Together with IASH, GENDER.ED presents ‘Rediscovering Feminist Histories’, an event that will be running as part of the Being Human Festival 2021, on Thursday 18 November 2021 at 17.00 GMT.
This hour-long online discussion explores how women’s histories are often forgotten, overlooked or actively suppressed. Bringing together historians, lawyers and literature experts, we will explore questions around who gets remembered, and what traces women have left behind. We will show you how you can start to uncover women’s lives from a variety of unusual sources: novels, photographs, digital archives, legal judgments, storytelling and oral history, and activist practices. Who will you rediscover?
The event will feature:
- Lois Burke (Edinburgh Napier) exploring the importance and connectedness of Scottish women writers of children’s literature, and their child readers.
- Joan Haran (Cardiff) on how stories about feminist activism and theory are continually retold in the effort to motivate further activism.
- Melissa Highton (Edinburgh) on Wikipedia’s ‘women problem’, and the ways the internet acts to uncover (or hide) women’s histories.
- Chloë Kennedy (Edinburgh) imagining how important legal cases might have been decided differently if the judge had adopted a feminist perspective.
The participants’ bite-size provocations will launch the discussion, challenging traditional narratives and opening the audience’s eyes to new ways of finding evidence for female achievement in the past and present. The discussion will then bring in the audience to share their thoughts, and to examine personal objects or heirlooms as a form of ‘family archive’ of women’s history. The event will be followed by an optional Wikimedia editathon on Friday 26 November from 13:00-17:00 (as part of the University of Edinburgh’s Women in Red Wikipedia workshops series), allowing attendees to learn more about addressing gaps in the record.
Free tickets can be reserved at https://rediscovering-feminist-histories.eventbrite.com.
