The efficacy of transnational network analysis for reinterpreting assumptions of nation-centred historiography is receiving increasing attention from historians of education. The 2007 issue of Paedagogica Historica (ed Fuchs 2007) demonstrates how networks span spaces beyond the nation-state, and may be formal, informal, overlapping, invisible, non-hierarchical or asymmetrical. As Fuchs argues, network analysis provides a lens through which to examine how agents and interactions played (and continue to play) a role in educational development at the local, national and international levels. At the same time, network analysis provides a micro-perspective and cultural angle on the specific circumstances, variations, actors and mechanics of phenomena that have been described in terms of homogenisation from a macro-sociological point of view, including by scholars at Stanford (e.g.Meyer and Ramirez 2000). To date, women have tended to play a shadowy role in the analysis of networks. For example, both Stefan Collini (2006), and Noel Annan (1999) focus on male intellectuals. Yet, as Ruth Watts (1998) Joyce Goodman and Jane Martin (2007) demonstrate, women have long been implicated in intellectual networks. Drawing on the work of Annan, Watts (1998) highlights the importance of familial, social and intellectual networks and of place in historical accounts of women’s part in radical education movements in the late eighteenth century. Goodman and Martin (2007) adopt a Bourdieusian approach in their account of networks around women, education and politics from the 1890s to the 1920s. This symposium will follow Goodman and Martin (2007) in drawing on Collini’s account of the ‘intellectual’. Collini distinguishes three main senses of the term ‘intellectual’ in English: the sociological, the subjective and the cultural. The socio-professional category includes occupations like teachers and journalists. The subjective sense ‘focuses upon an individual’s attitude to and degree of interest in ideas’ and the cultural sense upon those who qualify for the label because they are deemed to possess some kind of ‘cultural authority’. The symposium will adopt the sociological (socio-professional) and cultural sense of the term ‘intellectual’ in order to make women visible in the analysis of transnational intellectual networks in the run up to the first world war and during the inter-war period. The papers will provide perspectives on women’s intellectual networks in Belgium and across Europe more generally.

The symposium will adopt contrasting approaches to analysis of women’s position in intellectual networks. The paper by Verbruggen and Carlier will focus on analysis of a journal as a ‘laboratory of thought’, which is linked with the journal’s patronising organisation in order to examine intellectual networks around progressive thought and social and educational reform. The sources analysed will include Dokumente des Forschritts/Documents du progrès/Progress (1907-1916) a journal which appeared simultaneously in three languages and sources relating to the journal’s patronizing organisation (Instititut Internationale pour la Diffusion des Expériences Sociales). The paper by Goodman will apply aspects of three-level Bourdieusian analysis, following Grenfell and Hardy (2007). This focuses on ‘various strata of interaction between habitus and field. Level one analysis requires consideration of the field in relation to other fields and particularly ‘the recognised source of field power’. The paper will focus predominantly on level two analysis which involves consideration of ‘the structural topography of the field itself; all those within it and the positions they hold’. As Grenfell and Hardy illustrate, this positioning is expressed in terms of the field’s capital and its volume and configurations, which may be economic (financial wealth), social (useful or prestigious network relations), and cultural (symbolically powerful attributes derived from education, social background and dispositions) and which define the organization of the field and its systems of recognition. Level three analysis focuses on the structured and structuring aspects of habitus and on the way in which habitus ‘directs and positions individuals in the field in terms of the capital configurations they possess’ (Grenfell and Hardy, 2007). Sources will include organisational records from the International Federation of University Women, the International Council of Women, the League of Nations, and auto/biographical accounts.

The symposium will raise questions around the role of women in intellectual networks and begin to redress the gap in research and literature pertaining to women and intellectual co-operation. It will add to the debate about neo-institutionist approaches and approaches based on notions of ‘internationalities’. Neo-institutionist approaches point to an increasing isomorphism in the emergence of education systems associated with rationalised models of education and the homogenisation of educational structures beyond what would be predicted by the variability of national societies and cultures. (Meyer and Ramirez, 2000). Within the neo-institutionist stance, increasing attention to women’s issues, to changing notions of womanhood and women’s rights, and the homogenisation of educational structures are determined by the global context, in which nation states form sub-units of a world polity (Berkovitch, 1999; Ramirez, Soysal and Shananah, 1997). Attention to women’s intellectual networks will nuance constructions of ‘internationalities’ from a communicative perspective, which point to the importance of cultural perspectives and to the reception, reinterpretation and re-articulation of ideas and institutions resulting in significant variations in what at first sight appear to be similar processes of appropriation and signification of phenomena (Caruso and Roldan Vera, 2005; Schreiwer, 2004).