{"word_count": 2070, "character_count": 15624}
By Tika Ramadhini and Thiago Pinto BarbosaFrom 20 to 22 June 2019, the Explorative Workshop “Women and the Transregional Circulation of Knowledge, from 1800 to 1950” was held at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. It was convened by Heike Liebau, Tika Ramadhini and Thiago Pinto Barbosa (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient). The workshop took the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries as a relevant timeframe to discuss women and the circulationof knowledge. This period witnessed the increased development of science andtechnology, the global movement of objects and people, and colonialism. What didwomen produce and circulate in transregional movements, and how did theytransform them? What role does transregionality play in the situatedness ofwomen and the knowledge they produced? How did gendered practices shapeknowledge production and what gendering effects can be perceived in itscirculation and reception? The workshop contemplated and engaged with thesequestions. The workshop sought to explore conceptual discussions that could expandour understandings of how gender and mobility shape processes of knowledgecirculation among women. It examined these themes and questions from diverse disciplinaryperspectives, &#160;including anthropology,science and technology studies, art and literary studies, theatre andperformance studies, pedagogy, history, philosophy, and archival studies.The workshop started by collecting impressions on two textssuggested for discussion, namely Donna Haraway’s Situated Knowledges[1]and Paola Bertucci’s The In/visible Woman[2].During this brief brainstorming session, there were various issues raisedby the participants, such as what knowledge production actually stands for andhow it is gendered, as well as issues about the authority and hierarchy ofknowledge, the agency of women in knowledge practices, and theunderrepresentation and exclusion of women in science. Different participantsbrought up the issue of in/visibility, not only in terms of how womenstrategically in/visibilize themselves to produce and circulate knowledge, butalso in the sense of sources, namely through the question of how to work with theinvisibility of women in the archives. Finally, the discussion touched uponpower and gender relations and how they affect our own productions of knowledge.Women Scientists and Knowledge OutputsThe first day began with a discussion on the topic of femalescientist figures in the panel, ‘Women Scientists and Knowledge Outputs’. Inthe first part of the panel, Johanna Ziebritzki (Heidelberg University) andAmurabi Oliveira (Federal University of Santa Catarina) presented their cases of two female Jewish scientistswho, in the first half of the 20th century, moved across regions andproduced knowledge about the societies they travelled to. One of these artists wasStella Kramrisch, who moved from Europe to India. Through her “epistemicagency”, she hybridized methods in art history, levelling Indian art withEuropean art genealogies. Ziebritski brushed upon the hierarchy of knowledge, alludingto the different access given to female and male artists. The other artist wasNorth American anthropologist, Ruth Landes, who produced a today canonical but,back then, disputed ethnography on gender and sexuality in Bahia, in which shehighlighted the powerful role of women and queer men in the Afro-Brazilianreligion candomblé. Using historicalethnography, Oliveira argued that the critical refusal of Landes’ thesis had todo with her positionality as a woman in the field, which is confirmed by thefact that her contemporary male colleagues reached similar conclusions butreceived no critique. Julia Roth’s (Bielefeld University) commentarycalled attention to the problem of the essentialization of womanhood and positionalitiesand suggested the use of Floya Anthias’ notion of “translocationalpositionality”.The second part of this panel revolved around the figure of Indiananthropologist, Irawati Karve (1905-1970). Thiago Pinto Barbosa discussedKarve’s transregional movement between India and Germany and how her shiftingpositionality also resulted in different research outcomes. While in Germanyshe challenged racial theories in craniometry, in India she applied them to thestudy of castes and tribes. In India, although she was outspoken about women’soppression, she (like most members of her upper caste group in that time) wassilent about caste injustices. Urmilla Deshpande (Independent writer, USA)read two excerpts from her novel project, which explores the subjectivities ofKarve’s life and work in Berlin. Among the participants, a question was raised onthe relation the topic to current debates on decolonializing knowledge. Thiswas then followed by a discussion stimulated by Razak Khan (University of Göttingen),who suggested to rethink the relationships between fact, fiction and fieldworkin more complex ways. On this thread, participants discussed different modes ofhistorical writings (scientific and/or fictional-based-on-facts) and on the useof literature as historical sources. While reflecting on the possibility ofcollaboration between scientistsand novelists, Deshpande and Barbosa insisted on