Temporalities, Trajectories and Histories of (Women’s) Education

Description

Invited Keynote Lecture - This keynote used three vignettes from the history of women’s education to discuss the potential of multiple temporalities for historians of education. To analyse the vignettes I drew on a range of writers on time and temporalities.

In the first vignette I used a photograph taken in the school hall at Wycombe High School for Girls in the 1950s and the metronome I used as a child when practising the piano. With this vignette I explored the nature and meaning of multiple temporalities, both linear and indeterminate, and discuss relations between time, space, matter and bodies.

The second vignette moved to the inter-war period and to the Phebe Anna Thorne progressive open-air model school for girls on the Bryn Mawr College campus in the USA. In this vignette I used photographs and documents to focus on multiple temporalities and social and educational change. I explore how temporalities associated with the natural world, as well as durational temporalities and linear temporalities of modernity associated with acceleration, were implicated in fashioning the attentive girl pupil and what newspaper reporting refers to as “Bryn Mawr’s superwomanhood”.

The third vignette moved to the French protectorate of Indochina during the 1930s and to power and multiple temporalities. I discussed the educational work of Suzanne Karpelès, the founding director at Phomn Penh of both the Royal Library the Buddhist Institute. I addressed regimes of historicity that the French used to provide justifications for colonialism and which constituted a play of power in a reversal of indigenous and Buddhist temporalities. I focussed on Karpelès' account of a pagoda school inspection which worked to synchronised temporalities along linear lines in an intercultural mimesis between Khmer modernists and the French administration in the uneven power relations between coloniser and colonised.

To conclude, I argued that the inclusion of elements of temporal indeterminacy alongside analyses of the “stubborn fact” (Whitehead 1985 [1929], p.129) of time as linear abstraction enables historians of education to point to a future yet to be made, with the potential to enrich accounts of social and educational change.

Period	5 Nov 2021
Event title	History of Education Society UK Annual Conference
Event type	Other
Degree of Recognition	International