever she goes, the public sphere is not a welcoming space for women in 2019. But why are we surprised? When has it ever been? Well, according to a fascinating paper by Cambridge University’s, Harry Mace, given at our workshop last week, there was a brief moment in the 1920s and 30s in which it seemed like French women were going to have an –albeit proportionately limited – place in diplomatic life. It was short-lived. By the 1940s, women were routinely being called back to Paris and demoted. So was the interwar period an anomaly? Why did things change for French women in the public sphere after the Second World War? By exploring these questions, Harry says, we can better understand the challenges that face our public and political establishments today.
Mother, soil, and people: The gendering of Bengali nationalism past and present
Harry Mace
Beginning this term’s Gender and Sexuality workshop, we welcomed Marie Curie Global India fellow of Dublin City University, Proma Ray Chaudhury. Her work focuses on gender and women’s political participation in contemporary India (more explicitly, political parties in West Bengal). A social scientist by training, Chaudhury’s paper began with some theoretical explanations on the gendering of Bengali nationalism. Her talk was a welcomed insight into her doctoral work, namely bringing a South Asian study of the state of Bengal into a field dominated by Western case studies. Her paper set out to examine late nineteenth and early twentieth-century nationalism and sought to explain how these were infused with discourses of gender. But the paper was just as much about contemporary Indian politics as it was of the past. Expecting the paper to focus namely on Bangladesh, the paper was instead about an Indian politician of Bengali descent. We heard how Mamata Banerjee, often referred to as the Didi (the older sister), navigated the gendered and racialised terrain of Bengali nationalism in Indian public life. Banerjee founded the All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) party based in West Bengal. She is now the Chief Minister of the West Bengal state. Issues of caste, gender, sexuality and indeed nationhood infused her performances of public self. Bengali women had to connect with the masses, Chaudhury explained, in a way that male counterparts did not. Banerjee dressed in plain Bengali clothes, which reflected some of the caste and class sensitivities facing politicians. Qualities expected of such a politician were non-attachment to political power: a self-sacrificing, unabashed expression of emotions, that rendered her without career ambition. Concepts of the nation state had to be ‘motherly’ and ‘natural’.
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The making of “unofficial ethngraphies” – Mobeen Hussain
George Severs
As we approach the end of Women’s History Month, the time is more than opportune to reflect on the wonderful contribution which Mobeen Hussain made to the Workshop this term. Hussain, a PhD student in World History at Newnham College, Cambridge took her audience through many of the sources she is using to research her thesis, which examines the intersections of racial politics, gender and beauty in late colonial and immediate post-independence India (1880-1960).
In the paper, Hussain dealt with the genre of travel writing, both as a profession and as a quotidian mode of written communication for some in the early-twentieth century. Four distinct forms of travel writing existed in this period which dealt with women in what can be seen as ‘accounts of the natives’, she contends: that which made no comment on the ‘native’ population of the country in question; those in which only female domestic servants are described or discussed; those which wrote about their Indian acquaintances, usually in passing; and finally, detailed accounts which referred to caste, location, etc. The authors of these sources, the travel writers whose sources made up this part of Hussain’s paper, were socially elite white women, writing back ‘home’ (usually to the metropole) with tales of everyday life overseas in the British Empire.
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Sex, Reproduction and Oral History
Holly Ashford
The Gender and Sexuality History Workshop hosted its last speaker of the term a couple of weeks ago. Roseanna Webster gave a nuanced and intimate view of the fight for reproductive rights in the Spanish barrios. Her paper, entitled: Reproductive Rights in Spain’s Barrios During the 1970s navigated geographical and class divides to explore how birth control reached the neighbourhoods of Spain’s cities in the 1970s. Given my own research on women’s reproductive health in the very different context – Ghana – but in a similar time period, I was very interested to hear Roseanna’s paper!
Roseanna demonstrated the conflict between ideologies for birth control. Marxist inspired, young, urban, feminists sought to lead the sexual revolution by entering neighbourhood spaces and telling barrios women about their rights to sexual and reproductive freedoms. On the other hand, barrios women were keen to organise for birth control, but for the most part on a materialist level. They framed their freedom from giving birth to child after child into conditions of poverty, as an economic matter.
Cambridge Gender and Sexuality History Workshop 