Part III - Around the World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2017
Summary
In Women's Liberation and in Women's Studies, both, we were always conscious of being part of a global scholarly community as well as a local polity. Making up my job at Adelaide University allowed me to foster both. International visitors rolled in like waves on an incoming tide, from the United States, Britain, The Philippines, New Zealand, Sweden, Canada, Germany, and that was only those who came to give seminars. We organised conferences and workshops, a major conference every two years, on average, ranging from one in 1986 organised in conjunction with the Humanities Research Centre at ANU, to a workshop on Women's Studies in Asia and the Pacific organised in conjunction with UNESCO in 1991, to another workshop, this one in 1992, in conjunction with the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia on Women and Restructuring: Work and Welfare, and a major conference, the Sixth International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women in 1996 at which we hosted almost 1000 participants from 57 countries. Local participants came from all over Australia, and in Adelaide the Research Centre was involved with the Working Women's Centre, the Women's History Task Force, the government's Tertiary Education Authority, and a conference on Women and Housing. In Chapter Twelve I have a footnote listing all the conferences that the Research Centre for Women's Studies at Adelaide University organised between 1985 and 1996. The reasons for such boasting are that these conferences were an immense amount of administrative, as well as intellectual, work (and such work included applications for funds), and these were times when we undertook that work ourselves — we did not have recourse to professional conference-organisers then, any more than we had access to email (still to reach us).
However, the achievement of which I am still proudest is the establishment of the journal Australian Feminist Studies, which I edited from 1985 until 2005.
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- Dangerous IdeasWomen's Liberation, Women's Studies, Around the World, pp. 229 - 234Publisher: The University of Adelaide PressPrint publication year: 2015