Working Group 4

Travelling concepts: space, women, migration

 

REPORT I

Travelling Concepts Meeting

ATGender Conference, Utrecht, Netherlands

Friday, April 8, 2011

The coordinators of Travelling Concepts: ReSisters, Sara Goodman and Mina Karavanta, and the coordinator of Travelling Spaces, Biljana Kasic, who together with Eva Skaerbaek, a member of Travelling Spaces, met in Utrecht to assemble a new group formed by old and new members who gathered to share the history of the group and, in the process of the ATGender Spring conference, reconfigure its epistemological and interdisciplinary overall mission. The meeting started with a history of both groups as they were formed and developed within the activities of ATHENA, the Advanced Thematic Network of Women’s Studies in Europe. Mina Karavanta joined Sara Goodman in Utrecht to design the future of the project drafted by Giovanna Covi in Bruxelles. Goodman and Karavanta drew on the long history of ReSisters and Covi’s drafted project in order to mediate between the past and present of the group, its history and future, in their effort not only to honor the heritage of ReSisters and make a reference to the members who had coordinated and participated in the group with success and were not present in the ATGender conference; but also to represent the shared ground of knowledges, epistemologies, projects, publications and activities of the group as the overall work on which the participants could draw to develop their activities in the present and future.

Sara Goodman and Mina Karavanta took on the task of developing the legacy of the Travelling Concepts Subgroup ReSisters, which had explored feminist pedagogy from the point of view of representation, responsibility and complexity, in ATHENA 2, and of interculturality in Athena 3. They presented a summary of its main projects and publications that promoted the interdisciplinary work of a gender and women’s studies “outside/in” Europe. More specifically, they elaborated on:

The critical retooling of gender studies concepts in TravellingConcepts.net, Clare Hemmings and Ann Kaloski (eds), (York, UK: Raw Nerve Books, http://www.travellingconcepts.net);

The ReSisters’ articulation of a pedagogical and theoretical praxis of “conversation,” an agonistic dialogue centered on the reconfiguration of the concepts of “representation,” “responsibility,” “complexity” and “pedagogy” in the booklet ReSisters in Conversation: Representation, Responsibility, Complexity, Pedagogy (Giovanna Covi, et al. York, UK: Raw Nerve Books, 2006);

The critical analysis of the European politics and policies of interculturality through the shared and contrapuntal methodologies of the interdisciplinary field of gender studies in the book Interculturality and Gender (Joan Anim-Addo, Giovanna Covi & Mina Karavanta, eds. London: Mango Press, 2009).

The pedagogical practice of an interdisciplinary, intercultural and inter-institutional teaching of travelling concepts that ReSisters put into action in 2007-2008: twelve researchers from across Europe and from different institutions (Greece, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the UK) recreated the classroom and gender studies learning and teaching experience in Athens, London and Trento (where in addition to the support of the University of Trento, the City of Trento made collaborative teaching over 5 years and the translation of the results into Italian).

The meeting then proceeded to welcome the new members of both groups, Travelling Concepts: ReSisters and Travelling Spaces, before the two groups decided to hold their own individual meetings. Spaces, Migration and Selves had already been working towards a publication and needed the conference time to finalize and tune their projects.

They welcomed new members who had been working in this area before and had work to contribute. Travelling Concepts: ReSisters and Travelling Spaces spent the rest of Friday and Saturday morning in meetings clarifying their goals and drafting new projects.

Saturday, April 9

Travelling Concepts: ReSisters Participants & Members who have declared their interest to remain in the group and participate in the agreed project:

Giovanna Covi (University of Trento), Sara Goodman (Lund University), Mina Karavanta (National & Kapodistrian University of Athens), Coordinators

The group resumed its meeting on Saturday morning and afternoon to set its immediate and future plans for its activities. We agreed to have a round to introduce ourselves, individual projects, and scholarship that contribute to the epistemological and methodological praxis of “travelling concepts.” Each of us put a concept and project on the table with the intention of creating a provisional cartography of concepts that we would then force into a travelling process in order to destabilize their fields of origin–their “natural habitat”– and in the process imagine, invent, and create new affiliations and connectivities. Our travelling cartography of wrenched from their context concepts affords space to a wide range of terms and epistemologies: community (Karavanta), ReSistering Racism (Goodman), reconfigured cultural spaces (Mulhall), feminist critique of urban practices (Orta Jacinto), voluntary and involuntary migration (Pfaelzer), the “working-class mothers and the moralizing effects of welfare” (Monte), the migrant worker and her culture (Ramil), interculturality as a political and pedagogical practice (Covi), the “signifying minority” and Europe (Anim-Addo).

Our conversation travelled through the liminal sites of cultural, linguistic, historical and socio-political differences and borders and made the effort to imagine the cartography of new connectivities across these differences conscious of the danger of misrepresenting these differences as continuities. Aware of the imperative need to contemplate these concepts from across borders that still remain fixed and the danger of assuming or implying that a critical analysis of these differences annuls the political and social space that demarcates class, gender, racial and ethnic differences, we decided on the following course of action.