the commitment of science totruth but still recognized the transformative possibilities of non-scientificcreative narratives, especially when these are informed by real stories andaddress current issues.Women’s EducationThe second panel dealt with the topic of women’s education. DivyaKannan (Shiv Nadar University)presented a paper about British female missionaries in Travancore, South India.Kannan demonstrated how their moralising agenda intertwined with motives ofevangelism and colonialism, and then raised the question of how far the conceptof transregionalism could help to understand processes of knowledgecirculation. Jana Tschurenev (Humboldt University Berlin) examined the involvement of Indian women’s organizationsin transregional knowledge circulation and how pedagogical ideas for earlychildhood care and education travelled. Tschurenev argued that Indian women’sorganizations were active agents for circulating pedagogical innovation in thetwentieth century by means of creating a platform for women’s movement,international networks, and gaining expertise from European and American universities.Johanna L. Peterson (University of California, San Diego)talked about the educational and professional trajectories of Wadad Makdisifrom Baghdad. Peterson’s paper examined how education facilitated the movementof women and how school became a site of interconnections to create and spreadconceptions of nationhood and citizenship. Peterson argued that toconceptualise a women’s movement, one needs to look away from linearity andinstead, illustrate it through a ‘knitwork’. Tika Ramadhini (Leibniz-ZentrumModerner Orient) presented a paper about the agency of Jawi women whomigrated to Mecca in the early twentieth century, with a focus on NyaiKhairiyah Hasyim, who opened a school in Mecca. Ramadhini showed how KhairiyahHasyim was an active agent for circulating transregional knowledge by applyingdifferent strategies as she moved from one place to another, relating to herpositionality in different settings.&#160; In the discussion that followed, commentator Ulrike Freitag (Leibniz-ZentrumModerner Orient) raised &#160;a number of questionsfor debate: How far have we gone with conceptions about writing about women? Whatwould happen after we have written women back into history? The discussion alsobrushed upon the limits of women’s agency, which is often seen through eitheran apologetic or romanticized approach. Kannan and Tschurenev highlighted theimportance of stressing the political agency of women in historical processes,arguing this is still relevant vis-à-vis today’s continued exclusion of women frompolitical spheres. Imperialism and (De)colonialityThe second day of the workshop began with a warm-up recapdiscussion. Participants addressed how postcolonial and feminist perspectiveshave been at the margins of historiography in Germany. Some raised issues ofhow the mainstream way of writing history might be gendered, how it might continueto haunt us when we write history about women, and ultimately, how we can tryto overcome this by making the gendered biases evident.The morning panel was composed of two cases dealing with women inTurkey andthe Ottoman Empire. Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay (Sabanci University) presentedon Turkey’s use of fashion shows as a diplomatic strategy to transmit apositive image of Turkey, associated with modern development and ethnicharmony, and at the same time promote an image of Turkish femininity inaccordance to these principles. Altınay demonstrated how the diplomatic fashionshow used the female body as a space for circulating knowledge, and furthercomplicated discussions of the female body in transregional knowledgecirculation. Altınay argued that women did not always contribute to atransregional circulation of progressive knowledge, but, as we can see in thisstory, certain images of femininity were articulated and promoted innation-building motives. In her presentation, Müge Özbek (Kaç University)discussed the role of women companions of Ottoman civil servants and armyofficers and their role in the production of spatial knowledge in differentcorners of the empire. These female companions of colonial civil servants had thepossibility to write autobiographical texts through their opportunity to traveland meet new people when with their husbands. Özbek discussed travel writing asa site of knowledge production, especially the female companions’ travelwriting, which presented gendered understandings of empire. The discussant,Hilal Alkan (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient/ASH Berlin), underlined howpractices of embodiment might take a particular stance for particular politicalprojects. Questions about the tension of agency and structure were raised inthe discussion. While Özbek argued for the attention to women in a more complexand nuanced Ottoman historiography, Altınay commented on differentinterpellations about the participation of women in those fashion shows, suchas the desires of consumption, the need of cash from the USA, but also about marketingand nation-building. He stressed how nation-building projects might push forcertain subjectivities in regard to ideal citizens, as well as in genderedideal types.In the afternoon, Muhammad