71243 - Methods, Sources, Research and Documentation for Women's Studies

Learning outcomes

The course aims to provide students with the tools to tackle research in general (within the humanities) and in particular in the area of women's and gender history.

Course contents

This course will be held in English and will introduce students to methodological sources and sites of memory for women’s studies.

 

For centuries, historiography focused primarily on men. Women’s experiences were often absent from records or, if included, were treated as peripheral to major events and actions.

By examining relevant sources and methods, this course presents the foundations of women’s history and explores its developments and relationship to gender history, feminist historiography and broader historical scholarship.

This approach will allow students to understand how historians recover, reconstruct and interpret women’s experiences, analyse gender relations, and challenge traditional historical narratives by incorporating perspectives that were long overlooked or marginalised from hegemonic discourses. The following questions will be addressed:

 

• Where were women in history?

• Why have their experiences been overlooked?

• How can we recover voices that were excluded from traditional archives?

• How the inclusion of women’s experiences rewrites and reshapes historical narratives?

 

Particular emphasis will be placed on the critical analysis of primary and secondary sources, including archival documents, personal correspondence, diaries, oral histories, legal records, visual materials and material culture. The course also addresses key methodological issues such as historical silences, the politics of archives, representation and the ethical challenges of researching the past.

Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches, students will develop the analytical and research skills necessary to evaluate historical evidence and engage with historiographical debates. Readings, source analysis, class discussions and research exercises will allow students to gain a deeper understanding of how methodological choices shape historical interpretation and accounts of the past.

 

Provisional planning (subject to change):

1. Introduction. Documents and their definitions.

2. Memory and historiography.

3. Sites of memory and research: libraries, archives.

4. From Women’s History to Gender History.

5. Women’s history.

6. Women, History and the law.

7. Women, History and the law.

8. Reconstructing a life.

9. Oral history.

10. Documents and evidence.

11. Documents and evidence.

12. Memory as resistance. Memory as justice.

13. Bibliography/Presentations by students.

14. Digital Humanities.

15. Visual culture.

 

 

Students with SLDs or temporary or permanent disabilities: we suggest that you contact the relevant university office ( https://site.unibo.it/ studenti-con-disabilita-e-dsa/ en [https://site.unibo.it/studenti-con-disabilita-e-dsa/en] ) and your teacher immediately to work together to find the most effective strategies for attending classes and/or preparing for exams.
Any requests for exam accommodations must be made at least 15 days before the date of the exam, by sending an email to the teacher and copying (Cc) the email address disabilita@unibo.it (in case of disability) or dsa@unibo.it (for students with Specific Learning Difficulties).

Readings/Bibliography

1- Bonnie G. Smith, ‘Gender I: From Women's History to Gender History’, in Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot, eds, The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory (London: SAGE, 2013).

2- Judith P. Zinsser, ‘Women’s History/Feminist History’, in Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot, eds, The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory (London: SAGE, 2013).

3- Material included in one of the following groups:

1. Sara Delmedico, Opposing Patriarchy. Women and the Law in Action in Pre-Unification Italy (1815-1865) (London: IMLR, 2021), pp. 32-43 and 101-116.

2. Sue McKemmish, ‘Evidence of me’, The Australian Library Journal, 45/3 (1996), 174-87 and Michelle Caswell, Anna Robinson-Sweet, ‘“It was as Much for Me as for Anybody Else”: The Creation of Self-Validating Records’, Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, 10 (2023), Article 10.

3. Honor Sachs, ‘Reconstructing a Life: The Archival Challenges of Women's History’, Library Trends, 56/3 (2008), 650-66 and Maja Krtalić, Jesse David Dinneen, Chern Li Liew, Anne Goulding, ‘Personal Collections and Personal Information Management in the Family Context’, Library Trends, 70/2 (Fall 2021), 149–79.

4. Kieran Hegarty, ‘Imagining Permanence on the Web: Tracing the Meanings of Long-Term Preservation among the Subjects of Web Archives', New Media & Society, 27/2 (2025), 898-913 and Kristina Sundberg, Ulrika Kjellman, ‘The Tattoo as a Document’, Journal of Documentation, 74/1 (2018), 18–35.

5. Natalia Bermúdez Qvortrup, ‘Archives of the Disappeared: Conceptualizing the Personal Collections of Families of Disappeared Persons’, Journal of Human Rights Practice, 14/2 (July 2022), 582–99 and Natalia Bermúdez Qvortrup and Marta Lucía Giraldo, ‘Evidence of Jorge. Documentary Traces of a Forced Disappearance in Colombia’, Archivaria, Special Issue Toward Person-Centred Archival Theory and Praxis, 94 (Fall–Winter 2022), 204-30.

Suggestions for further reading:

• Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern, and Jacqui True, eds, Feminist Methodologies for International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

• Brooke A. Ackerly and Jacqui True, Doing Feminist Research in Political and Social Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

• Kalpana Kannabirān and Padmini Swaminathan, eds, Re-Presenting Feminist Methodologies Interdisciplinary Explorations (London: Routledge, 2017).

• Patricia Leavy, Research Design: Quantitative, Qualitative, Mixed Methods, Arts-Based, and Community-Based Participatory Research Approaches (New York: The Guilford Press, 2017).

• Wendy Harcourt, Karijn van Den Berg, Constance Dupuis, Jacqueline Gaybor, eds, Feminist Methodologies: Experiments, Collaborations and Reflections (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022).

 

Teaching methods

-Lectures

-Seminars with discussion and critical analysis of documents

-Guest speaker(s)

Assessment methods

Students are asked to actively participate in lectures and seminars.

 

Attending students:

 

Active participation in class discussions: 25%

Students’ presentation: 25%

Final oral exam on slides uploaded on Virtuale after classes and three articles from the reading list (article 1, article 2, one article from group 3): 50%

 

Non-Attending students:

Final oral exam on slides uploaded on Virtuale after classes and five articles from the reading list (article 1, article 2, three articles from group 3): 100%

 

Office hours

See the website of Sara Delmedico