Reconsidering Knowledge

Feminism and the Academy

Edited by Meg Luxton, Mary Jane Mossman

How has feminist thinking shaped what we know? Emerging from the lecture series “Feminist Knowledge Reconsidered: Feminism and the Academy,” held at York University in 2009, Reconsidering Knowledge examines current ideas about feminism in relation to knowledge, education and society, and the future potential for feminist research and teaching in the university context. Connecting early stories of women who defied their exclusion from knowledge creation to contemporary challenges for feminism in universities, this collection assesses how feminist knowledge has influenced domi- nant thinking and transformed teaching and learning. It also focuses on the challenges for feminism as corporatization redefines the role of universities in a global world. The essays reflect on both historical and contemporary themes from a diversity of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, but are united in their exploration of how feminism’s continuing contribution to knowledge remains significant, even fundamental, to the transformation of knowledge in the academy and in our world.

Contents

Contributor Biographies • Introduction (Mary Jane Mossman and Meg Luxton) • Part One: Feminism and the Academy: Revealing the “Other” • Feminism and the Academy: Transforming Knowledge? (Meg Luxton) • Cartographies of Knowledge and Power: Transnational Feminism as Radical Praxis (M. Jacqui Alexander & Chandra Talpade Mohanty) • Sexual Diversity in Cosmopolitan Perspective (Elisabeth Young-Bruehl) • Part Two: Feminism and the Academy: (Re)Engaging the “Knowledge Revolution” • Universities Upside Down: The Impact of the New Knowledge Economy (Margaret Thornton) • The University on-the-Ground: Reflections on the Canadian Experience (Janice Newson) • Part Three: Feminism and the Academy: Remembering History/ Recalling Resistance • Bluestockings and Goddesses: Writing Feminist Cultural History (Ann Shteir) • Feminism, Ecological Thinking and the Legacy of Rachel Carson (Lorraine Code) • References

About the Authors

 Dr. Luxton is a Professor in the School of Social Sciences and the Women’s Studies Programme at Atkinson College, York University. She is Director of the Graduate Programme in Women’s Studies and has published widely, with several highly acclaimed books and articles on the women’s movement, women’s work, paid and unpaid, and relations among work, family and class.

MARY JANE MOSSMAN is a professor of law at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University, and was director of Osgoode’s Institute for Feminist Legal Studies from 2002 to 2010.