Commentaries on the continued relevance of feminism are often pessimistic. In the United Kingdom it is common to find claims that feminism is 'yesterday's politics' (Coote 2000; Segal 1999; 2004; Toynbee 2003), and young women are part of a 'post-feminist' generation (McRobbie 2008). It is also argued that the continued relevance of academic analyses focused on feminist issues such as, for example, relationships between production and social reproduction, public and private spheres, gendered divisions of labour, and the nature of caring work require a radical rethinking in the context of a new emphasis on difference, diversity and intersectionality (Valentine 2007). One consequence is that feminism today is often seen as the politics of either an earlier time or of other places (see Mohanty 2001; Peters and Wolper 1994, amongst others).
Recently some scholars have begun to ask new questions about the times and spaces of feminism. While they agree that the dominant preoccupations and theoretical approaches of second wave feminism may require rethinking, this does not mean that feminist theory is less relevant. It is argued that feminist theory provides analytical tools to rethink time and space, which in turn transforms key conceptions of matter, subjectivity and politics (Grosz 2005: 172). During the same period geographers have also begun to rethink their core disciplinary concepts of time and space, in part as a response to recent political-economic and cultural changes. For example, Harvey's influential account of globalisation as time-space compression, recent debates about relational space (Massey 2005), the rise of the new mobilities paradigm (Cresswell 2006), and the growing interest in non-linear and multi-directional conceptions of space and time (Marston et al. 2005; Pred 2004) are prompting geographers to ask new questions in new ways.
The aim of this seminar series is draw together feminist and geographical debates to explore what new conceptions of time and space might mean for feminist geographers, in particular, and feminist scholars more generally. We are interested in two dimensions of these debates. First, we are concerned to identify and examine the new times and new spaces being revealed in contemporary feminist and gender-sensitive research, and the ways in which these problematise familiar understandings of gender, sexuality and femininity. For example, economic globalisation, postcolonial processes, new forms of governance, changing forms of community organisation, and new technologies have all reconfigured conventional understandings of relationships between production and social reproduction, men and women, sex and gender, here and there, bodies and matter. Second, we will engage with the new questions that have emerged as scholars have redeployed the analytical tools provided by feminist theory in new domains (Adkins 2004; Gibson-Graham 1996; Lury 2002). What does it mean to rethink the conventional concepts and categories of social science through contemporary feminist theory? What new questions have begun to emerge? What new conceptions of space and time are involved?
The seminar is structured around five thematically focused sessions, each of which identifies and interrogates new times and new spaces in a substantive field. These are:
These will be followed by a sixth synthetic session in which the implications of the seminar series for feminist theory and politics will be explicitly addressed.
