Maria Tamboukou

Re-imagining the narratable subject

In this article I problematize sequence as a necessary condition for defining and making sense of narratives and argue that it is to the consideration of process that the interest in narrative research should shift. Process as an organizing plane focuses not on what stories are but on what they do and how their meaning is ceaselessly deferred, breaching the narratological conventions of coherence and closure. Drawing on my work with Gwen Johns letters, I trace three methodological movements in narrative analytics: a) creating an archive of stories as multiplicities of meanings, b) following the emergence of the narratable subject, and c) making narrative connections in the political project of re-imagining the subject of feminism.

Machinic assemblages: women, art education and space

In this paper I explore connections between women, art education and spatial relations drawing on the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of machinic assemblage as a useful analytical tool for making sense of the heterogeneity and meshwork of life narratives and their social milieus. In focusing on Mary Bradish Titcomb, a fin-de-siècle Bostonian woman who lived and worked in the interface of education and art, moving in between differentiated series of social, cultural and geographical spaces, I challenge an image of narratives as unified and coherent representations of lives and subjects; at the same time I am pointing to their importance in opening up microsociological analyses of deterritorializations and lines of flight. What I argue is that an attention to space opens up paths for an analytics of becomings, and enables the theorization of open processes, multiplicities and nomadic subjectivities in the field of gender and education.

Of Other Spaces: Women's colleges at the turn of the nineteenth century in the UK

This article explores the first British university-associated womens colleges at the turn of the nineteenth century. Drawing on Foucault, the article looks into the dualistic opposition between private and public, as well as womens attempts to transcend this dichotomy. In theorising womens colleges as Foucauldian heterotopias, spaces in the interstices of power relations and dominant social structures, the author focuses on the interplay of contradicting discourses and strong power relations within these womens colleges. In this light, the author considers the ways women resisted, negotiated, but also compromised in their attempt to shape their lives and invent new ways of being in the world.

Truth Telling in Foucault and Arendt: Parrhesia, the Pariah and Academics in Dark Times.

In this paper, I consider the problem of truth telling through the notion of parrhesia as developed and explicated in Foucault’s last lectures at the College de France (1982–1983 and 1983–1984) and the figure of the pariah that runs throughout Arendt’s work. In tracing connections and tensions in the way the two thinkers explore questions and dilemmas around the courage to tell the truth in philosophy and politics, I look into the current climate within the UK academia, where there is a lot of ambivalence about whether people mean what they say or say what they mean anymore. In a Foucauldian mode of inquiry, I raise the question: what is the role of the academic when going through ‘dark times’, vis-à-vis questions of truth telling; what are the conditions of possibility for truth telling itself to be recognised as a question or a problem and how can we start mapping the effects of what we as academics do or refrain from doing?

Spacing Herself: Women in education

This article is concerned with the problematic status of the female self, seen from the perspective of women in education. Studying womens autobiographical writings, the author uses a genealogical approach to interrogate the historical and cultural conditions of the construction of the female self. The article looks specifically at those practices women have used to act upon themselves and create a lifestyle of their own, technologies of the female self. Space is important in womens attempts for self-assertion, and the explorations of this article focus on the ways women in education have been striving to negotiate space of their own, within and beyond gendered social structures and dominant discourses of womanhood.

Charting cartographies of resistance: lines of flight in women artists’ narratives

In this paper I chart lines of flight in women artist’s narratives. In focusing on the complex interrelations between the social milieus of education and art, what I suggest is that they should be analysed as an assemblage where power relations and forces of desire are constantly at play in creating conditions of possibility for women to resist, imagine themselves becoming other and for new possibilities in their lives to be actualised. As a novel approach to social ontology the theory of assemblages offers an analytics of social complexity that accounts for open configurations, continuous connections and unstable hierarchies, structures and axes of difference. In reconsidering resistance as immanent in dispositifs of power and assemblages of desire, what I finally argue is that women artists’ narratives contribute to the constitution of minor knowledges and create archives of radical futurity.

Archival research: unravelling space/time/matter entanglements and fragments

In recent years, archival research in the social sciences is emerging as a vibrant field of qualitative research, with contributions from a range of disciplinary fields, epistemological standpoints, theoretical insights and methodological approaches. In this article, I explore archival research strategies in life-history research, drawing on my experience of working at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas at Austin, reading the letters of Dora Carrington (1893–1932), an English painter, who lived and worked in the peripheries of the Bloomsbury group. The archive in my analysis is theorized as a spatial and discursive apparatus of experimentation, whose configuration has an impact on the type of data and the kind of knowledges that will derive from it. Drawing on neo-materialist approaches in feminist science studies, what I suggest is that the researcher’s questions, interpretations, theoretical insights and analytical tropes emerge as intra-actions between space/time/matter relations and forces within the archive.

Educating the seamstress: studying and writing the memory of work

In this paper I excavate the memory of work by looking into institutional histories, discourses and ideologies revolving around women workers’ educational experiences, cultural lives and political activities in the first half of the twentieth century in the US. In doing this I sketch Rose Pesotta’s pen-portrait, drawing on her autobiographical narratives. As a migrant garment worker, an anarchist trade union leader and one of the few women vice-presidents in the history of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), Pesotta emerges as a narrative persona, whose writings throw light on a rather neglected area in the field of gender studies: women’s memory of work and their contribution to the cultural formations of the twentieth century. In analysing Pesotta’s autobiographical writings in the context of their geographies and times, I deploy Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of narratives as tangible traces of the contingency of action and the unpredictability of the human condition, constitutive of politics and the discourse of History.

Power, desire and emotions in education: revisiting the epistolary narratives of three women in apartheid South Africa

In this paper I will attempt to consider emotions in the context of three women’s lives, whose passion for education brought them together and then tore them apart along axes of difference defined by race, class and age in apartheid South Africa. I am looking in particular into the correspondence between Lily Moya, Mabel Palmer, and Sibusisiwe Makhanya, published in 1987 by Shula Marks and having since become an almost canonical reading in the ‘intersectionality’ literature. In revisiting this correspondence, I am exploring how culturally differentiated emotions, as inscribed in the three women’s epistolary narratives, can open up spaces for the subject of feminism to emerge. In this context, what I suggest is that reclaiming emotions within current educational discourses and practices can have significant effects not only on how lives are shaped and subjectivities formed, but also on how we can rethink about what feminism is and what it can do.

Interfaces in narrative research: letters as technologies of the self and as traces of social forces

In this article I explore the use of letters in narrative research in the social sciences. Taking Gwen John’s love letters to Auguste Rodin as an exemplar of epistolary analysis, I raise questions around the ontological and epistemological nature of epistolary narratives, particularly focusing on openness as a force generating meaning, challenging conventions in classical narratology and destabilizing discourses around the constitution of the social and the subject. Further drawing on Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality, I propose an analysis of epistolary narratives along the axes of subject-addressee and text-context. In this light I trace connections between ‘real life letters’ and the genre of the amorous epistolary novel, highlighting the need for interdisciplinary approaches in the analysis of letters in narrative research.