Women's international thought in the twentieth-century anglo-american academy: autobiographical reflection, oral history and scholarly habitus

Dunstan, S. C. (2021) Women's international thought in the twentieth-century anglo-american academy: autobiographical reflection, oral history and scholarly habitus. Gender and History, 33(2), pp. 487-512. (doi: 10.1111/1468-0424.12521)

Abstract

Methodologies of textual and linguistic analysis have long held sway in Anglo-American practices of intellectual history. Such approaches tend to decouple the ideas being traced from the human subject, or scholar, producing the thought. Taking the lead from the rich theorising work done in feminist, gender, race and cultural histories, this article asks what changes in our understanding of intellectual histories of international thought when we connect the lived and bodily realities of the human subjects producing the ideas to the ideas themselves. In so doing, the article makes a case for the importance of fleshing out what the author calls ‘scholarly habitus’ and suggests the potential utility of oral history as a methodology for reconstructing ‘scholarly habitus’. The article will draw upon an oral history archive comprised of twenty interviews conducted with senior women International Relations scholars from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom to flesh out this argument. The article argues that oral history, as a medium for autobiographical practice, can reveal aspects of how gender, race and class shaped the scholarly practice and career trajectories of these women, as well as shed light on the historical dynamics of the discipline of International Relations as a whole.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: Research for this article was carried out with funding from the Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant (RPG-2017-319) Women and the History of International Thought.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Dunstan, Dr Sarah
• Authors: Dunstan, S. C.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities > History
• Journal Name: Gender and History
• Publisher: Wiley
• ISSN: 0953-5233
• ISSN (Online): 1468-0424
• Published Online: 07 March 2021
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
• First Published: First published in Gender and History 33(2):487-512
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the publisher copyright policy