This book highlights the catalytic role of workers’ education in mobilizing political activism and women’s involvement in labour struggles and politics. Through a comprehensive study of the gendered aspects of workers’ education it explores the intellectual lives of women workers. Drawing on the letters and papers of Fannia Mary Cohn, a prominent figure in the US garment industry’s trade union movement, it discusses and further theorizes the importance of gender as an analytical category in the forceful interaction of labour, education and migration histories. The significance of the visual turn in feminist narrative analytics is considered and the book puts forward a compelling case for the contribution of writing working women in the intellectual and cultural life of the twentieth century.

This book explores gendered aspects in the memory of work by looking at auto/biographical narratives and political writings of women workers in the garment industry. The author draws on cutting edge theoretical approaches and insights in memory studies, neo-materialism and discourse analysis, particularly looking at entanglements and intra-actions between places, bodies and objects. Tamboukou aims to enrich our appreciation of the role of women’s labour history in the wider realm of cultural memory, as well as in the politics of women’s work. The book addresses a significant gap in the literature by focusing on the memory of work from a gendered perspective. It also examines the relationship between workspaces and personal spaces: the intimate, intense and often invisible ways through which workers occupy workspaces and populate them with their ideas, emotions, beliefs, habits and everyday practices. The book will be a theoretical and methodological toolbox for students and researchers in the interface of the social sciences and the humanities, as well as a vital resource in women’s labour history. It will be particularly relevant for sociologists, cultural theorists, feminist scholars and social historians.

This book offers an in‐depth historiographical and comparative analysis of prominent theoretical and methodological debates in the field. Across each of the sections, contributors will draw on specific case studies to illustrate the origins, debates and tensions in the field and overview new trends, directions and developments. Each section includes an introduction that provides an overview of the theme and the overall emphasis within the section. In addition, each section has a concluding chapter that offers a critical and comparative analysis of the national case studies presented. As a Handbook, the emphasis is on deeper consideration of key issues rather than a more superficial and broader sweep. The book offers researchers, postgraduate and higher degree students as well as those teaching in this field a definitive text that identifies and debates key historiographical and methodological issues. The intent is to encourage comparative historiographical perspectives of the nominated issues that overview the main theoretical and methodological debates and to propose new directions for the field.

This book follows the stories of forcefully displaced women and raises the question of whether we can still use the figuration of the nomadic subject in feminist theories and politics. This question is examined in the light of the ongoing global crises of mobility and severe border practices. In recounting their stories migrant and refugee women appear in the world as ‘who they are’ — unique and unrepeatable human beings —and not as ‘what they are’ —objectified ‘refugees’, ‘victims’ or ‘stateless subjects’. Women’s stories leave traces of their will to rewrite their exclusion from oppressive regimes, defend their choice of civil and patriarchal disobedience, grasp their passage, claim their right to have rights and affirm their determination for new beginnings. What emerges from the encounter between theoretical abstractions and women’s lived experiences is the need to decolonize feminist theories and make cartographies of mobility assemblages, wherein nomadism is a component of entangled relations and not a category or a figuration of a subject position. These stories that have now been collected, transcribed and analysed; they have created a rich archive of uprooted women’s experiences and have brought forward a wide range of new ideas that will be presented and discussed in the book: Decolonizing feminist theory Mobility assemblages and geographies of nomadism The art of listening to fragmented narratives and the labour of translation Crossing borders and inhabiting borderlands Radical solitude and radical hope Feminist genealogies of labour under conditions of forced displacement The force of political narratives through the figure of Antigone? Education for hope Imagining the non-nomad 4 narrated stories will also be presented in full interwoven in the theoretical discussions of the book, thus opening up a dialogic space between theoretical reflections and diffractions, and narratives of lived experiences.

This collection brings together the work of scholars exploring the history of women in education in a number of different national settings. The contributors include both established scholars who have completed major studies and younger scholars exploring new directions. All of these writers share an engagement in reflection on the process of history writing and consider the impact of recent theoretical debates on their own scholarship. Their work reflects the influence of feminist theory and poststructuralism, but also of postcolonial theory and theories of the educational state. In these essays, writers address such key issues as the nature of historical evidence, the continuing need to uncover the 'hidden histories' of women as teachers, the ways life history narratives can illuminate women's own conceptions of themselves as women and teachers, the material conditions of teaching as work for women, and the way conceptions of gender have shaped women's experiences in relation to the educational state, the family, class, sexuality and race. These feminist writers also explore the ways they are implicated in the very subject of their research - the educated woman who is also an educator.

Drawing on the life histories of three teachers, this book explores their narrative strategies to author themselves as active agents within and against the essentializing discourses of teaching. The complex and contradictory ways in which these women construct themselves as subjects, while simultaneously disrupting the notion of a unitary subject, provide new ways to think about subjectivity, resistance, power and agency.

This updated second edition unpacks the discussions surrounding the finest qualitative methods used in contemporary educational research. Bringing together scholars from around the world, this Handbook offers sophisticated insights into the theories and disciplinary approaches to qualitative study and the processes of data collection, analysis and representation, offering fresh ideas to inspire and re-invigorate researchers in educational research.