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In this paper the author looks at the letters of two renowned women mathematicians and scientists of the Victorian period, Mary Somerville and Ada Lovelace, while also considering the imperceptibility of Sophie Germain, an important French mathematician and philosopher in their epistolary exchanges and philosophical writings. Drawing on the importance of mathematical correspondences and epistolary education in the creation, circulation and dissemination of knowledge, as well as in processes of formal and informal learning, the author argues that Lovelace's and Somerville's letters leave traces of a remarkable genealogical line of women's mentorship and personal relations in the nineteenth century world of British mathematics in the backdrop of contradictory discourses around gender, mathematics, and science education.

In this paper I draw on my experiences of listening to migrant and refugee women's stories of displacement and explore questions around discourses and practices of listening across borders and languages. In doing so, I particularly focus on the materiality of listening, the force of corporeal voices, the rhythms of oral narratives and their effects on understanding and making connections within the web of human relations. Following tracks and traces of a rich body of literature around sounds, voices and texts in narrative analytics and feminist theory, I have turned my attention to aurality and I have suggested "narrative rhythmanalysis" as a mode of understanding and as a method. What I argue is that turning our attention to listening practices as a neglected process in theoretical analysis illuminates the perspective of the storyteller, mobilizes affective forces in the milieu of relational narratives and enacts the materiality of knowledge through the intensity and uniqueness of the corporeal voice. What I finally suggest is that perhaps we should move beyond the imperatives of clarity and transparency in an attempt to be in the world with others. Here the sound of narratives could become a trope that can take us down the path of decolonizing our ways of knowing and understanding.

The bifurcation of nature, taken as a gap between the scientific conception and the subjective experience of the world, is according to Alfred North Whitehead, one of the major epistemic fallacies of modernity. This paper draws on insights from Whitehead's process philosophy to map some analytical trails that the author followed in her work on the archives of women workers' education. There are three themes that have emerged from this archival research decisively challenging the bifurcation of nature: the power of associations, the coexistence of permanence and flux, and "amor mundi," love for the world. In this light, women workers' education emerges as an assemblage of feelings, cognitive understandings, imaginative enactments and creative forces, wherein nature and culture are inextricably entangled.

In this article, I trace lines of materialist pedagogies in the history of women workers' education following feminist interpretations of Spinoza's assemblage of joyful affects. More particularly, I focus on the notions of "laetitia" [joy], "gaudium" [gladness] and "hilaritas" [cheerfulness] as entanglements of joy and trace their expression in practices and discourses inscribed in archival documents that I have reassembled around the theme of women workers' education. My reading of "Ethics" follows a range of feminist thinkers that have engaged with Spinoza's 'ethics of joy' in education and beyond. The article draws on extensive archival work with personal auto/biographical documents and public essays of women workers/educators/writers in Paris and New York that span the period between 1830 and 1950. What I argue is that it is the experience of creative and radical education that has created a platform for workers to re-imagine themselves in the world with others.

Feminist historians have long argued that women have been absent from history, and recovering their position in the historical discourse has been one of the main projects of academic feminism for the last 40 years. But while women's marginal position as historical subjects has been recognized and addressed their actual contribution to the historiographical operation is still a grey area that needs further research and exploration. Narratives are at the heart of how women have attempted to write history and it is this marginalized area that I address in this paper by focusing on Maud Gonne's controversial autobiography, "Servant of the Queen", as well as on moments of her correspondence with her life-long friend William Butler Yeats. Gonne's auto/biographical narratives are read as discursive effects of fierce power relations at play, but are also theorized as recorded processes wherein Gonne as the author of her political story emerges from the margins of knowledge production and actively inserts herself in the discourses of Irish history.

