Lavett Ballard, When They See Us (2020) (detail) from cover image of Bonnie G Smith & Nova Robinson (eds), Routledge Global History of Feminism. Courtesy the editors.

A Global History of Feminism? Perspectives from across the Pacific World

The history of feminism is a field that has traditionally been dominated by scholars of Europe and the United States. This webinar, hosted by the University of Melbourne in October 2022, set out to foreground scholarship on this topic from and about Southeast Asia, East Asia and the Pacific. The webinar brought together feminist scholars and historians working on and across the Asia-Pacific region, to consider the challenges and possibilities for writing a global history of feminisms. 

This roundtable grew out of the most recent Routledge Global History of Feminism, an edited collection of thematic and regional works on the history of feminism. 

The panelists, including Sharon Bong (Monash University – Malaysia), Georgina Tuari Stuart (Auckland University of Technology), Louise Edwards (UNSW), Kyungja Jung (UTS), Sally McLaren (UNSW), and Rumi Yusatake (Konan University), shared their work on the history of feminism and contemporary challenges for feminist scholars in their respective regions, and discussed the potential promise and pitfalls of writing regional and global histories vis-a-vis feminist epistemologies and histories rooted in the local. The panel was organised and moderated by Julia Bowes, the new gender history lecturer in SHAPS. 

You can watch the roundtable in the YouTube player below

Lavett Ballard, When They See Us (2020) (detail) from cover image of Bonnie G Smith & Nova Robinson (eds), Routledge Global History of Feminism. Courtesy the editors