The Social Life of a Herstory Textbook (PDF)

"The Social Life of a Herstory Textbook is an original and exciting analysis by a hugely promising young scholar. It skillfully and elegantly bridges two theoretical frameworks typically seen as incompatible, and provides a rich ethnographic account of a timely, widely debated issue: how to do justice to gender and women's perspectives in the context of mainstream education?"

-Prof. Dr. Giselinde Kuipers, Research Professor of Sociology, Catholic University Leuven, Belgium

"This is a very important and timely book. It moves beyond the mere observation of the inadequacy of gendered representations in education and asks: how does educational change happen in practice? Next to its empirical contribution, this book ingeniously brings together actor-network theory and the institutionalist sociological tradition. A must read!"

-Prof. Dr. Jan Willem Duyvendak, Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

This book studies the possibility for feminist educational change by examining a case study on the social life of a French gender and women history textbook. Massilia Ourabah opens a unique and timely dialogue between two antagonistic sociological trends: institutionalism and actor-network theory (ANT), and more specifically the inhabited institution approach and the sociology of translation. The structure of the book is dual: it offers one version of the case study grounded in the institutionalist approach, and another version grounded in the translational approach. The goal is to show that through the introduction of institutional elements and the rejection of some of ANT's strongest assumptions, the critical value of ANT can be restored and prove a useful framework for studying sociomaterial networks in education. The book also engages with feminist pedagogy and discusses the implications of the case study for the prospect of a more gender-balanced educational curriculum.

Massilia Ourabah is a PhD researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She is conducting a doctoral thesis on gender and eco-friendly reproductive labour. Her main research focus is gender and forms of civic participation, but she has also written on gender and family norms in French family migration policies.