AustLit

'At the March 2016 ‘Intersections in History’ Conference, eminent feminist historian Professor Patricia Grimshaw recounted the origins of the Australian Women’s History Network (AWHN). The AWHN ‘helped start a conversation’ with the Australian Historical Association (AHA) ‘about [the] representation of women in Ph.D. programs and lecturing’, Grimshaw asserted; it perhaps even forced the AHA to ‘consider gender politics in academia’.1 Access to these enlightening recollections was made possible not through participants’ memory of the conference held at the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre in Melbourne, but through the documentation of the conference on Twitter. Both Lilith: A Feminist History Journal and the AWHN are becoming more engaged with new media technologies, spaces that some argue have a democratising effect and even constitute new forms of feminist activism.2 Indeed, the AWHN will be expanding their efforts in this direction with an upcoming feminist history blog, to be edited by current Lilith Collective members Dr. Alana Piper and Dr. Ana Stevenson. The 2016 AWHN conference topic was in part inspired, or provoked, by the rise of ‘intersectionality’ in online feminist conversations and communities. Conference participants discussed an academic focus on intersections as a productive, but also a seductive, space - one that can illuminate but may also distract.' (Editorial introduction)