2017 Symposium
The Australian Women’s History Network Symposium will be held as a stream of the Australian Historical Association Annual conference in 2017.
The AHA conference theme is Entangled Histories and the conference will be held from the 3rd to the 7th July, 2017 in Newcastle.
The theme for the AWHN Symposium is Symbiotic Histories and is convened by Dr Chelsea Barnett, Isobelle Barrett Meyering, James Keating and Sophie Robinson and is on Wednesday 5 July.
Program available here.
The welcome to Symbiotic Histories Symposium is at 10:30am in Newcastle I Room of the City Hall. The latest edition of Lilith will be launched at the welcome. There are two streams of papers during the day and formal session will conclude with a Plenary Session from 5:00-6:30pm on ‘Wild Jill’: Jill Roe and the Reshaping of Australian Women’s Histories. This will be chaired by Dr Tanya Evans (Macquarie University) with panelists Niro Kandasamy (The University of Melbourne) Professor Melanie Oppenheimer (Flinders University), Professor Mary Spongberg (UTS) and Professor Angela Woollacott (ANU).
Symbiotic Histories
For at least forty years, feminist historians in Australia and elsewhere have documented intimate histories, guided by a belief in the personal as political, a desire to challenge grand narratives, traditions and borders, and a commitment to acknowledging the dynamics of intersectionality. Feminist historian Mrinalini Sinha has emphasised the importance of contextualising intimate histories, noting how gendered discourses have a “symbiotic” relationship to local and global histories of dispossession, colonisation and nation building. We see this conference as an opportunity to build on her analysis. If historians are asked to consider how gender has been historically articulated in the local and the transnational – as well as the national – then, much like “entanglements,” we might uncover the underlying connections, contradictions, and interdependencies between and among our subjects. For this symposium we invite speakers – individually or on panels – to contribute papers that speak to symbiotic histories of women and gender. We especially invite papers that explore the potential for symbiotic histories of women and gender.
For more information contact the conveners: Dr Chelsea Barnett, Isobelle Barrett Meyering, James Keating and Sophie Robinson: auswhn@gmail.com