Becoming Schoolgirls: The ambivalent project of subjectification

Davies, Bronwyn; Dormer, Suzy; Gannon, Sue; Laws, Cath; Rocco, Sharn; Taguchi, Hillevi Lenz; McCann, Helen

doi:10.1080/09540250124848

Cited by 150 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Memory work becomes a way of trying to answer this question. In a project carried out by Bronwyn Davies et al (2001), ''Becoming Schoolgirls'', the group started by discussing different theoretical concepts as a way to inspire and awake memories, and later decided to write memory stories of school experiences that actualize certain concepts.…”

Section: Memory Work As a Feminist Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Memory Work Reconsidered

Jansson

Wendt

Åse

2008

NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research

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In this article we discuss the epistemological status of the knowledge and understandings that a specific way of working with women's experiences-memory workgenerates. This discussion is held in the light of the last decades' feminist debate on the risks and problems inherent in research taking women's experience as a point of departure. We put forward memory work as a fruitful method of working scientifically with experiences, especially when it comes to understanding deeply naturalized power structures such as gender, nation, and sexuality. We show how different interpretative modes and practices in memory work may help us locate ruptures and ambivalences in the already known, and open up for understandings and interpretations that take us beyond the discursively given. However, several epistemological as well as methodological issues need to be addressed in order for memory work to render possible new forms of understanding that reach beyond established discourses and concepts. To avoid the muchdebated risk of essentialism and reproduction of different power structures, we argue that a great deal of reflection is required when elaborating research techniques. It is thereby necessary to carefully design the different steps in the process of memory work. This article shows how different ways of handling methodological problems in memory work-concerning foremost the choice of theme for the memory project, the textual practices used when writing memory stories, and the modes of interpretation employed-are crucial for what kind of analysis is made possible. We also highlight the importance of displacing the research problem at a certain distance from the theme of the project. The concepts of transferring and dislocating the research problem are introduced as a means to elucidate how different types of displacement generate different research results.

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Section: Memory Work As a Feminist Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the ''Becoming Schoolgirls'' project (Davies et al 2001) the memory stories are interpreted with the purpose of reworking and developing already defined theoretical concepts. The results thereby enrich the understanding of certain concepts.…”

Section: Memory Work As a Feminist Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Memory Work Reconsidered

Jansson

Wendt

Åse

2008

NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research

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“…She is produced and projected through the process of mastery. As Davies suggests, this process of mastery is also a process of subjection, a paradox of the double bind (Davies 2001). Agnes lives these conflicting processes as she immerses herself in mathematics: 'The rewards of her toil were so intangible, her mastery so symbolic, her desire so persistently thwarted, she was able to imagine a self outside of her ruminations, to imagine another Agnes made other by the disembodied substance of mathematics'.…”

Section: How Does 'Im/perfect Other' Demonstrate the Ways By Which Mamentioning

confidence: 95%

Mathematics and its other: (dis)locating the feminine

Freitas

2008

Gender and Education

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“…The world cannot be divided into the masterful and the others, since mastery may always slip out of one's grasp (Davies et al 2001). Mastery is accomplished in relation to others who may withdraw or withhold their recognition of an act or an individual as masterful.…”

Section: Collective Biographymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this 'pagan attitude regarding words' (Khlebnikov, as cited in Kristeva 1980, 30), she and her brother recognise in each other the cleverness, and the subversiveness, of their game. Again she is released from the abject position of the dependent one from whom approving adult recognition can be withheld at any time (Davies et al 2001). In a moment of fierce and joyful autonomy from adult recognition, she risks the limits of adult tolerance.…”

Section: Varia Caught Outmentioning

confidence: 99%