Buana (University Gadjah Mada) andJahnabi B. Chanchani (University of Michigan) presented two casesdealing with the role of women in projects of decolonization, the first inIndonesia and the latter in India. While Buana presented the intriguing case ofhow two Malay-descendant princesses at Tanete Kingdom preserved a cryptic Arabic-Bugisscript that dealt with anti-colonial resistance, Chanchani explored issues oftranslation in the poet Sarojini Naidu’s work dealing with Indiannation-building. &#160;The discussant, RashaChatta (Forum Transregionale Studien/SOAS),chaired the following session, in which she, based on Buana and Chanchani’scases, emphasized and contemplated the importance of circulation in theproduction of knowledge. In various cases, some knowledge might not be circulated,and this occurs quite frequently with knowledge produced or transformed bywomen actors.Scientific NetworksThe last panel dealt with scientific networks. Irina Nastasă-Matei (Universityof Bucharest) started her presentation by addressing the invisibility ofwomen in academia in Romania, and then focused on the case of HumboldtFellowships and how not sponsoring female students under Nazi Germany hadshaped international academic networks in gendered ways. Amelia Bonea (Universityof Heidelberg) presented her investigation on Rutiran Sahni, the wife ofBirbal Sahni, a well-known paleobotanist in British India. After the prematurepassing away of her husband, she was responsible for nurturing thetransnational scientific networks of a key earth science institute in India.Bonea commented on the gendered-ness of fieldwork-based science, and calledattention to how wives of male scientists have contributed to differentscientific activities not placed on the spotlight, like collecting samples,typing, and correcting papers. In the discussion chaired by Ergun Özgür (Leibniz-ZentrumModerner Orient), participants related Bonea’s comment to the figure of BronislawMalinowski, the social anthropologist: He was not solely responsible forpromoting and standardizing a research method that was extremely difficult forwomen (ethnography). His wife, Elsie Masson, had an extremely important role inhis writings, but this was never publicly acknowledged by him.Afterwards, artist/researcher, Anuja Ghosalkar, presented herlecture performance “I, He, Her”, with support by performer, Kiran Kumar. Itstarted with an exercise in which participants had to ask each other verypersonal questions in pairs and then were asked to recite them to the otherparticipants. Then, the performance juxtaposed Kumar’s readings from theautobiography of actress, Durga Khote, the “first film actress from arespectable family to act in films” (as the opening line of her autobiographystates), with Ghosalkar’s own performance, Lady Anandi. Lady Anandi dealt with Ghosalkar’sown experience as a female actress in male-dominated theatre spaces and thestory of her great grandfather, Madhavrao Tipnis –a female impersonator in late19th century Marathi theatre. In the discussion that followed,commentators Nazan Üstündağ (Forum Transregionale Studien) and FranziskaRoy (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient) touched again upon questions aboutthe relationship between fiction and non-fiction. Üstündağ praised Ghosalkar’s juxtapositions(of biography and autobiography, of the perverse and the dignified) as a goodnarrative strategy to tell complex stories, and argued for going beyondcausality-centred narratives in historiography. Roy contended that thecurrent&#160; rise of the right-wing callsnevertheless for a commitment to telling true stories – and to flying the flagof science. In disagreement, Üstündağ argued that the re-articulation ofpolitical narratives by (far-right-wing) political groups is nothing new; weshould not be as obsessed with truth as we have been before. In the finaldiscussion, participants reflected on the relationships betweenpower, knowledgeand not-knowing. BotakozKassymbekova stressed that historical knowledge is not only about thereconstruction of past, but it is also of the present. Moreover,history&#160;is not only always viewed from the lens of the present, but alsoour expectations from and&#160;for the future. On similar lines, different participants emphasized knowledgemaking as a dialogue and process. Reconnecting with the opening discussion,participants highlighted the importance of reflexivity as a productive,empowering way out of (gender relation-imposed) self-doubt. Moreover,participants underlined how history can be flooded with hopeful messages, andhow rewriting both transregionalism and women in history can be politicallytransformative.[1] Donna Haraway (1988): ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question inFeminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. In Feminist Studies 14 (3), pp. 575-599.[2] Paola Bertucci (2013): ‘The In/visible Woman: Mariangela Ardinghelli and the Circulation of Knowledge between Paris and Naples in the Eighteenth Century’. In Isis 104 (2), pp. 226-249Citation:&#160;Workshop Report: Women and the Transregional Circulation of Knowledge, 1800–1950, in:&#160;TRAFO – Blog for  Transregional Research, 15.10.2019, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/19776.