Feminist scholarship and the 'performative university'; a book review of Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship, An Ethnography of Academia by Maria Do Mar Pereira
Vráblíková, Lenka
How do scholars in countries such as Portugal, the US, the UK, or Scandinavia
situate feminist scholarship in the current academia? How is the claim to
scientificity in women’s, gender, and feminist studies (WGFS) produced and
negotiated? And what happens to these emerging fields, and the individuals
inhabiting them, under the accelerated corporatisation of higher education? This
book provides insightful and novel answers to these questions and anticipates future
directions of research on the institutionalisation of feminist scholarship.
The book is based on ethnographic research of academia mainly in Portugal.
During the years of 2008–2009 and 2015–2016, Pereira interviewed 36 WGFS and
non-WGFS academics and conducted participatory observations at national and
international conferences, WGFS associations’ meetings, lectures, and PhD vivas
also in Sweden, the UK, and the US. In her feminist discursive analysis, she focuses
on the question of ‘how academics demarcate the boundaries of “proper”
knowledge, and how WGFS scholarship gets positioned in relation to those
boundaries’ (p. 2).
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