POSTPONED: Enquiring Women - Education, place, space, and constructions of self (DOMUS seminar)

Please note that this seminar has been postponed. 

Members of the Centre for the History of Women’s Education (Winchester) explore women’s use of, and claim to, place and space through the live of artist Rosa Branson and the social practice of ‘walking and talking’ as part of heritage open days. 

With speakers: Dr Sue Anderson-Faithful, Professor Joyce Goodman and Professor Stephanie Spencer from the University of Winchester

As academics we are interested in the lives of women and their formal and informal engagement with education and the construction of self. We are also interested in the physicality of enquiry beyond academia, and the potential that talking as we walk through areas of historical interest offers for a deeper and wider recognition of women’s use of, and claim to, place and space. Our two papers explore these two aspects of our work:

Joyce Goodman’s paper discusses Rosa Branson’s quest to become an artist. It outlines her rejection of her formal art education at Camberwell School of Art and the Slade and her self-education as an artist copying works in the National Gallery. The paper discusses how Arendt’s (1958) notion of natality links with the structuring of Rosa’s biography around art practices and Foucauldian technologies of the self as Rosa sought to become and to practice as an artist.

Sue Anderson-Faithful discusses how participants from a range of academic and non-academic backgrounds engage with the practice of ‘walking and talking’ in her Winchester women’s walk, that is now established as part of Winchester Heritage Open Days project. It highlights the relationship between gender, place and space across historical time. Taking inspiration from the recent ‘turn’ in scholarship that concerns itself with material culture and feminist perspectives on geography (Bartlett 2019; Lee and Ingold 2006; Reading 2015) Anderson-Faithful sees place as palimpsest upon which the physical and mental activity of walking, and walking together, both inscribes memory and elicits stories that have been overlooked or obscured.

References

Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 

Alison Bartlett. "Feminist Heritage Walks: Materialising the Feminist Past in Perth, Australia and Glasgow, UK." Gender, Place & Culture (2019): 1-16. 

Jo Lee and Tim Ingold, “Fieldwork on Foot: Perceiving, Routing, Socializing.” In Locating the Field: Space, Place and Context in Anthropology, Simon Coleman and Peter Collins (eds)  (London: Bloomsbury, 2006): 67–85.  

Anna Reading, “Making Feminist Heritage Work: Gender and Heritage.”  Emma Waterton, Emma and Steve Watson (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Heritage Research (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): 397-413.