Archives, genealogies and narratives in women workers' education

Abstract

In this paper I look back at my research of writing a genealogy of women workers’ education and I map methodological moves and strategies that I have deployed in the process. While there is a rich body of literature around genealogical histories little has been written about a genealogical approach to archival work. It is precisely in the lacuna of how to do archival research from the situated position of a feminist genealogist that I look at three interrelated methodological and epistemological planes: (a) living and re-imagining the archive; (b) working with the possibilities and limitations of archival technologies of the self and (c) considering the visual turn in the era of the digital revolution. While I perceive archival research as a process, I also take the archive as an event, marking discontinuities and ruptures in our modes of analysis and interpretation.