Feminist Readings/Lectures Féministes – A Room For Reading

Feminist Readings/Lectures Féministes – A Room For Reading

Three PhD students from the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies are part of an international network which has recently been awarded funding from the Gender and Education Association.

The Feminist Readings Network provides a space to explore the question of reading with feminist thought, art and pedagogy. The Network came out of Feminist Readings, a set of two postgraduate symposia held in Paris (2015) and Leeds (2016). A team of five PhD researchers ― including Elspeth Mitchell, Lenka Vráblíková and Leandra Koenig-Visagie from the University of Leeds ― established the Network to create further possibilities for international collaboration. This new funding strand from the Gender and Education Association will allow them to develop and extend the Network.

Lenka Vráblíková said of the Network:

“The Feminist Readings Networks is a transnational and multilingual initiative. We are a group of readers, performers, activists, curators, musicians and writers who are also doctoral students based in four different universities, Paris 8, Leeds, Helsinki and the University of South Africa in Pretoria.　

“Reading for us is considered as a collective, political endeavour, far from being a solitary, elitist practice. In order to open up monolingual and hierarchical spaces, there is nothing more essential than working with feminists who have different linguistic competences and habits, who inhabit different spaces, who have different experiences, who have read different texts and know different contexts, and who are therefore able to approach feminist readings from different angles and with different transformations in mind.”

Elspeth Mitchell said of the Gender and Education Association funding award:

“With support from the Gender and Education Association we are able to continue and build on our current activities. This includes developing a website to archive materials from the previous and future symposia and to blog our activities. The website will act as a central hub for other online projects we want to develop related to the network aims and concerns.

“We have already facilitated two international symposia, Lectures Féministes – Feminist Readings in Paris 2015 and Feminist Readings in Leeds 2016. The next one will take place in Helsinki, Finland, in May 2017. After our first network meeting, held Paris in December we are looking forward to building our website and working on new publications together.”

For full information about the Feminist Readings Network, see this recent blog post on the website of the Gender and Education Association.