Putting Gender on The

04_0185 GenderStudies Bk_v6 29/7/05 11:02 am Page 1 Acknowledgements Our biggest debts of gratitude are to the We also thank the many postgraduate students Gender Institute’s director, Diane Perrons, of the Gender Institute, both past and present, senior lecturer, Clare Hemmings, and who shared with us their memories. We department manager, Hazel Johnstone, for particularly appreciate those alumni and current initiating this project to mark fifteen years MSc and PhD research students who provided us of history at the Institute. Diane, Clare and with the quotes and personal profiles that appear Hazel got us started by sharing their visions throughout the book. Special thanks to Bettina for the project as well as their views about Kahn for assisting us with the MSc contributions. where the GI has been, what it has evolved into, and what it might become in the People’s memories of the Gender Institute’s history future. They also read many proposals and and their interpretations of its present sometimes drafts and provided excellent comments and vary. This document therefore represents our suggestions. Hazel was infinitely patient with distillation of many individuals’ understandings. us as we probed her memory banks for We consider it a contribution to an ongoing details about everything to do with the GI, dialogue about the Gender Institute’s past, present from names of visiting academics to and future. To that end, we welcome hearing outstanding alumni. In addition to these from those who believe we have omitted or three, the two other current core faculty misrepresented significant elements. members of the Gender Institute – Ros Gill and Anne Phillips – endured multiple email Special thank yous to the LSE’s Sociology inquiries whilst cheerfully offering Department and LSE benefactor Richard Babson information and advice. for funding this project. Although the core staff of the GI is small, Faith Armitage and Carolyn Pedwell through the years countless individuals have been involved in the Institute as staff, supervisors June 2005 and visiting scholars. While we were not successful in contacting all past associate directors and lecturers, those we did reach were uniformly generous and helpful in sharing their memories. The past leaders of the Gender Institute – Sylvia Walby, Henrietta Moore and Anne Phillips – all granted us long interviews. Many other individuals who were essential in creating and developing the GI in the first five years provided us with important information via email. In particular, we’d like to thank Sylvia Chant, Meghnad Desai, Derek Diamond, Fred Halliday, Virginia Morrow, Katherine Rake, Jan Stockdale, and Gail Wilson for responding to our requests for their personal recollections of the GI. 1 04_0185 GenderStudies Bk_v6 29/7/05 11:02 am Page 2 Foreword I am delighted to have this opportunity The Gender Institute now runs five Masters to congratulate the Gender Institute as it courses, a vibrant PhD programme, and a celebrates its fifteenth year at the LSE. dynamic lecture and seminar series featuring Having been the director of the Gender many prominent scholars in gender theory. Institute in its first formal years, from This year, with the addition of the new MSc October 1994 to October 1999, I have had programme in Gender, Development and a particular interest in, and concern for, the Globalisation, the Institute has attracted a record Institute’s development, work and activities. 80 Masters students, hailing from many different Over the past fifteen years, the GI has countries around the world. The Institute’s evolved from a small group of individuals consistent research and teaching around working to initiate a seminar series on development issues has proved to be a main gender issues, to a vital and enterprising unit attraction for many. with an impressive international reputation. I am confident that the Gender Institute will The Gender Institute emerged at LSE in a continue to build on the tremendous successes period of academic innovation. With its explicit that all those involved have worked so hard to multidisciplinary nature, the Institute challenged achieve over the past fifteen years, and I wish the old assumptions which held that teaching and Institute the best of luck in the future. research should be confined in discrete disciplinary blocks. The diverse disciplinary Professor Henrietta backgrounds of many of the scholars involved L Moore in the early days – geography, anthropology and politics to name a few – enabled the Institute to Professor of Social construct a dynamic interdisciplinary framework Anthropology for scholarship and teaching. LSE Deputy Director, It has been exciting to both be a part of, Research and External Relations, and to witness, the tremendous growth and 2002-05 development of the Gender Institute over the Gender Institute Director, years. In the academic year 1994-95, the Institute 1994-99 had 11 MSc students and two PhD students – a respectable number, given its infancy. At that time, we also had nearly a dozen research fellows through one of the Institute’s first major grants: the Human Capital Mobility project. By the time my directorship ended, the Institute was housing approximately 55 scholars, including faculty and research fellows and 45 postgraduate students. 