The First Fridays Postgraduate Workshop, Reflections on doing feminist research: a panel, was held at Deakin Downtown on 6 December 2020.
Featuring leading academics from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds at Deakin University, this panel reflected on the idea of “doing feminist research”. Through informal discussion of their careers and examples from their own work, speakers considered what makes research feminist, how ideas about feminism relate to their work, and why doing feminist research is so important today.
About the Speakers
Torika Bolatagici’s practice focuses on the centering of black and brown lived-experience and the relationships between visual culture, human ecologies and contemporary indigenous counter-narrative. She is interested in exploring the tensions and intersections between gender, embodied knowledge, commodification, migration and globalization. Torika’s work has been exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Taiwan, Mexico City, Yogyakarta and throughout Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. She has published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at local and international conferences on the representation of mixed-race identity; Pacific arts practice in Australia and Fiji and gender and militarism in the Pacific. (https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/torika-bolatagici; http://www.bolatagici.com)
Victoria Duckett is Senior Lecturer in Screen and Design at Deakin University, Melbourne. Author of over 70 articles and book chapters that explore women and media industries, her most recent book was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title (Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film, 2016). She is a founding editorial member of Feminist Media Histories (University of California Press), a founding participant in the Women and Silent Screen Conference (1999), an elected member of Women and Screen History International (2010-2015), on the editorial board for Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film (SAGE), and an editorial member of FAScinA (Studies of Cinema and Audiovisual Media, Edizioni ETS, Pisa. She is currently completing a monograph that explores the centrality of the French stage actress to the birth of global media industries.
Janine Little’s research draws from her work as a long-time writer of feminist and cultural critique, and extends from a PhD (UQ 1999) critiquing Australian/American novels, film, theatre and musical lyric through race/class/gender intersectionality. That work produced seven articles, while research Masters and First Class Honours degrees about Aboriginal short fiction and women’s autobiography also produced publications in leading journals. Her current writing is about the cultural representation of gender and class, family violence, and violence against women and children — and its navigation of horror and tragedy. An incomplete publication list is available via Deakin Elements research page. Janine is a trained journalist with reporting experience in courts, police, political, industrial, entertainment, features, and general rounds, and has written a book about journalism law and ethics, and co-authored another on journalism training. (https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/janine-little)
Debbie Ollis is an Associate Professor in Education at Deakin University where she teaches and researches in the fields of gender, respectful relationships and sexuality education. Debbie has worked in the health and sexuality education field for over 30 years as a secondary school teacher, policy officer, curriculum consultant, curriculum writer, teacher educator and researcher. She has co-authored two national frameworks in the area and written curriculum resources for state and federal governments. Most recently she has written a respectful relationships curriculum for Victorian secondary schools and coauthored a sexuality education monograph for Universities. Her research is focused on capacity building in health and sexuality education, teacher education, gender and violence education and young people’s experience of school based sexuality education. Debbie is currently involved in number of projects in these areas, including an ARC linkage project researching young people’s experience and voice in sexuality education (https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/debbie-ollis)
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For more information about the ‘First Fridays’ Deakin Gender and Sexuality Studies HDR Masterclass and Seminar series.
