Do 20 Jun 2019 – Sa 22 Jun 2019
Women and the Transregional Circulation of Knowledge, from 1800 to 1950
Convener: Tika Ramadhini, Thiago Pinto Barbosa, Heike Liebau (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient)
Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin
When taken on the move across different regions and across time, knowledge is adapted, translated, and transformed. This exploratory workshop aims at discussing new concepts and approaches to understand knowledge production by women in transregional mobility, considering the complex relations between interconnecting actors, sites, contexts, standpoints and/or situatedness. By inviting its participants to analyze and reflect over historical cases of women who moved transregionally and actively engaged in knowledge practices, this workshop explores the relations between gender, mobility, and processes of circulation and transformation of knowledge.
A historical examination of the role of women and transregional mobility in knowledge practices is especially relevant in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a period globally marked by colonialism and the establishment of modern sciences. Power relations asserted in colonialism influenced the gender and mobility dynamics in both metropoles and colonies, with far-reaching and longstanding structural, racializing and gendering consequences. The period has a strong tie to an increase of knowledge circulation also due to accelerated developments in science and technology, as well as changes in the transnational and transregional movements of objects and of humans, from which women were surely not exempted from.
Thus, the workshop seeks to explore conceptual and methodological issues related to examinations of how gender and mobility shape processes of knowledge transformation that featured women as key actors. Having the proposed historical frame (1800-1950) as a focal point, it opens with the question: How did women produce, or transform, or circulate knowledge in these transregional movements? This main interrogation unfolds further questions for discussion, such as: What role does transregional mobility play in the situatedness of women and of the knowledge they produced? How do gender and transregional mobility shape the positionality of women actors in knowledge practices and what are the implications for their knowledge outcomes? How gendered practices shape knowledge transformation, and what gendering effects are to be perceived in knowledge production and reception? How can we account for the intersecting factors related to gender and mobility and their relation to knowledge practices and outcomes? What concepts and methods are helpful for such examinations?