2 04_0185 GenderStudies Bk_v6 29/7/05 11:02 am Page 3 Introduction Through more than fifteen years The story we present here has been of committed, collaborative and constructed through analysis of creative work, the Gender Institute documents in the Institute’s archives, has established itself among the interviews with key people involved leading centres for Gender Studies in its development, conversations in the world. It now attracts with staff, students and alumni, and prominent scholars and students scholarly research on the broader from around the globe, and its history of Gender Studies in the UK alumni go on to pursue a diverse and internationally. In some ways, range of careers in many the ‘herstory’ of the Gender Institute international locations. As the can be told in a straightforward, nerve centre for gender scholarship factual, descriptive way – notable at the London School of Economics dates can be marked; significant and Political Science, the Gender scholars can be identified. It should Institute has succeeded in putting be clearly noted at the outset, issues of gender on the map at the however, that the viewpoints of the School. It has generated the interested parties often diverge. development of an increasing Thus, apart from the ‘bare bones’ of number of courses with a focus the GI’s historical development, there on gender, at both the graduate is plenty of room for disagreement and undergraduate levels. In 2005, about many issues related to the the Gender Institute remains a Institute. For example, people’s leader in gender research and memories of various events, debates pedagogy and an exciting place and decisions rarely coincided for staff, researchers, students perfectly with the accounts we were and visitors alike. able to piece together from the archive material available. There were In Putting Gender on the Map: The also cases where one individual’s LSE Gender Institute’s First Fifteen recollection of a particular event Years, we aim to trace the Gender differed from those of another’s. Institute’s development, beginning with its origins as a pioneering In our account of the Gender seminar series on gender issues in Institute’s emergence and 1990. We move from the efforts of a development, we have endeavored small working group to establish the to weave together different Gender Institute as a centre for perspectives and to include many gender research in the early 1990s, voices. We have had to make to the expansion and evolution of choices about how to present this teaching, degrees and courses in the story, including where to start, what late 1990s, to the tremendous to include (and what to exclude), growth of student numbers at the and how to frame various debates beginning of the millennium and the and discussions. The decisions we lively Institute that stands before us have made in the text will inevitably today. Our narrative, however, does reflect our particular positions as not always follow a linear, authors and PhD research students chronological trajectory. at the GI. 3 04_0185 GenderStudies Bk_v6 29/7/05 11:02 am Page 4 institutional framework. We also provide a short ‘The Gender Institute has been enormously disciplinary history of Gender and Women’s Studies successful in its 15 year history. It has gone in the UK, leading up to the GI’s formal from being a tiny unit, supported primarily by establishment as a unit in 1993. In section 2: individuals with an interest in gender to being a Teaching: Expansion and Evolution, we chart the successful, autonomous unit. It runs five growth of the Institute’s teaching staff and student Masters programmes and has a large number population. Profiles of several outstanding alumni of PhD students. It has put gender on the map provide a more personal view of the within the broader institution of the LSE, and it teaching/learning experience at the GI. We also has had an impact and influence beyond the explore the development of the GI’s five degree LSE that is belied by its relatively small size.’ programmes and its in-house core course, linking Rosalind Gill, Lecturer, Gender Institute the changing content of curriculum with developments in gender theory and practice. In Others involved in the Institute’s history might have section 3: Research and Activities, we examine the chosen to present some aspects differently. We substantive research themes which have guided the hope, however, that we have succeeded in Institute’s research programmes and projects over conveying the vibrancy, diversity and sheer ambition the years. We chart the GI’s conferences, lecture of the Gender Institute throughout its growth, and series and academic visitors, and highlight the in illustrating how much the centre has meant to so fascinating research work conducted by the GI’s many students, staff and visitors who have passed academic staff and a handful of the Institute’s PhD through its doors over the past fifteen years.

Load more