This post is part of our new Countdown to Conference (C2C) series. We would love to feature a brief blog post from you too! Visit our main Countdown to Conference page for details!
C2C: Your guide to the #GEAconf2017 Keynote Speakers
by Kate Marston, GEA Social Media Intern
We are delighted to have six amazing keynote speakers presenting four keynote sessions at the 2017 GEA Conference: Generative Feminism(s): working across / within / through borders.
Below we offer a brief overview of our speakers and what is in store for #GEAconf2017!
Professor Kerry Robinson, Western Sydney University
(Day 1 – 10:30 – 12:00)
Schooling, gender and sexuality: Children’s and young people’s narratives in an era of global conservative backlash.
Despite notable gains for feminist, queer and trans politics in Australia, the global expansionism of conservative right-wing politics in recent years has led to a culture war as key institutions see the reestablishment of heteronormative social orders and dualistic conceptions of sexuality and gender. Framed by this unfolding Australian experience, Professor Robinson will discuss several qualitative and quantitative research projects conducted over the past six years: exploring schooling, gender and sexuality with children, young people, parents/carers and educators. She will consider what we are learning from children and young people about gender, gender diversity and sexuality in the early 21st century and how this knowledge is being received in an era of global conservative backlash. Drawing on feminist, trans and queer theory, this keynote will be looking for ways forward offered by generations of feminist thought.
Kerry Robinson is a Professor in Sociology in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology at Western Sydney University, Australia. She is the director of the Sexualities and Genders Research group in the School and her expertise lie in the fields of gender and sexuality studies; childhood; children’s sexual citizenship; diversity and difference; sexuality education; sociology of education; and sociology of knowledge. She has published widely in these areas, including: lead co-author of Growing Up Queer; monograph, Innocence, Knowledge and the construction of childhood: The contradictory relationship between sexuality and censorship in children’s contemporary lives; a co-edited collection Rethinking school violence; and is the co-author of Diversity and Difference in Early Childhood Education: Issues for Theory and Practice.
Dr Iris Van Der Tuin, Utrecht University
(Day 1 – 17:00 – 18:00)
The Generative Curriculum: On the Past, Present and Future of Feminist Teaching and Learning
Re-directing generational logics of feminism away from phallogentricism and simplistic ideas of conflict, Iris Van Der Tuin paves the way for a more complex notion of generationality. In this keynote she will address the generative approach to generational feminism as it reconfigures exchange of women in patriarchal societies, the mother-daughter plot in feminism, and correspondence theories of truth and method: providing a theory and practice for 21st century feminist teaching and learning. Reading generative generational feminism specifically through the growing phenomenon of Liberal Arts & Sciences (LAS) education in Europe, Iris Van Der Tuin explores a developing feminist education for, and of, the future.
Iris van der Tuin is an associate professor in and program director of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Utrecht University (The Netherlands). Trained as a feminist epistemologist, she specializes in gender studies and new materialisms (especially pertaining to humanities scholarship that traverses “the two cultures”). She co-authored New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies with Rick Dolphijn, and edited Gender: Nature for Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks. Her book Generational Feminism: New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach inspired, in part, the theme for #GEAconf2017.
Professor Emma Renold, Cardiff University;
Professor Gabrielle Ivinson, Manchester Metropolitan University;
& Jên Angharad, Future Matters Collective
(Day 2 – 12:30 – 13:30)
Moving with the not-yet: choreographing the political with young people in space, place and time
Extending a long tradition of feminist work on the marginalised position of minoritarian Others (Irigaray, 1984; Braidotti, 2006) and new materialist feminist philosophy (particularly Manning 2012, 2013, 2016), Emma Renold and Gabrielle Ivinson will present aspects of their on-going pARTicipatory research with young people (aged 12 – 18) living in the ex-mining/coal/steel towns of the south Wales valleys. Working with choreographer Jên Angharad they will share a series of dartafacts (Renold 2017) created across a range of research creations and contribute an interactive performance piece that brings to life new materialist feminist research methodologies. The intention is that through creative research practices the team will demonstrate the means by which educational research can transcend conventional boundaries and expectations to put the in-act into enacted activism.
Emma Renold is a Professor of Childhood Studies at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University. Her research explores gendered and sexual subjectivities across diverse institutional sites and public spaces across the young life course. She chairs the Welsh government’s expert advisory group on healthy relationships and recently led the production of Wales’ – and the UK’s – first online toolkit to support young people to raise awareness of gender-based and sexual violence in schools and local communities (in collaboration with Welsh Women’s Aid, NSPCC Cymru and the Children’s Commissioner).
Gabrielle Ivinson is Professor of Education and Community in the Faculty of Education, Manchester Metropolitan University. She is interested in how the specific habits, practices and gender worlds that supported dangerous work in industrial locales can be regenerated as social and educational resources for children and young people today. She leads the BERA Poverty and Policy Commission, which aims to influence and broaden public debate on the role of education to improve the life chances of children & youth living in poverty.
Jên Angharad trained in Dance Theatre and Advanced Performance at the Laban Centre for Movement & Dance, London. Her career began in performance before building a portfolio of work independently as a bilingual choreographer, workshop facilitator and movement director in education, community, theatre and television. She is a member of the Future Matters Collective in Cardiff and collaborates with Cardiff University colleagues and artists on research projects as movement facilitator, choreographer and performer.
Professor Ann Phoenix, Institute of Education, University of London
(Day 3 – 14:40 – 16:00)
Generating feminisms? Negotiating intersectional borders and boundaries over time
The power struggles that result from intersectional differences between women have been central to the generativity of feminisms, fuelling new ways of seeing and shifts in relations between women and new claims to feminist theory. Whilst it can be easy to romanticise these histories, fissures within feminisms in and out of the academy have been intense in some sites and ignored in others over the last few years. At the same time, borders have proliferated as migration, concerns about terrorism and state responses to it have made many citizens contributors to the policing of national borders in their everyday lives (including in the academy).
In this closing keynote, Professor Ann Phoenix will examine some of the ways in which feminisms, through intersectional lenses, are currently generating new ways of seeing and working across borders. This process is often a heated and painful one, where new generations of feminists, multiply positioned in terms of ethnicisation, racialisation, genders and sexualities, find their own ways of taking up affordances from feminisms and resisting exclusionary practices within and outside feminisms. Professor Phoenix will consider the ways in which old issues (e.g. of racialisation, genders and sexuality) are both recursive and take new forms. Her presentations explores how disciplinary practices in the academy serve to (re)produce hierarchical gendered inequalities by shoring up old borders that sometimes exhaust generative energy and examines the psychosocial impact of this in policy, practice and research.
Ann Phoenix is a Professor in Psychosocial Studies based at Thomas Coram Research Unit, Department of Social Sciences, UCL Institute of Education and she is the Principal Investigator of the research network NOVELLA (Narratives of Varied Everyday Lives and Linked Analyses). She has over 200 publications which include work on narratives, theoretical and empirical aspects of social identities, gender, masculinity, youth, intersectionality, racialization, ethnicisation, migration and transnational families. From 2016-7 she is the Erkko Professor at the Helsinki University Collegium for Advanced Studies.
If you are attending conference, let us know on Twitter using the hashtag: #GEAconf2017
