{"id":197,"date":"2019-10-02T10:32:12","date_gmt":"2019-10-02T09:32:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/?p=197"},"modified":"2019-10-02T10:32:18","modified_gmt":"2019-10-02T09:32:18","slug":"a-question-of-knowing-thinkers-thought-and-sources-in-the-history-of-womens-international-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/2019\/10\/02\/a-question-of-knowing-thinkers-thought-and-sources-in-the-history-of-womens-international-thought\/","title":{"rendered":"A question of knowing: thinkers, thought and sources in the history of women\u2019s international thought"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Joanna Wood<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Review of the\nworkshop \u2018Women and the History of International Thought\u2019 held at as part of\nthe Early Career Workshops at the EISA Pan-European Conference 2019, Sofia,\nBulgaria<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Sarah Dunstan\nand I first conceived of this workshop, our aim was two-fold: firstly, to\nintellectually and practically engage a network of Early Career Researchers\n(ECRs) working on the area of women and the history of international thought.\nIn an emerging field, such connections are particularly vital as ECRs are less\nlikely to have peers in their own institution or region and connecting with\nsenior academics often involves a significant \u2018leap\u2019 across hierarchical divides.\nHowever, secondly, and far more basically, we wanted put this topic and these\nthinkers at the heart of a major International Studies conference because women and gender are not a new\npresence in international thought, they are constitutive from the beginning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To this end, we\nbrought together scholars from across Europe and beyond to recover and evaluate\nhistorical women\u2019s international thought as well as set the agenda for\nrevisionist histories of International Relations. We also hoped to engage in\ntheorizing the role of gender in the histories of international thought and\nInternational Relations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nfirst panel aimed to recover historical women as thinkers. Thomas Briggs from\nthe University of Connecticut started us off with Vera Micheles Dean – ‘The\ngreat lady of International Relations\u2019, as she was eulogised at her funeral –\nand her forgotten contribution to Foreign Policy Analysis. Tracing the\nbiographical and intellectual journey of Dean from graduate studies to her long\nemployment at the Foreign Policy Association, he illuminated the personal and\nprofessional gendered divisions experienced by women scholars. Reflecting on\nthe legacy of these in the construction of the IR canon, he advocated attending\nto gender as an organising principle of IR, one holding significant and\nproductive discursive power.  I followed\nwith a connected paper on the \u2018Terra Incognitae\u2019  (a term borrowed, in different ways, with\ndifferent meanings, from Anna Julia Cooper and Robert Vitalis) – the neglected\nlocations of international thought. I discussed how following feminist and\nblack feminist historians and taking racially diverse women as your starting\npoint leads to new locations, specifically women\u2019s colleges and historically\nblack colleges and universities (HBCUs), thinkers and types of thought. Using a\ncase study of the Bureau of International Research at Radcliffe and Harvard, I\noffered a tentative, pre-archival research analysis of how the lines of gender,\nrace and class shaped the formation, functioning and forgetting of women\u2019s\ninternational thought in the US academy from 1919-49. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second panel,\non gendering security and diplomacy, led with Dean Cooper-Cunningham of the\nUniversity of Copenhagen on visualising insecurities through close examination\nof posters in and about the women suffrage movement. He argued that we need to\nlook beyond text sources and investigate different types of knowledge\nproduction to fully recover historical women\u2019s international thought and break\nsilences. Showcasing the utility and impact of visual sources when looking at\nsuffragist and suffragette approaches to security and insecurity, war and\npeace, he asked the powerful and searching question: \u2018where is the visual in\nIR?\u2019. Dr Boyd van Dijk of the University of Amsterdam then followed, speaking\non gender and women in the 1949 Geneva Conventions. He revealed how the attempt\nto undo \u2018Nazi extremes\u2019 such as mass forced sterilisation after World War II\nreasserted older sex differences such as pro-natalism that found \u2018fighting\nwomen\u2019 dangerous to world order and the structure of politics. Through the\nexample of Marguerite Frick-Cramer, the first woman to join the committee of\nthe International Red Cross, he intricately reconstructed how gender operated\nin the ICRC and through this, the drafting of the Conventions, highlighting the\nfundamental role of unpaid volunteer female labour.