The emergence of Japanese style buildings on the Bryn Mawr campus illustrates the reciprocal flows of educational ideas and practice in the transnational cultural encounters between Japan and the USA. In this keynote lecture I use the example of the Phebe Anna Thorne School to raise some theoretical and methodological questions about the movement of people, places and things when researching transnational flows.
I organise the discussion through Karen Barad’s argument that space, time and matter are not separate elements but fold into one another, which she terms spacetimematter and I will comment on how aspects of these approaches illuminate questions of gender, as a power relation that “shapes [both] worlds and words”.
To discuss spacetimematter I will first focus on space in spacetimematter and questions of context and movement. Then I will home in on matter in spacetimematter through post humanist views about the importance of considering non-human as well as human life. Then I move to time in spacetimematter through questions of temporality. Finally I touch on Barad’s question about the location of the researcher in the research apparatus. But first. I discuss the local, regional, national and transnational threads that come together in the education that emerges at the Phebe Anna Thorne Model School
Joyce Goodman, Local, National and Transnational Flows in the Japanese-Style Classrooms on the Bryn Mawr College Campus, USA: Spacetimematter and Transnational Histories of Women’s Education: Keynote address delivered at Tsuda University, Tokyo, 11 August 2019.
