New women, new technologies : the interrelation between gender and technology at the Victorian fin de siècle

This thesis treats the interrelation between gender and technology at the Victorian fin de siècle, focusing on the figure of the New Woman. It aims to offer a reexamination of this figure of early feminism in relation to the technologies and techniques of the time, suggesting the simultaneously abstract and material concept of technology as a way to more fully understand the ‘semi-fictionality’ of the New Woman; her emergence as both a discursive figure in literature and as a set of social practices. Major authors include Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, and H. G. Wells, examined in the larger context of late-Victorian and fin de siècle popular and New Woman fiction. Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical and methodological premises of the thesis. Locating a specific problematic in the ‘semi-fictionality’ of the New Woman, it draws upon wider discussions within gender and feminist theory to consider this central concern in New Woman criticism. Criticising gynocritical assumptions, the chapter offers a way of reading New Woman literature without relying on the gender of the author – taking Grant Allen’s (in)famous New Woman novel The Woman Who Did as a case in point. It concludes by suggesting technology as a way of examining the figure of the New Woman in its historiospecific and material context. Chapter 2 establishes the typewriter as a case in point for examining the interrelation between gender and technology at the fin de siècle. Through reading Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl and Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys, it examines the semantic ambiguity of the term ‘typewriter’ to demonstrate the sexual ambiguity of the New Woman and also the mutual interaction between individual agency and technology. Chapter 3 examines the technology most associated with the New Woman: the safety bicycle. Through reading H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance and Grant Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures, it considers how the social practice of bicycling comes to be associated with concepts of female freedom, problematising the notion of the bicycle as a technology of democratisation. Chapter 4 discusses the figure of the New Woman nurse as a fin de siècle figuration of the Nightingale New Style nurse. Examining the emergence of the clinical hospital, it places the New Woman nurse in a context of medical modernity. Reading Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade as an intervention in a debate on hospital hierarchies, it explores the institutional technology of the hospital in the formation of notions of gender

International education, educational rights and pedagogy:Introduction

With increased globalization, travel and mobility, international student education has become an academically and economically important part of tertiary education around the world. The increased commodification and marketization of higher education complicate the present challenges in ensuring culturally sensitive and competent pedagogies and enabling international students’ educational rights and equal access to opportunities and knowledge. Linking the multifaceted concept of educational rights to international student education and pedagogy, we explore issues related to cultural diversity, safety, vulnerability, welfare, peaceful co-existence in a changing global environment. Opening up further discussions on inclusive, culturally competent and accountable teaching in an unstable and frequently vexed geopolitical space, this introduction argues for an inclusive education that puts learning and social justice at its centre

Intersectionality and dissensus: a negotiation of the feminist classroom

Purpose - The paper aims to examine the potential feminist politics of teaching: is there a clear connection between feminism and teaching, and is there a particular feminist way of teaching? Through notions of engaged political pedagogy (as developed by bell hooks Jacques Ranciére), it proposes an intersectional and dissensual approach to teaching, as a primary way of practising feminist politics within academia. Design/methodology/approach - The paper sets out to explore the possibility of a feminist pedagogy of teaching. Drawing on works by social and feminists theorists as well as by radical pedagogues, it negotiates these various standpoints, finding similarities and differences, in order to formulate ways in which we can more fruitfully conceive of teaching as politics. Findings - The paper proposes that the classroom proves one of the most radical spaces for possibility within academia. Through an engaged, dissensual pedagogy, in which both students and teachers work together in mutual recognition of each other's knowledge, the feminist teacher can enthuse political change both within and outside of the classroom. Originality/value - Teaching is often viewed as a less important part of academic work. This paper, in contrast, proposes the classroom as one of the spaces where we as feminist academics can have the most impact. Providing a theoretical methodology of a potential feminist teaching pedagogy, this paper adds a well-needed exploration of the relation between teaching and feminism, and a defence of teaching as politics