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr Sarah Dunstan\u2019s\npaper on women, scholarly habitus & the canon of international thought\nprovided a starting point in the third panel for broader discussions on\nconstructing the field. Using the rich resource of oral histories conducted\nwith senior women scholars in International Relations, she made a compelling\ncase for why intellectual history needs to take such sources seriously if it is\nto truly understand and capture the contributions of women thinkers. Oral\nhistories can get at the silent experience of the world that shapes the output\nof a scholar that otherwise goes un-noted, especially crucial when dealing with\nthinkers marginalised in traditional approaches to knowledge production,\nintellectual history and canon-formation. This led on to a multi-faceted\ndiscussion on how we \u2018do\u2019 the history of women\u2019s international thought, to\nwhich I\u2019ll return. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The undisputed highlight of the day\ncame with Dr Immi Tallgren from the University of Helsinki, who, having been\nour senior discussant throughout, gave her keynote \u2018Absent or Ignored? Women at\nthe Dawn of the Discipline of International Law\u2019. Giving a nuanced and\nreflexive account of looking for and researching women in the history of\ninternational law, she shared how a book chapter became a four year\ninternational project and the focus shifted from identifying women to questions\nof gender, visibility and silencing. She asked how we can move on in mainstream\ncontemporary scholarship from the question of simply the absence of women to\none of detail, depth and complexity and how we can \u201cconfront the sex and gender\nmarginalisation in intellectual and professional \u2018disciplinary\u2019 histories without\nfalling into essentialism, revisionism or hagiography? How to truly address\nintersectionality?\u201d. The case studies of Katherine B. Fite (US Lawyer at the\nNuremberg Trials) and Rebecca West (reporting on Nuremberg as a journalist)\nprovided a captivating journey into how women worked and gender operated in\ninternational law in the mid 20th Century. However, even more compelling was\nthe reflection on how looking for women and working on this sort of history\nbecomes inherently political, inherently activist – \u201cwriting on women becomes\nan exercise in writing history from below\u201d and asked the question of all of us \u2018is\nbeing on the critical margin of scholarship a result of focusing on women and\ninherent to this?\u2019. This provided both a powerful call to arms and demand for\nreflexivity from all of us and led to a buzzing Q&A. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three key themes\nhad emerged through the day and were crystallised in Immi\u2019s keynote: 1. How do\nwe know and identify women in international thought? 2. How do we identify\nInternational Relations or International Law and their respective scholars,\nparticularly in relation to intellectual production versus practice and the\nhierarchies of knowing and doing? And 3. Which sources do we look at and which\ncount as \u2018thought\u2019? We\u2019ll be continuing to work on and discuss these as we\nbuild our network through online groups and future events. If you\u2019re an ECR and\nwant to be a part of this, please do get in touch! Email me at j.c.wood@sussex.ac.uk<\/a> and I\u2019ll add you to the list. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to end with some\nimportant and well-earned thank yous: thank you to Jef Huysmans and the EISA\nECD committee and group for providing the funding, support and organisation\nthat enabled the workshop to take place. To our hosts,Sofia University,\nand especially Prokop Kolinsky for his exceptional organisation both before and\nduring the event. To our workshop participants Dean, Tom and Boyd, for making\nit an incredibly rich and thought-provoking day. To our fantastic senior\ndiscussant and keynote Immi, who in her engagement, enthusiasm, deeply thought\ncomments and encouragement provided an exceptional model of mentorship and\ncollegiality. And, finally, and most importantly, to my co-organiser Sarah, for\nall her hard work and for agreeing to do this in the first place! Thank you\nall. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Joanna Wood Review of the workshop \u2018Women and the History of International Thought\u2019 held at as part of the Early Career Workshops at the EISA Pan-European Conference 2019, Sofia, Bulgaria When Sarah Dunstan and I first conceived of this…<\/span><\/p>\n

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