Actions for 2011-2012

Organize a Travelling Concepts Panel for the 8th European Feminist Research Conference in Budapest. We agreed to circulate our concept formulations, titles and abstracts (300 words) amongst the members of the group by May 30th and form the panel before the conference deadline for panel proposals (June 30th).

Collaborate with Spaces, Migration, Selves to have a two-day or three-day seminar panel in the Budapest conference. Eva Skaerbaek and Biljana Kasic enthusiastically agreed to organize a joint conference seminar in order to examine the possibilities of a larger project together.

Edit a collection of essays with the provisional title ReSisters in Travelling Concepts: Engendering Keywords. This publication will follow the conference seminar and include old and new members willing to contribute their interdisciplinary work with the care, passion, and grace that has characterized the activities of this group since its beginnings.

Mina Karavanta, National & Kapodistrian University of Athens

(on behalf of Giovanna Covi, University of Trento & Sara Goodman, Lund University)

 

REPORT II

Travelling Spaces Meeting

ATGender Conference, Utrecht, Netherlands

Friday, April 8, 2011

In the joint meeting with Travelling Concepts: ReSisters, Biljana Kasic, the coordinator of Travelling Spaces, which was formed out of the previous subgroup Travelling Selves under the Travelling Concepts umbrella, and Eva Skaerbaek gave a short reflection on Travelling Selves coordinated by Melita Richter Mallabota. Also, most of the members shared the same history of theoretical articulation and connectedness within Travelling Concepts from the very beginning. In this regard two booklets appeared:Common Passion, Different Voices: Reflections on Citizenship and Intersubjectivity (Eva Skaerbaek, coordinator, et al. York, UK: Raw Nerve Books, 2006) and Teaching Subjects in Between:Feminist Politics, Disciplines, Generations (Therese Garstenauer, coordinator, et al. York, UK: Raw Nerve Books, 2006).

In a concise manner they elaborated on:

1.The activity of the working group Travelling Selves who made effort to elucidate the concept of ‘travelling’ and of construction of ‘women’s nomadic identity,’ in its complexity and ambiguity starting from different subjective and professional experiences.

2. The result of Travelling Selves that consists of a various aspects of geographical and cultural displacement, hybridity, contamination, migration, loss, dependency, interdependency of women’s subjects and their perception of the ‘real’ that also create a basis for feminist pedagogy, was published in Athena books series entitled Teaching Subjectivity, Travelling Selves for Feminist Pedagogy (Silvia Caporale Bizzini and Melita Richter Mallabota, eds., Athena series Teaching with Gender, Stockholm/ Utrecht, 2009).

3. The critical articulation of “travelling spaces“ as a core concept for new research work came out of the Lisbon meeting within the workshop Travelling Selves and Feminist Transversalities (22 October 2010 at the Universidade Aberta – CEMRI, Lisbon) along with the promotion of the book Teaching Subjectivity: Travelling Selves for Feminist Pedagogy by prof Ana Gabriela Macedo, University of Minho. Participants of the workshop were: Melita Richter Mallabota, Eva Skærbæk, Silvia Caporale Bizzini, Anabela Galhardo Couto, Biljana Kašić and Theresa Joaquim.

4. The agenda of the work on Travelling Spaces for upcoming period having in mind that the group has already been working towards a publication and needed the conference time to finalize and tune their projects.

The proposed topic addressed a rethinking of the interpretation of spaces in their multiple and complex manifestations (including public-private spaces, exclusion-inclusion, dislocation and spaces located in-between cultures and languages, remembrance and memory, among others), significance of women’s spaces (feminist spaces, spaces of ’intimacy’, spaces of informal talk/public talk, spaces within mainstream, “baule” spaces) and potentiality of the third space.

Saturday, April 9

Biljana Kašić (Centre for Women’s Studies, Zagreb/University of Zadar), coordinator

Travelling Concepts: Travelling Spaces Participants & Members who have declared their interest to remain in the group and participate in the agreed project:

The group explored their own potential contributions as well as “intertextual shelter” as a place for mutual responses within the proposed agenda (the “baule“ became a key metaphor for a travelling spaces exploration and a point of getting our ideas together), discussed agenda planning including the upcoming meeting in Trieste (September 2011) as well as a precise plan for publishing book as a final result (2012). In addition, the panel for Budapest Conference “The Politics of Location Revisited:Gender@2012” will be proposed within the strand 8: “Feminist Legacies, Feminist Futures: Generating Feminisms“ where both Travelling Concepts groups will be present to share their theoretical and methodological projects.

The group resumed its meeting on Saturday morning and afternoon.

Biljana Kasic, Centre for Women’s Studies, Zagreb/University of Zadar