Teaching Gender with Libraries and Archives

Abstract

This volume invites teachers and students in gender and women’s studies to engage with the library not as an instrument for knowledge, but as a subject and object of knowledge in its own right. The authors and editors had three specific aims. Firstly, to highlight how Gender Studies and the institutions and practices that preserve and disseminate feminist knowledge are historically and systematically intertwined. Secondly, the necessity to reflect on the symbolic meaning and practical institutionalization of libraries and archives as they are undergoing profound transformations under the influence of new (technological) developments; finally, to engage with the question of how these transformations give way to new ways of producing, preserving and disseminating feminist knowledge through practices situated between the force fields of cultural and academic institutions, material and virtual culture, and the collective imaginary.This book is a part of the series Teaching with Gender, European Women’s Studies in International and Interdisciplinary Classrooms, jointly published with ATGENDER, The European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation.