The Centre for Narrative Research in the Social Sciences

Click here to
Return to Abstract Index

Abstracts - Prof. M. Tamboukou

for full access to some of the papers, please see:

research open acces repository (roar @uel): http://dspace.uel.ac.uk/jspui/browse?type=author&value=Tamboukou,%20Maria

(2011) Interfaces in narrative research: letters as technologies of the self and as traces of social forces. Qualitative Research, 11 (5), 625-641.

In this article I explore the use of letters in narrative research in the social sciences. Taking Gwen John’s love letters to Auguste Rodin as an exemplar of epistolary analysis, I raise questions around the ontological and epistemological nature of epistolary narratives, particularly focusing on openness as a force generating meaning, challenging conventions in classical narratology and destabilizing discourses around the constitution of the social and the subject. Further drawing on Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality, I propose an analysis of epistolary narratives along the axes of subject-addressee and text-context. In this light I trace connections between ‘real life letters’ and the genre of the amorous epistolary novel, highlighting the need for interdisciplinary approaches in the analysis of letters in narrative research.

(2011) ‘Rethinking the Private Hypothesis: Epistolary Topographies in Carrington’s Letters’. Emotion, Space and Society, 4 (1), 25-34.

In this paper I look into the letters of Dora Carrington, a British artist who lived and worked in the first half on the 20th century in the UK. I am particularly interested in her life-long interest in decorating private spaces and making delightful illustrations of them in her letters. Carrington’s longlife interest in turning lived spaces into works of art went hand in hand with her overall disillusionment with her paintings. The paper discusses the problem of why a young woman artist in the peripheries of the Bloomsbury group had difficulties in devoting herself to her art. This problem I argue has to be considered within what drawing on Foucault I have called the private hypothesis, the long held argument that the private has been socially constructed and experienced as ’a space’ for women. My argument is that for Carrington as for many of her contemporaries it was not the access to the public but the negotiation of solitude and privacy that emerges as a problem. Carrington’s love and passion for private spaces and her epistolary topographies are expressions of spatial technologies of the female self: an artistic intervention in reclaiming solitude and privacy and in reinventing herself.

(2011) ‘Archive Pleasures or Whose Time Is It?’ in Forum: Qualitative Research, special issue on Qualitative Archives and Biographical Research. 

In this article, I draw on my experience of doing archival research at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas at Austin and at the archives of the Rodin Museum in Paris. Reflecting on my experience of reading Dora CARRINGTON's and Gwen JOHN's letters, I address the problem of how a researcher makes specific choices while working in the archive: choosing what to see, what to note and even more what to transcribe. These are questions that relate to wider issues of how the researcher can oscillate between pathos and distance and create a transitional space that can accommodate both her involvement and her need for detachment and reflection. What has further emerged from my work in the archives is what I have theorized as heterotemporalities, space/time blocks where women's past is so forcefully contracted in my perception of the present that it becomes a vital part of my actuality as a feminist researcher. I therefore discuss how my experience of working in the archives has created conditions of possibility for transgressing the constraints of the present and has facilitated leaps into open and radical futures, constituting chronotopes of the feminist imaginary.

(2010) Charting Cartographies of Resistance: Line of Flight in Women Artists’ Narratives. Gender and Education, 22 (6), 679-696.

In this paper I chart lines of flight in women artist’s narratives. In focusing on the complex interrelations between the social milieus of education and art, what I suggest is that they should be analysed as an assemblage where power relations and forces of desire are constantly at play in creating conditions of possibility for women to resist, imagine themselves becoming other and for new possibilities in their lives to be actualised. As a novel approach to social ontology the theory of assemblages offers an analytics of social complexity that accounts for open configurations, continuous connections and unstable hierarchies, structures and axes of difference. In reconsidering resistance as immanent in dispositifs of power and assemblages of desire, what I finally argue is that women artists’ narratives contribute to the constitution of minor knowledges and create archives of radical futurity.

(2010) ‘Relational Narratives: Autobiography and the Portrait’. Women Studies International Forum, 33, 170-179.

In Cavarero's (2000) philosophical conceptualization of the narratable self, narration, both biographical and autobiographical, is a political act in its capacity to expose the fragile uniqueness of the self in its constitutive relation with others. Drawing on the notions of the narratable self and the relational character of stories, in this paper I am sketching out a genealogy of relating narratives by focusing on an early twentieth century document of life: Rosa Bonheur's auto/biography written by her companion Anna Klumpke. This rare blend of biography and autobiography brings forward in a unique way what Cavarero has defined as the desire of the narratable self to listen to her story being told by others. It further highlights the political and ethical responsibility of the listener to retell and rewrite the story disclosed to her. What I suggest is that there is an urgent need for narrative driven researchers not only to bend over the timely necessity of listening to stories being told by others, but also to problematize their listening and dig deeper into the political and ethical effects of the stories they write and tell.

(2010) 'Working With Stories as Multiplicities, Opening up the Black Box of the Archive. Life Writing, 7 (1),  19-33.

This paper opens up a dialogue between narrative researchers working within and between history and the social sciences. Following Israel's (this issue) account of how narratives of lives are useful subjects for historical analysis, I consider issues arising from the social sciences, particularly focusing on questions that destabilise narratological conventions around sequence, closure and agency. In agreement with Israel, I suggest that narrative research as the art of the archive foregrounds the importance of partial truths in life-writing research, offers rich knowledges and invokes intense intellectual pleasures. But also the subject in my analysis seems to transgress the discursive limitations of her textuality, foregrounding the salience of the political in narrative research. In its capacity to help shape historical and auto/biographical writings, narrativity emerges as an immensely rich way of opening up an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. However, the narratological canon also needs to be continually problematised.

Keywords: the archive; narrativity; narratological canon; the subject; feminist genealogical approach

 

(2010) 'Narratives from Within: an Arendtian Approach to Life Histories and the Writing of History.', Journal of Educational Administration and History, 42:2, 115-131.

In this paper I draw on my current research of writing a genealogy of women artists, focusing in particular on the life history of the American working-class artist, May Stevens (1924-). I am particularly interested in how an analysis of the textual and visual narratives in her work, seen in the context of her life history, can intervene in the formation of historical discourses around gender and art education, a grey area that I suggest needs to be further explored. In looking into the interrelation between life histories and the writing of history, I follow Hannah Arendt's conceptualisation of biographies within the political and I highlight the importance of history painting in creating critical communities of remembrance. I argue that this is where gender becomes crucially important: not just as an analytic category as influentially theorised by Joan Scott but as a politically situated position for re-imagining women as historical subjects and thus rewriting history.

Keywords: Arendt; art education; life histories; visual narratives; women artists

 

(2010) ‘Rethinking the Private Hypothesis: Epistolary Topographies in Carrington’s Letters’. Emotion, Space and Society. (in press, published on line, July 2010)

In this paper I look into the letters of Dora Carrington, a British artist who lived and worked in the first half on the 20th century in the UK. I am particularly interested in her life-long interest in decorating private spaces and making delightful illustrations of them in her letters. Carrington’s longlife interest in turning lived spaces into works of art went hand in hand with her overall disillusionment with her paintings. The paper discusses the problem of why a young woman artist in the peripheries of the Bloomsbury group had difficulties in devoting herself to her art. This problem I argue has to be considered within what drawing on Foucault I have called the private hypothesis, the long held argument that the private has been socially constructed and experienced as ’a space’ for women. My argument is that for Carrington as for many of her contemporaries it was not the access to the public but the negotiation of solitude and privacy that emerges as a problem. Carrington’s love and passion for private spaces and her epistolary topographies are expressions of spatial technologies of the female self: an artistic intervention in reclaiming solitude and privacy and in reinventing herself.

Keywords: Carrington; Epistolary topographies; Letters; Private hypothesis; Spatial technologies; Women artists

 

(2010) Charting Cartographies of Resistance: Line of Flight in Women Artists’ Narratives. Gender and Education, 22 (6), (in press).

Abstract:  In this paper I chart lines of flight in women artist’s narratives. In focusing on the complex interrelations between the social milieus of education and art, what I suggest is that they should be analysed as an assemblage where power relations and forces of desire are constantly at play in creating conditions of possibility for women to resist, imagine themselves becoming other and for new possibilities in their lives to be actualized. As a novel approach to social ontology the theory of assemblages offers and analytics of social complexity that accounts for open configurations, continuous connections and unstable hierarchies, structures and axes of difference.  In reconsidering resistance as immanent in dispositifs of power and assemblages of desire, what I finally argue is that women artists narratives contribute to the constitution of minor knowledges and create archives of radical futurity. 

(2009) ‘Leaving the self, Nomadic passages in the memoir of a woman artist. Australian Feminist Studies, 24:61, 307-324.

In this paper I am following nomadic passages in the memoir of Sofia Laskaridou, a Greek woman artist. I am interested into how her dislocation from familiar places and spaces in the beginning of the twentieth century opened up unforeseen territories for her self to be constituted as a travel logbook, a chart tracing paths of becoming. As a writer and painter of her own modernity, Laskaridou reconstitutes herself in retracing her paths in the cities she lived as a young art student. However in writing herself in space, she also rewrites the city, offering insights in the experience of the spaces of modernity from a range of marginalised subject positions, in terms of gender and geography. In observing modern life within the discourse of the aesthetic and the limitations of her own time, class, culture and geographies, Laskaridou’s memoir becomes a site of contestation and her autobiographical map rather chaotic. What I will argue is that as she moves on, she leaves herself behind, continuously becoming-other as she creates real-and-imaginary connections with the spaces she temporarily inhabits. In this light, nomadism becomes an effective conceptual tool for making cartographies of gendered spatial practices in becoming a woman and an artist.

(2008) ‘Visual silences, nomadic narratives’. In Auto/biography Yearbook. Vol.II, pp.1-20.

Abstract:

In this paper I look into letters and paintings of Gwen John’s, an expatriate Welsh artist who lived and worked in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century. John’s epistolary narratives and paintings are placed within a conceptualization of time as duration, a continuum where past, present and future coexist and wherein linear sequentialities are broken. In this light, untimely events emerge, narrative subjectivities are dispersed and forces of narratability are released. What I argue is that John’s letters and paintings create a narrative plane for visual silences and nomadic narratives to be explored as events that force us to think differently about the ethics and aesthetics of what human communication entails.

(2008) ‘Machinic Assemblages: Women, Art Education and Space. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 29 (3), 359-375, also published in Dillabough, J. A., McLeod, J., Mills, M., (2009) Troubling Gender in Education. London: Routledge, pp.57-73.

Abstract: In this paper I explore connections between women, art education and spatial relations drawing on the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of machinic assemblage as a useful analytical tool for making sense of the heterogeneity and meshwork of life narratives and their social milieus. In focusing on Mary Bradish Titcomb, a fin-de-siècle Bostonian woman who lived and worked in the interface of education and art, moving in between differentiated series of social, cultural and geographical spaces, I challenge an image of narratives as unified and coherent representations of lives and subjects; at the same time I am pointing to their importance in opening up microsociological analyses of deterritorializations and lines of flight. What I argue is that an attention to space opens up paths for an analytics of becomings, and enables the theorization of open processes, multiplicities and nomadic subjectivities in the field of gender and education.

 

(2008) 'Re-imagining the narratable subject' in Qualitative Resaerch, special issue on Narrative Methodologies: Subjects, Silences, Re-readings and Analyses, No 8 (3), 283-292.

Abstract:

In this paper I problematize sequence as a necessary condition for defining and making sense of narratives and argue that it is to the consideration of process that the interest in narrative research should shift. Process as an organizing plane focuses not on what stories are but on what they do and how their meaning is ceaselessly deferred, breaching the narratological conventions of coherence and closure. Drawing on my work with Gwen John’s letters, I trace three methodological movements in narrative analytics: a) creating an archive of stories as multiplicities of meanings, b) following the emergence of the narratable subject and c) making narrative connections in the political project of re-imagining the subject of feminism

Keywords: narratable subject, nomadic narratives, process, letters, multiplicities, feminist imaginary

 

(2006) Power, desire and emotions in education: revisiting the epistolary narratives of three women in apartheid South Africa, Gender and Education, Vol.18, No.3, May 2006, pp.233-252

In this paper I consider emotions in the context of three women’s lives, whose passion for education brought them together and then tore them apart along axes of difference defined by race, class and age in apartheid South Africa. I am looking in particular into the correspondence between Lily Moya, Mabel Palmer, and Sibusisiwe Makhanya, published in 1987 by Shula Marks and having since become an almost canonical reading in the ‘intersectionality’ literature. In revisiting this correspondence, I am exploring how culturally differentiated emotions, as inscribed in the three women’s epistolary narratives, can open up spaces for the subject of feminism to emerge. In this context, what I suggest is that reclaiming emotions within current educational discourses and practices can have significant effects not only on how lives are shaped and subjectivities formed, but also on how we can rethink about what feminism is and what it can do

 

Tamboukou, M (2005), 'Rethinking the political subject: narratives of parrhesiastic acts' in International Journal of Critical Psychology, No, 13, pp.138-157.

In this paper I am exploring discourses and practices that constitute women as political subjects and as subjects of politics, particularly focusing on auto/biographical narratives of women educators at the dawn of the twentieth century in the UK . In following genealogical lines in the constitution of the political subject, I am making connections between the Arendtian conceptualization of political action and the notion of parrhesia as the act of telling the truth in risky situations that Foucault has used to theorize the political technologies of the individual. What I argue is that women teachers' narratives emerge in the intersection of historically constructed dichotomies and separations between the private and the public, the political and the social; these narratives create non-canonical conditions for the political subject to emerge as both relational and narratable. Within the contemporary climate of a profound crisis of politics, rethinking the constitution of the political subject is becoming I suggest, increasingly timely and urgent.

Tamboukou, M. (2004) 'Tracing Heterotopias, Writing women educators in Greece ' in Gender and Education, vol. 16 (2), no2, pp.187-207

Over the last fifteen years, feminist theorists have sought to redefine female subjectivity. Amongst a wide range of critical notions of the female self, this paper focuses on what Foucault has defined as heterotopias, 'different places' which disrupt the dominance of the one single 'real' social place, offering shelter to subjects in crisis. I will argue that this Foucauldian notion is a useful tool for the exploration of the multifarious ways that some women educators attempted to define and describe themselves at the turn of the 19 th century in Greece , particularly focusing on the writings of Alexandra Papadopoulou.

 

Voela, A. and Tamboukou M. (2004) 'Enjoy their Symptom: Of Women, Men and Other Interesting Figures in Greek literary texts', in Women a Cultural Review , Vol.15 (1), pp.83-100.

This paper uses Zizek's notion of the symptom as a lens through which to look at representations of female figures in Greek literary texts of the early twentieth century. In mapping the construction of the figure of the modern woman in the matrix of discourses, phantasies and power relations of fin-de-si è cle Greece , we draw on psychoanalytic insights, interrupted by Foucauldian interventions. Following Butler 's move of making trouble we attempt to open up a dialogic space between psychoanalytic and foucauldian approaches to the female subject, contextualised in a specific social, historical and cultural milieu. It is in this context that we discuss first, how feminine and masculine subjectivities are represented in man's speech; second, how unintended excesses and interruptions occur in the problematic representation of women; and third, how madness and ultimately death come to play a significant role in the power relations between the two sexes. Key words: death, madness, heterotopia, figure, phantasy, power relations, subjectivity symptom

Tamboukou, M. (2004b) 'Nomadic trajectories in the unfolding of the self' in spacesofidentity.net , Vol. 4, issue 3.

Tamboukou, M. (2003b) 'Interrogating "the emotional turn": making connections with Foucault and Deleuze' in European Lournal of Psychotherapy, Counselling and Health, Vol.6, Number 3, pp.209-223.

In this paper I use theoretical insights from Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari to explore what I have called 'the emotional turn' in education. In following trails of the pedagogical repercussions of the Foucauldian notion of the care of the self, I trace various ways that it has been used and transformed, in discourses of progressive pedagogy. The Foucauldian conceptualization of the care of the self is further making connections with the Deleuzian notion of desire and affect. What I suggest is that revisiting education as a site of intense power relations at play, but also as a plane for the production of intense flows of desire and affect can perhaps create moments for thinking critically about the possible dangers of current discourses about emotional learning.

Tamboukou, M. (2003) 'Writing feminist genealogies' in Journal of Gender Studies, Vol.12, no 1, pp.5-19.

In this paper the author considers the critical role of auto/biographies in the writing of a Foucauldian genealogy of women teachers in the fin-de-siècle Britain. In isolating points of convergence between feminist theories and the Foucauldian genealogical project, the author explores the deployment of self-technologies of women teachers in a particular historical stage and geographical site, which I have identified as having a particular genealogical significance. What the author suggests is that a genealogical approach to women teachers auto/biographical writings at the turn of the century, creates new perspectives from where to theorise the different modes in which they chose to mould themselves and calls into question given discourses surrounding the persona of the woman teacher.

