Postgraduate Symposium:
Gender History and the Worlds of Care
Online, all day, 13 October 2021
Organised by the University of Glasgow, Oxford University, Ghent University and Sabanci University
The Symposium is aimed at providing a stimulating and supportive environment for the presentation and discussion of work in progress by PhD students in gender history at the participating departments. Peer exchange as well as feedback by academics are central to the event.
Theme:
The gendered division of care roles, in private settings such as the family as well as in culture and the economy, has formed the object of thriving research in recent years. ‘Care’, as used by historians, involves the everyday practices of responding to the needs of those who are vulnerable, the ideologies and norms framing those practices, and the institutions through which care is organised at the societal level. As many historians have turned their attention to the history of practices, ideologies, and institutions of care, new understandings of the ever-changing and contested nature of care arrangements have emerged, as well as a new emphasis on the latter’s centrality to the economy, social stabilisation, and the gender order.
Gender and the construction of difference in the allocation of care roles are rightly placed at the centre of histories of care. We invite work-in-progress papers by PhD students focusing on any historical time-period and geographical region, and addressing any gender-related aspect of care regimes and practices – including (but not limited to):
- Family formation and gender roles in the family
- Childcare practices and childhood experience in a variety of care settings
- Care for the sick and elderly: practices, institutions, gender roles
- Care, emotions, and affective labour
- Care and welfare in law and institutions
- Care, sexuality, and the erotic
- The boundaries of care and work
- Care systems and social constructions/hierarchies of race and class
- Feminism and the critique of ideologies and systems of care
- The subjectivity of the carer; the subjectivity of the cared-for
Contributing departments:
Centre for Gender, Identity and Subjectivity, Oxford
Centre for Gender History, Glasgow
History, Ghent University
Gender Studies, Sabanci University
LIST OF SPEAKERS
Oxford University:
Leena Din: Community Service, Mutual Support and Care amongst British-Pakistani Women in Middlesbrough and Oldham.
Polly Baynes: Women's work? A Gendered History of Social Work Practice 1889 to 2010'
Isabel Morris: Asian massage work in the UK: social reproduction and care
University of Glasgow:
Anna McEwan: Representations of motherhood and care in East German communist cinema
Eliska Bukujova: Body Servants, Attendants and Lady's Nurses: Patterns and Gendering of Caring in Victorian Advertisements
Rosie Hampton: Emotion, care and solidarity in 1970s-80s Scottish left spaces
Ghent University:
Amal Miri (Moroccan mothers and care in immigrant families in Belgium, 1960s-)
Sabanci University:
Begum Selici (Sexual health care: a gendered analysis of pain and pleasure)
Baris Bilgit: The Gift of Life: Prosocial Surrogacy, Reproductive Justice, and New Kinship
Any questions, please contact
maud.bracke@glasgow.ac.uk