Walking in Women’s Shoes

This article traces feminist affinities across images of shoes as signifiers of women’s precarious mobilities on the screen. Inspired by Catherine Russell’s methodology of parallax historiography, it investigates compelling images of shoes in women’s activist filmmaking from two different time periods and national cinemas. The footwear of Eva from Lois Weber’s Shoes (1916) and Mona from Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985) lends itself to reflection on practices of feminist historiography and a figurative reconfiguration of the flâneuse as a feminist historian who critically revisits knowledge of the past and of the present to set both in motion.

Towards Digital Histories of Women’s Suffrage Movements: A Feminist Historian’s Journey to the World of Digital Humanities

This chapter discusses the various practical, epistemological and methodological issues of importance when a historical scholar with limited digital skills wants to take a step towards learning how to conduct digital analyses. As a feminist historian, the author combines this approach with a discussion of the relation of feminist research and digital humanities. In line with practice in feminist research, she uses a self-reflexive approach and asks how the increase in the understanding of digital methods influences research questions in feminist history. Do digital humanities tools transform the work as feminist historians? How can digital analyses develop the field of gender history in general and the history of feminism in particular? Can a scholar who has limited technological skills engage with an informed and critical discussion with digitised materials? In doing this the chapter provides an inside reflective history of the making of digital history.

On Growing a Journal

In this era of the neo-liberal academy, establishing an academic journal is a labor of love and hope. In this article, I celebrate the dedication and commitment of its many contributors and reflect on the value of the arts and humanities to the mobilities paradigm. I do that from the perspective of a feminist historian from a settler colonial polity in the southern hemisphere, where uneven mobilities and the violence of dispossession continue to shape national life. I consider how a mobilities framework that derived from the northern hemisphere has spoken to the intellectual and political projects that played out in a colonial settler nation in the southern hemisphere.

Webs

This chapter begins with an analysis of the conjoined humans, plants, and animals that “people” Levins Morales’s semi-autobiographical writings, ranging from her best-known early publications to her recent work as a feminist historian and an activist in health and disability communities. Most important for this analysis are the author’s website—an unbounded digital space that enables community and support as well as toxic transmission—and a personal interview conducted by the author wherein Levins Morales discusses her theory (derived from indigenous Puerto Rican epistemology) of ecological permeability. Chapter 3 concludes with a vision of other-than-Humanist ethics that positions Levins Morales’s work alongside feminist New Materialists like Karen Barad and Stacy Alaimo.

From Housewife to Historian

This chapter focuses on the personal, social, and historical contexts that shaped Donna Sinclair’s career as a feminist historian. The story of Sinclair’s trek to the 2013 Prelinger Award took root in a divorce that left the former army wife alone with three small children. Returning to school reshaped her identity, provided purpose, and led to her life’s work as an oral and public historian, educator, and social justice advocate. In this essay, Sinclair engages in the self-scrutiny that oral historians so often ask of their narrators. As recommended by Antonia Castaňeda, she digs into “the silences, gaps, and interstitial spaces” of experience to examine her journey to the Prelinger and beyond.