Turning and twisting histories of women’s education: matters of strategy

ABSTRACT

This article discusses established and more recent methodological and theoretical strategies in histories of women’s education. The established approaches to histories of women’s education with which the article begins include networks, sites, technologies of the self and Bourdieusian notions of reproduction. To explore recent approaches that foreground processes and practices, the article then focuses on accounts that trace how gender has been made visible and audible in and through education, and how affect may become durable and thread across a scene, a site or an institution. This is followed by discussion of posthumanist strategies that orient the researcher to how human beings come into relation with one another and with non-human life with consequences for notions of temporality and context. The article ends by calling for dialogue to open up pathways framing the geopolitics of histories of women’s education.     

Two views of women and the bush

Kay Schaffer, Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988.     

Poisoned by the Fluff: Compensation and Litigation for Byssinosis in the Lancashire Cotton Industry

The literature on the history of industrial diseases is scanty, especially for byssinosis – a chronic respiratory illness caused by exposure to cotton dust that was prevalent in Lancashire cotton mills from the early nineteenth century. This article uses government, legal, medical, and trade union records to explore the development of state compensation for byssinosis. This began in 1941, but not until the early 1970s did compensation extend to all affected workers. Even then, dissatisfaction with state benefits for byssinosis ensured a steady stream of common law actions after 1975. Most of these were settled, highlighting the failure of government and industry to control dust and safeguard workers' health. Government aversion to increasing costs in a declining industry was a major factor in the development of an inequitable compensation system, which shifted many of the costs of industrial disease onto cotton workers.     

Institutionalization, Sustainability, and Repeatability of ADVANCE for Institutional Transformation

Principal investigators sow the seeds for successful institutionalization and sustainability of their ADVANCE grants when they make the decision to submit the grant and plan the goals, objectives, and activities underpinning the particular aspects of institutional transformation that their university will pursue within a general framework to advance faculty women to senior and leadership positions. Receiving the National Science Foundation (NSF) funding in a very competitive, peer-reviewed program and the relatively large size of the NSF grants carry considerable prestige. It is the institutional investment in terms of both human and capital resources and commitment on the parts of administrators and faculty to establish, change, and implement policies and practices to support ADVANCE that leverages the NSF support and assures long-term impact of the initiative.