Understanding and action are central themes in Hannah Arendt's thought and an idea that runs throughout her work is that whenever human beings act, they start processes. It is in this light that she saw education as a process whose aim is to make human beings feel at home in the world. Given the centrality of process in understanding action, early on in her work, Arendt reflected and drew upon the ideas of Alfred Whitehead, the philosopher of process. Education in his thought is an art and an adventure whose object should be to enable students to grasp the process of life itself and imagine different worlds. In this light, universities are crucial in creating conditions of possibility for imaginative learning and intellectual adventures. Taking action, process, imagination and adventure as my central ideas, in this paper, I make connections between Arendt and Whitehead in an attempt to think about education within and beyond "dark times".

In this paper, I look into the papers of Fannia Cohn, an immigrant labour organizer, who served the Education Department of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) between 1918 and 1962 and became one of its few women vice-presidents. As an internationally recognized figure in the history of workers' education, Cohn left a rich body of labour literature, wherein art is central in the ways she conceptualized, designed and organized women workers' educational programmes and curricula, as well as cultural activities for more than 50 years. For Cohn, however, art and politics were tightly interwoven in what I have called the "artpolitics assemblage" of women garment workers' life and work. It is entanglements between ethics, aesthetics and politics, considered in the light of the Rancièrian notion of "the distribution of the sensible," that I discuss in this paper.

In August 1922 a young woman was writing a letter to her comrade and colleague in a New York garment shop. The sender was Rose Pesotta, writing from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where she had just completed a summer school for women workers. Short as it is, the letter brings together a cluster of themes, ideas, and practices that were crucial in the way women garment workers shook and changed the world in the first half of the twentieth century in the US and Europe. Taking Pesotta's epistolary trace of her educational experience at Bryn Mawr as the starting point, in this paper the author wants to look into a rather grey area in the field of gender and education: women workers' intellectual lives and their dynamic intervention in the socio-historical and cultural formations of the twentieth century. The author argues that a genealogical approach to women workers' autobiographical narratives unveils significant gaps, silences, and omissions in the cultural histories of the twentieth century, but also problematises and unsettles the writing of labour histories. Moreover, these writings constitute archives of minor knowledges, counter-memories, and radical futurities, and open up new questions and perspectives in socio-historical studies of the memory of work that need to be further explored and theorised.

In this paper, I consider the problem of truth telling through the notion of parrhesia as developed and explicated in Foucault's last lectures at the College de France (1982-1983 and 1983-1984) and the figure of the pariah that runs throughout Arendt's work. In tracing connections and tensions in the way the two thinkers explore questions and dilemmas around the courage to tell the truth in philosophy and politics, I look into the current climate within the UK academia, where there is a lot of ambivalence about whether people mean what they say or say what they mean anymore. In a Foucauldian mode of inquiry, I raise the question: what is the role of the academic when going through "dark times", vis-a-vis questions of truth telling; what are the conditions of possibility for truth telling itself to be recognised as a question or a problem and how can we start mapping the effects of what we as academics do or refrain from doing? (Contains 27 notes.)

In this paper I chart lines of flight in women artist's narratives. In focusing on the complex interrelations between the social milieus of education and art, what I suggest is that they should be analysed as an "assemblage" where power relations and forces of desire are constantly at play in creating conditions of possibility for women to resist, imagine themselves becoming other and for new possibilities in their lives to be actualised. As a novel approach to social ontology the theory of assemblages offers an analytics of social complexity that accounts for open configurations, continuous connections and unstable hierarchies, structures and axes of difference. In reconsidering resistance as immanent in "dispositifs" of power and "assemblages" of desire, what I finally argue is that women artists' narratives contribute to the constitution of minor knowledges and create archives of radical futurity. (Contains 24 notes and 1 figure.)

In this paper I draw on my current research of writing a genealogy of women artists, focusing in particular on the life history of the American working-class artist, May Stevens (1924-). I am particularly interested in how an analysis of the textual and visual narratives in her work, seen in the context of her life history, can intervene in the formation of historical discourses around gender and art education, a grey area that I suggest needs to be further explored. In looking into the interrelation between life histories and the writing of history, I follow Hannah Arendt's conceptualisation of biographies within the political and I highlight the importance of history painting in creating critical communities of remembrance. I argue that this is where gender becomes crucially important: not just as an analytic category as influentially theorised by Joan Scott but as a politically situated position for re-imagining women as historical subjects and thus rewriting history. (Contains 90 footnotes.)

