Since the publication of Frigga Haug et al's 'Female Sexualisation' in English in 1987, the method she pioneered as collective memorywork has been taken up enthusiastically in educational contexts particularly within feminist poststructuralist paradigms as 'collective biography'. As Frigga Haug was Professor of Sociology at the University of Hamburg until recently, it is timely to turn attention to how her method has travelled and been reshaped within a different disciplinary context, and within changing theoetical turns. This workshop will provide an outline of these aspects of collective biograhy as method, and turn to the conference theme of 'risk' in the context of gender and schooling. Rather than emphasise dramatic or high profile events, the workshop will focus on documenting and collectively interrogating everyday, even banal, manifestations of what might be framed as 'risk' through the memories and embodied experiences of workshop participants. Furthermore, questions of difference including intersectional  dimensions of gendered experience will be examined.  As well as drawing on the researcher's extensive experience with the method, the workshop responds to her current research into gendered experiences of secondary schooling. 

The methodology that is taken up in this workshop is collective biography, which draws on the feminist sociological traditions of collective memory-work. The study draws directly on the international project on the formation of gender and sexualities documented in the book 'Becoming Girl: Collective Biography and the production of girlhood' (Gonick & Gannon, 2014).

The workshop will examine the relevance of the body and relationality to educational research and critically consider onto/epistemologies of feminist research methods. Expected outcomes are that participants will contribute memory stories to the workshop space, and participate in the collective analysis during the workshop. If participants wish to continue engagement with the topic subsequent to the workshop, it may be possible to develop a coauthored publication.

Davies, B., & Gannon, S. (2006). Doing collective biography: Investigating the production of subjectivity. Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open University Press/McGraw Hill. Davies, B., & Gannon, S. (2009). Pedagogical encounters. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Haug, F. (2008). Memory work. Australian Feminist Studies, 23(58), 537–541. Haug, F., Andresen, S., Bünz-Elfferding, A., Hauser, C., Lang, U., Laudan, M., Lüdermann, M., & Meir, U. (1987). Female sexualization: A collective work of memory (E. Carter, Trans.). New York, NY: Verso. Gannon, S. & Gonick, M. (2019) Collective biography as a feminist methodology. In G. Crimmins (Ed.) Resisting sexism in the academy. Palgrave MacMillan. Gonick, M., & Gannon, S. (Eds.). (2014). Becoming girl: Collective biography and the production of girlhood. Toronto, ON: The Women’s Press. Gannon, S., Walsh, S., Byers, M., & Rajiva, M. (2014). Deterritorializing collective biography. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 27(2), 181–195.