Feminist Knowledge In and Beyond the Institution

This dossier on Archiving Feminist and Queer Voices, and the Production of Knowledge comprises a series of short posts from speakers at our roundtable on the topic convened during the visit we hosted for members of UGEN at this event.

By Aideen Quilty

Image: The Archives Roundtable at UoE. Photo by Wannes Dupont.

I'm going to talk specifically about a community university partnership program that I've been director of and involved with for over 20 years. I realise it's important from the conversations I've been having with the UGEN colleagues and Una Europa colleagues  particularly in the context of gender studies and the institutionalisation or deinstitutionalisation of our programmes. It takes a long time to build them up and they can be removed very quickly. So, I'm going to own, I think, with pride, the fact that we're still present and visible and vibrant as a gender studies formally instituted set of programs, at University College Dublin. I realise how unusual that is. So, I am going to talk about that particular community education program. But I want to start by just framing my comments around three challenges. 

The first is a starting kind of position that I take that heterosexism and hetero patriarchal ideologies are the structures that underpin a lot of our social structures, including the legal, medical and educational. And I'm particularly interested in how these play out in higher education institutions. 

The second is that within those higher education institutions, STEM discourses are increasingly dominant and disciplinary hierarchies are increasingly felt on the ground. We see that in the ways that programs can be shut down, or indeed, programs can be initially suggested to be so wonderful that we’ll be mainstreamed but in the move to mainstreaming, you become invisible because of the inevitable fallout of being considered so important that you should be everywhere. But if we're everywhere, there's a question of where are we? Or we can end up being nowhere, actually. And having that disciplinary space in our institutions, we all know is, is really important. 

The third is the increasing presence and impact of anti-gender movements. I was at a conference recently in Athens and people were looking to Ireland—that became me on the day—to speak to how wonderful Ireland was because we of course had marriage equality in 2015 and then we repeal the Eighth Amendment, so we got abortion rights in 2018. And, I was talking about the rise of the right and anti-gender movements in Ireland. And it is definitely the case that that is there. And it's becoming an increasing presence and that's deeply concerning and it's impacting what we're doing both in terms of policy, what the national position looks like. But it also has a real impact on what our classrooms look like and feel like for students. And there is a growing tension as to how those anti-gender movements can invade the sorts of practices that we're engaged in. It's qualitatively different walking in to teach, I'm going to say Macroeconomics 1 than it is going to teach gender, sexuality, social justice – the stakes are different, and the impact on both your students and increasingly staff is a real thing. 

To think a bit now about opportunities: our higher education institutions are increasingly asked to expand their social remit. We know institutions have to pay attention to teaching and research. There's always been that admin piece, but in Ireland there's definitely been a move to harness that kind of social and institutional contribution. I think there's a real potential there. It can be called the third mission—it's called lots of things. The programme that I'm involved in, it was set up by Ailbhe Smyth, who's a wonderful academic, feminist leader, mentor. She set up Gender Studies, and there's no doubt in saying that she went against the grain in doing that. Her disciplinary field had been French Literature. And, you know, the toll that it took to set up gender studies on her professional career has been evident. But she withstood all of that, and she is still a wonderful mentor and leader and an activist in Ireland. But she set up gender studies, what was then women's studies and it was WERRC the Women's Education Research and Resource Centre. I'm mindful of that today because of the importance of this kind of longevity piece. But from the outset, the vision of Gender Studies in UCD – what has become Gender Studies – was teaching, research and outreach. And that outreach piece from the outset was embedded as this third mission, this social aspect – which is a requirement on us feminist academics, that we have a social responsibility, and we need to do something about that. And that outreach program has continued. But again, there is the toll that that takes. So, the community partners are hugely supportive of it, they love the program, we are deeply committed to it in Gender Studies, but the institutional commitment wavers. And sometimes what you need is money actually, and often that's not forthcoming. There's no shortage of desire to keep it going – so, when I say keep it going, what am I talking about? Let me say something about the program pedagogy and partnerships very, very briefly. 

The program responded to a whole set of barriers that women—and it was targeting women in particular, or people who identify as women—deal with including of finance, childcare, transport. And they're the same barriers now, which is so disappointing and depressing to know that at 25 years ago, as they are now, the same barriers exist. And if we're going to make meaningful opportunities available for people in the community, we have to pay attention to those barriers. And there were also institutional barriers around lowering the bar, all these things that we hear, if you bring people in, if you open the doors, if you increase widening participation opportunities, you may be reducing the standards of the university. We all know now that is just not true, that the opposite happens, that a diverse institution is better for everybody, and everybody benefits from that, all students benefit. But it takes a long time for those sorts of positions and mindsets to change. And I'm very proud to be able to say that in UCD, there's now a critical mass of people who deeply, deeply support and are committed to that ethos of widening participation. But that was why the program started. We had women and community who couldn't participate. 

So, the program is shattering the walls of the university, and we are making the program available in the community sector, and for students who wouldn't be able to travel all the time. So, it's part time, and we work collaboratively with our partners. The program doesn't exist without UCD and it absolutely doesn't exist without the partners. We have different roles and responsibilities in that and how we support the program. It's deeply feminist, with critical feminist approaches and engaged pedagogies. We start with the women's experience, we build knowledge bases around it, and we're moving towards active kind of change within the community. For example in one partnership program we teach at a house in a housing estate, we teach in the kitchen, and that kitchen space is deeply, deeply important to that community. The sustained change that's happened over time is all associated with this university program that has deep legitimacy within the community. And for the learners, it's accredited, it's validated, and now we have all sorts of progression pathways for students to go on and take multiple degree programs. 

So why is this important for the archive, that program in the kitchen, the house? It's 25 years going, and we are now engaged in an impact evaluation. And I hadn't actually been thinking about that as having archival potential until I was asked to be on this panel. And then I thought, how could you not have seen that? So, I'm a social scientist, we're engaged in a questionnaire plus focus groups. With past participants, we've done a whole tracking project over those 25 years, and we need it. We need to be able to make visible the knowledge, make visible the learning. But the partners also need it for legitimacy, to build an evidence base. We need it in the institution to be able to continue to make the case for supporting it. But it is about giving voice and capturing that voice as to what these kind of women in the community have done, and such is their success. This House, Ronanstown, is now part of the Women's Collective Ireland (WCI), and this is a network of 17 community partners around the country that are all deeply committed to feminist principles of community education. And this is quite an extraordinary thing. So, they're now looking to us, the University, to say: how can you help us kind of harness the learning? I'm looking to them saying: how collectively can we know and capture what it is that we've been doing over 25 years? And thankfully, I'm sitting on this panel, because I'm not an archivist, but of course, I think about data and data management in my research and with PhD students. I just hadn't been thinking about it more broadly across the work that we do and how we maximise and harness that learning.  

Author Bio

Aideen Quilty is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Social Justice UCD and the Associate Dean of Social Sciences UCD with academic responsibility for all social science undergraduate degrees, certificate and diploma programmes including the largest undergraduate degree programme in UCD, BSc Social Sciences. Quilty was recently appointed to the Royal Irish Academy’s interdisciplinary committee of social sciences and is Director of the nationally recognized Gender Studies Community University Outreach Programme and was both Head of Subject and Director of the MA Gender Studies from 2019-21, responsible for steering the programme and supporting Masters and BSc students through the challenges posed by our COVID-19 global pandemic.