‘Not everything that the bourgeois world created is bad’: aesthetics and politics in women workers' education

In this paper, I look into the papers of Fannia Cohn, an immigrant labour organizer, who served the Education Department of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) between 1918 and 1962 and became one of its few women vice-presidents. As an internationally recognized figure in the history of workers' education, Cohn left a rich body of labour literature, wherein art is central in the ways she conceptualized, designed and organized women workers' educational programmes and curricula, as well as cultural activities for more than 50 years. For Cohn, however, art and politics were tightly interwoven in what I have called the artpolitics assemblage of women garment workers' life and work. It is entanglements between ethics, aesthetics and politics, considered in the light of the Rancièrian notion of ‘the distribution of the sensible’, that I discuss in this paper.     

Nomadic Subjects: Young black women in Britain

This paper reads the fragmented life stories of four young black women in the UK, at a transitional point of their lives, when they are making decisions about their post-compulsory education. We argue that the notion of nomadism is a useful, albeit not unproblematic, tool to theorize the multifarious ways that these black young women negotiate subject positions, make choices and shape their lives. We further trace how these women are struggling against fixity and unity and attempting to speak and act outside or beyond the positions available within the collectivities to which they belong. Finally, we point out that in travelling around unstable and contradictory subject positions they are sometimes caught up within fears of distortion, and ultimately choose to remain 'at home'. This 'home', however, is rather formless and uncentred and, far from being easily localizable and defined, interrogates ideas and perceptions about territories and borders. It is through this 'new image', that we can perhaps start thinking about 'being at home' in different ways, beyond restrictions and limitations of families, classes, gender groups, races or nations.     

Action as narration/narration as action: reading Maud Gonne’s auto/biographical writings as marginalized knowledges of the historiographical operation

Feminist historians have long argued that women have been absent from history, and recovering their position in the historical discourse has been one of the main projects of academic feminism for the last 40 years. But while women’s marginal position as historical subjects has been recognized and addressed their actual contribution to the historiographical operation is still a grey area that needs further research and exploration. Narratives are at the heart of how women have attempted to write history and it is this marginalized area that I address in this paper by focusing on Maud Gonne’s controversial autobiography, Servant of the Queen, as well as on moments of her correspondence with her life-long friend William Butler Yeats. Gonne’s auto/biographical narratives are read as discursive effects of fierce power relations at play, but are also theorized as recorded processes wherein Gonne as the author of her political story emerges from the margins of knowledge production and actively inserts herself in the discourses of Irish history.     

Truth telling in Foucault and Arendt: parrhesia,the pariah and academics in dark times

In this paper, I consider the problem of truth telling through the notion of parrhesia as developed and explicated in Foucault’s last lectures at the College de France (1982–1983 and 1983–1984) and the figure of the pariah that runs throughout Arendt’s work. In tracing connections and tensions in the way the two thinkers explore questions and dilemmas around the courage to tell the truth in philosophy and politics, I look into the current climate within the UK academia, where there is a lot of ambivalence about whether people mean what they say or say what they mean anymore. In a Foucauldian mode of inquiry, I raise the question: what is the role of the academic when going through ‘dark times’, vis-à-vis questions of truth telling; what are the conditions of possibility for truth telling itself to be recognised as a question or a problem and how can we start mapping the effects of what we as academics do or refrain from doing?     

The Paradox of Being a Woman Teacher

In this article, the author follows genealogical lines of analysis in an attempt to map the different discourses and practices that interweave women's position in education today. Education is theorised as a nexus of created paradoxical spaces, where the female self has attempted to surpass closed boundaries and to question the dichotomy of the feminised private and/or the masculine public. The author also considers the importance of time restrictions upon women's lives and pays attention to the multifarious ways these lives are highly structured by specific space/time regulations. The genealogical mapthat is drawn depicts various positions, where the female self has created parodic unities and temporary coalitions. Finally, in tracing exit points that education has offered women, the author considers some of the implications of feminist theories for the subversion of the various dilemmas and dichotomies the female subject has lived through.