VIDA, an initiative of the Australian Women’s History Network, is a collaborative blog about the research and practice of feminist history, with a specific focus on gender and women’s history.
Our goal is to create an open-access blog that makes knowledge of the history of feminism, in Australia and around the world, accessible, approachable, and inspiring.
Blogs offer a chance to share your research with a public beyond academia. They expose your work to academic colleagues who might not normally access it. VIDA is intended to be an inclusive space to generate discussion and keep members connected with others’ ongoing research pursuits.
Our name – VIDA – is inspired by early-twentieth-century Australian suffragist, social reformer, and politician Vida Goldstein. In Spanish, la vida is the feminine noun for the verb vivir, and so means “life.”
Our logo and banner – designed by Managing Editor Ana Stevenson – is further informed by the efforts of the many individual activists who have organised around causes relating to women, race, gender, and sexuality in Australia and around the world.
VIDA blogs have featured in articles on Huffington Post and The Conversation. Many have been showcased on the University of Exeter’s Imperial & Global Forum, Nursing Clio, History Carnival, and the Down Under Feminists’ Carnival.
Blogs have been republished on Inside Story, Broad Agenda, and the ARC History of Emotions blog. The VIDA “Humanitarianism and Internationalism Series” is also republished on A Seat at the Table: Australian Women in Global Governance, the website for the ARC Laureate Research Program in International History.
In 2017, VIDA was shortlisted as a Semi-Finalist for the iFly Online Achievement Award in the Queensland Young Achiever Awards. Hsu-Ming Teo’s blog, “Love and the land: Early Australian rural romances,” was also selected as the winner of the 2017 Romance Writers of Australia’s Romance Media Award (ROMA).
Acknowledgements
Our thanks to the convenors of the Australian Women’s History Network for their support of this initiative. We appreciate the valuable and ongoing contribution of the authors of blog posts. Thanks also to those who have provided technical assistance to VIDA.
Many of the images used on VIDA blog, including the composite images featured in our banner, are reproduced courtesy of the Creative Commons Attribution of Wikimedia Commons. The provenance of other images will be identified on an individual basis.
Copyright remains with individual authors who grant VIDA a perpetual, world-wide, royalty free and non-exclusive license to use, distribute, reproduce and promote content. For permission to re-publish any VIDA blog post, in whole or in part, please contact the managing editors at auswhn@gmail.com.au