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Travelling Concepts in Feminist Pedagogy: Travelling Concepts in Feminist Pedagogy: European Perspectives is one of the projects currently taking place under the umbrella of Athena, which is a Socrates Thematic Network Project bringing together over 100 Women’s and Gender Studies programmes, institutes and documentation centres across Europe. www.athena2.org |
Series Preface The twenty-four partners working within Travelling Concepts have come together in the shared desire to track the movement of key feminist ideas across the geographical, political and cultural complexity that is contemporary Europe. Th e partners in Travelling Concepts come from fourteen diff erent European countries, and are housed within a range of disciplines or interdisciplinary contexts. Some of us work within Gender or Women’s Studies departments, centres or institutes, while others negotiate the specifi c challenges of feminist research and pedagogy from within ‘home’ disciplines. Some of us work centrally within academic inquiry, while others straddle academic and activist interests, or teach within a broader educational fi eld, such as adult education. Th ese diff ering contexts invariably produce diff erent intellectual and political agendas within the group, yet there are a number of points of commonality that we have been able to identify, and the diff erences have also been productive arenas of inquiry in their own right. Intellectually and politically, thinking about travelling concepts in feminist pedagogy means foregrounding questions of exclusion, power and silence, among us and in Europe more generally. Th is work has to attend not only to racism and heterosexism as well as sexism, but also to the specifi cities of whose movements are constrained and curtailed, whose left more open. Within the work of Travelling Concepts West/East barriers proved diffi cult to overcome, as did presumptions based on generational diff erences, and silences around whiteness. We have been concerned to make sure that the work we produce refl ects directly on these issues and is an invested, politically and intellectually charged map of conceptual travel, one in which we are all staked and located. One of the ways we hope to develop broader dialogue is through this book series. Each of the four publications addresses a cluster of key concepts and each has been written by a diff erent group of feminist academics from diff erent European countries and disciplinary backgrounds. We look forward to further discussion and invite you to our participatory web site: www.travellingconcepts.net |