Tamboukou, M. (2002), 'Erasing Sexuality from the blackboard' in Australian Feminist Studies , Vol. 17, No. 38 , pp. 135-149.

This paper explores certain images and perceptions that British women teachers at the turn of the nineteenth century, used to position themselves discourses of sexuality. Starting from the assumption that sex matters in the construction of subjectivities, the author further suggests that sexuality has created an arena of conflicting and often contradictory discourses that have influenced past and contemporary perceptions related to the persona of the woman teacher. A point that has been highlighted in the discussion of this paper is that one of the most powerful images has been that of the asexual woman teacher. However the autobiographical writings of  real women teachers have spoken differently. They have revealed women who were deeply concerned with making sense of their sex, acknowledging their desires and making specific life choices. In doing so, they often found themselves entangled within the discursive restraints of wifehood and motherhood, the only recognisable female sexual roles of their era. Although they did not reject the social necessity of these roles, they resisted the gendered structure of power relations within them and sought to recreate them by finding some other spaces and different vocabularies through which to express their sexuality. The author finally suggests that far from being the key to unlock the secret of her existence, sexuality has become a passage for the female self, to work upon herself.

Tamboukou, M. and Ball, S.J., (2002), 'Nomadic subjects: Young black women in the UK ' in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Vol. 23, No.3 , pp.267-284.

This paper reads the fragmented life stories of four young black women in the UK , at a transitional point of their lives, when they are making decisions about their post-compulsory education. We argue that the notion of nomadism is a useful, albeit not unproblematic, tool to theorise the multifarious ways that these black young women negotiate subject positions, make choices and shape their lives. We further trace, how these women are struggling against fixity and unity and attempting to speak and act outside or beyond the positions available within the collectivities to which they belong. Finally, we point out that in travelling around unstable and contradictory subject positions they are sometimes caught up within fears of distortion, and ultimately choose to remain 'at home'. This 'home', however, is rather formless and uncentred and far from being easily localizable and defined, interrogates ideas and perceptions about territories and borders. It is through this 'new image', that we can perhaps start thinking about 'being at home' in different ways, beyond restrictions and limitations of families, classes, gender groups, races or nations.

Tamboukou, M. (2000), The paradox of being a woman teacher, in Gender and Education, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 463-478

In this article the author follows genealogical lines of analysis in an attempt to map the different discourses and practices that interweave women’s position in education today. Education is theorised as a nexus of created paradoxical spaces, where the female self has attempted to surpass closed boundaries and to question the dichotomy of the feminised private and/or the masculine public. The author also considers the importance of time restrictions upon women’s lives and have paid attention to the multifarious ways these lives are highly structured by specific space/time regulations. The genealogical cartography I have drawn, depicts various positions, where the female self has created parodic unities and temporary coalitions. Finally in tracing exit points that education has offered women, the author considers some of the implications of feminist theories for the subversion of the various dilemmas and dichotomies the female subject has lived through.

Tamboukou, M. (2000), Of Other Spaces: women s colleges at the turn of the century, in Gender Place and Culture, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 247-263.

This article explotes the first British university-associated women's colleges at the turn of the nineteenth century. Drawing on Foucault, the article looks into the dualistic opposition between private and public, as well as women's attempts to transcend this dichotomy. In theorising women's colleges as Foucauldian heterotopias, spaces in the interstices of power relations and dominant social structures, the author focuses on the interplay of contradicting discourses and strong power relations within these women's colleges. In this light the author considers the ways women resisted, negotiated, but also compromised in their attempt to shape their lives and invent new ways of being in the world

Tamboukou, M. (1999), 'Spacing herself' in Gender and Education, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 125-139.

This article is concerned with the problematic status of the female self, seen from the perspective of women in education. Studying women's autobiographical writings, the author uses a genealogical approach to interrogate the historical and cultural conditions of the construction of the female self. The article looks specifically at those practises women have used to act upon themselves and create a lifestyle of their own, technologies of the female self. Space is important in women's attempts for self-assertion, and the explorations of this article focus on the ways women in education have been striving to negotiate space of their own, within and beyond gendered social structures and dominant discourses of womanhood

---

© 2002