In this paper I explore connections between women, art education and spatial relations drawing on the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of "machinic assemblage" as a useful analytical tool for making sense of the heterogeneity and meshwork of life narratives and their social milieus. In focusing on Mary Bradish Titcomb, a fin-de-siecle Bostonian woman who lived and worked in the interface of education and art, moving in between differentiated series of social, cultural and geographical spaces, I challenge an image of narratives as unified and coherent representations of lives and subjects; at the same time I am pointing to their importance in opening up microsociological analyses of deterritorializations and lines of flight. What I argue is that an attention to space opens up paths for an analytics of becomings, and enables the theorization of open processes, multiplicities and nomadic subjectivities in the field of gender and education. (Contains 1 figure and 12 notes.)

In discussing an unpublished document of educational policy written by Sylvia Pankhurst in 1959 the context of its writing should be considered as well as the political, historical and cultural changes that have occurred between the historical moment of its writing and the conditions of its contemporary reception. Pankhurst's educational policy document is a text that can be read and analysed on many levels, but given the restrictions of the author's response, after an overview of the document, she focuses on three areas: (1) the colonial discourse; (2) the gendering of education; and (3) the role of art. (Contains 1 note.)

In this paper I will attempt to consider emotions in the context of three womens lives, whose passion for education brought them together and then tore them apart along axes of difference defined by race, class and age in apartheid South Africa. I am looking in particular into the correspondence between Lily Moya, Mabel Palmer, and Sibusisiwe Makhanya, published in 1987 by Shula Marks and having since become an almost canonical reading in the "intersectionality" literature. In revisiting this correspondence, I am exploring how culturally differentiated emotions, as inscribed in the three womens epistolary narratives, can open up spaces for "the subject of feminism" to emerge. In this context, what I suggest is that reclaiming emotions within current educational discourses and practices can have significant effects not only on how lives are shaped and subjectivities formed, but also on how we can rethink about what feminism is and what it can do.

Over the last 15 years, feminist theorists have sought to redefine female subjectivity. Amongst a wide range of critical notions of the female self, this paper focuses on what Foucault has defined as heterotopias, 'different places' which disrupt the dominance of the one single 'real' social place, offering shelter to subjects in crisis. I will argue that this Foucauldian notion is a useful tool for the exploration of the multifarious ways that some women educators attempted to define and describe themselves at the turn of the nineteenth century in Greece, particularly focusing on the writings of Alexandra Papadopoulou.

This article looks at the first university-associated colleges in the United Kingdom at the turn of the nineteenth century, and at how the first women students of these colleges lived within the limits of their society, but also beyond them, in yet unrecognised "different social spaces," which Foucault has described as "heterotopias." In Foucault's analyses of space, heterotopias contest the real space in which we live, creating transitional spaces and sheltering subjects in crisis. In this light, the notion of heterotopia becomes instrumental in the analyses of the constitution of the female self in education at the turn of the nineteenth century. The author suggests that in the genealogical analysis of women's colleges as Foucauldian heterotopias, the effects of power were not as important as the subjective capacities that were being developed in women's attempt to resist the power that had made them what they were. Through these technologies of resistance, women began to fashion new forms of subjectivity, always oscillating between the "unbearable lightness and heaviness of being," by adopting unstable positions between them. (Contains 2 notes.)

Examines discourses that interweave women's position in education today, theorizing education as a nexus of created paradoxical spaces, where the female self attempts to surpass closed boundaries, questioning the dichotomy of the feminized private and/or masculine public. Considers the importance of time restrictions upon women's lives. Discusses implications of feminist theories for the subversion of female dilemmas and dichotomies. (SM)