12-13 July 2010,  Manchester

The conference was a great success, with demand for places exceeding our plans, with over 55 participants, so it was good to see how much interest the event attracted. We kept with a single strand of papers, with lots of time for discussion, which worked well as a format, and we also included a range of speakers, from well-known international and UK feminist academics, to one who had recently passed her viva; as well as a local feminist youth worker and activist. We were able to bring two international speakers to the event: Ann Cvetkovich from University of Austin, Texas, US and Julie Mcleod, University of Melbourne, Australia, which was incredibly useful for both international reflections of the development of debates about methods in the UK, as well as some context for how these debates were emerging in the different locations of the US and Australia.

The conference was focused around the dual questions of using methods as a way of rethinking feminisms; as well as an exploration of the histories, transformations and travels of feminist methods. Day one was largely focused on histories of feminism and feminist methods, and methods for tracing feminist histories, with papers on a queer ethnography of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival in the US, to an ambitious Leverhulme-funded oral history of the UK’s Women’s Liberation movement; and an account of Feminist Webs, a collaborative intergenerational feminist project in the NW (of England), involving youth workers, young women in youth clubs and academics, in co-creating a history of feminist youth work in the North-West. Other papers addressed the practices of feminist collectives, issues of silence and the gaze, feminism and critique, feminist reading practices, developing practices of public sociology, researching intimacies, and the challenges of thinking feminism through ‘women’s empowerment’ in international development; with a closing roundtable discussion which returned to the more over-arching questions we were addressing.

We were fortunate to secure a range of funding from CRESC/SLOM, but also 1k from the School of Social Sciences (Manchester) and a further 1k from the Centre for Research on Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (Cardiff/Lancaster), which also meant that the event enabled the development and consolidation of a number of networks. We had further support from the Manchester Feminist Theory Network, and Jackie Stacey from MFTN contributed to the final closing plenary at the conference.

We are now in early discussions with the journal Feminist Theory about the possibility of a special issue coming out of the conference.