Academic work is not always a million miles from show business. One point where they come close is the
visiting lecture. That’s been
a part of my work for the last fifteen years, usually adding lectures at different
institutions to meet the heavy costs of inter-continental travel from Australia.
A week ago I came home from a tour with seven public lectures and five workshops
in three countries. I’ve reported
about particular conferences on this blog, but not really about a tour, so here
goes:
The trip began with a successful 3-day research group
meeting in April at the Fundação Getulio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro. I travelled with Australian colleagues via
Chile, flying over the far south Pacific and then over the magnificent Andes. The meeting was held in a room with an
eat-your-heart-out view of the harbour and the most famous sugarloaf in the
world; we also did some work.
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| Lecture at UERJ: photo courtesy Carmen de Mattos |
The following week I gave a lecture at the State University
of Rio de Janeiro’s impressive centre for research on sexuality and human
rights, CLAM, which I have mentioned on Twitter. This centre’s programme extends across Latin America and
ranges from HIV/AIDS to gender diversity. My talk was called “Transsexual
women’s embodiment: gender, medicine and politics“ and there’s a note about it
here: bit.ly/1yM3LOt .
I then visited the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador,
the first time I have been to Brasil’s legendary north-east. UFBA has one of the pioneering gender
research and teaching programmes in the country, the Centre for Interdisciplinary
Women’s Studies, NEIM.
We did a seminar on research, with
about forty people. The next day I
gave a public lecture “Gender in world perspective: thinking from the global
South”, with sequential translation into Portuguese – difficult, but very
effective. There’s a note about it
here.
In May I reached Europe. First visit was to the University of Bristol’s Graduate
School of Education, which has an innovative Centre for Globalization, Education and Social Futures. I was kindly invited to launch
the School’s new annual lecture series.
I spoke on “Education and the global politics of knowledge”; outside were rain, wind and cold - neoliberal weather! The next morning held a workshop on
methods in gender research, based on the studies currently being done by graduate students
and staff at Bristol. It was
highly participatory and I enjoyed it a lot.
The following week in London I
gave the Annual Lecture for the journal Feminist Theory,
hosted by the Gender Institute at LSE. Feminist Theory has recently published my paper “Meeting at the
Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale” (2015, vol. 16 no. 1, pp. 49-66). I took up the same theme for the
lecture, under the title “Decolonizing Gender, in Theory and Practice”. The LSE social media folk excelled
themselves with a campaign publicizing the event. I saw the Twitter version of
it with the hashtag #LSEConnell – curious to be the subject of a hashtag! About two hundred people came, I was in
good form, I think, and there were tough questions in the Q & A session – so all
went as we hoped. There’s a video
of it online, also an audio recording, and something that was new to me, a
“storify” of the tweets in and after the lecture.
I then leapt aboard the Flying
Scotsman steaming north from King’s Cross station... no, unfortunately that
famous train steams no more, it’s a boring Virgin Corporation intercity express...
and headed for Newcastle.
The University of Newcastle was
holding a Spring School in the humanities, on the theme of “Interiors”. I gave the keynote address, “Border
Protection: Inside and Outside Defended Spaces of the Neoliberal World Order”,
trying to get bearings on the growth of gated communities and border-defence
politics. The next day I conducted
a seminar with graduate students on transsexual embodiment. The Border Protection lecture too has
been tweeted and storified (if that's a word).
Then, after meeting friends in
London and doing just a little retail
therapy, I headed for the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main. The Cornelia Goethe Institute for
Women’s Studies and Research on Gender Relations has been running – indeed is still running – a public lecture
series on the theme “Masculinities”.
Mine was called “Masculinities in the World: Perspectives from the
Global South”, and this too was very well attended, as the picture shows. Before the lecture, I had a workshop
with a masters-level class. They were very well prepared; and instead of being
told what to think, they grilled me
on the subject of masculinity research for nearly two hours. Good stuff!
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| Conference in spring sunshine, courtesy of GSSC |
Then on the admirable DeutscheBahn to Köln, where the University has recently founded a Global South StudiesCentre. I gave the opening keynote
at the Centre’s inaugural conference, on “Transformations in the Global
South”. You will find the
programme here. It was all in English; those questions about the politics of language buzzed around in my head. My talk was called “The Global South and Transformations of
Knowledge”, and discussed decolonial, Southern and postcolonial perspectives on
organized knowledge - see the abstract.
And then: the long flight
home, via Hong Kong, and a long recovery from exhaustion... Was it all worthwhile? I find it hard to judge this kind of
academic travel, against the wear-and-tear, cost (including carbon
cost) and time involved. What I hope to do is focus attention on emerging issues and approaches,
perhaps dramatising them for new audiences – that’s show business again. The ultimate purpose is to create a terrain on which other intellectual workers
can build, in the future. It’s a
fragile project, and the real effects
will be a long time emerging. But
in the short run, I got great satisfaction from this trip, I hope others got something too, and I’m
grateful to all the people who made it happen.