Marie Cabadi

Please tell us about your research project.

I am a History PhD student at the University of Angers, affiliated with the TEMOS research unit. My research traces the history of the women’s centres set up in the 1970s and 1980s in Belgium, Britain and France. In the wake of the late sixties revival of feminist activism in the West, hundreds of such centres were opened by women’s groups looking to have a place of their own. They were spaces of feminist organising, socialising, and outreach work, attempting to provide a locally-grounded base to a transnational social movement, and are thus an ideal research object to take up questions arising from sociological, geographical and historical work on the spatial dimensions of social movements. Entering feminism through its public-facing doors, you encounter a series of compelling questions, revolving around issues of access, of shifting priorities and interests, of funding, professionalisation and institutionalisation, and of the materiality and aesthetics of feminist places. By looking at these projects on a three-country scale, I also hope to shed some light on the cultural transfers involved in the adoption of activist practices, on processes of local appropriation of and elaboration on a transnational feminist category.

Could you please tell us a bit more about your scholarship/exchange programme?

I am lucky to have been awarded a Maison Française monthly scholarship, which means I will be a resident at the MFO for the month of November. It gives me an opportunity to visit several English archives (including the Oxford Women’s Centre collection" of " the Oxfordshire History Centre), and hopefully to conduct some oral history interviews.

First impressions of Oxford/the University?

I had been here before, so it’s not a true first impression, but I came from the station to the MFO by walking along the canal, meeting my first Oxonian (a cat), and getting slightly drizzled on: everything I have come to expect (and enjoy, rain notwithstanding) from English towns. The innumerable libraries dotted around the city, and the MFO’s own wonderful one just downstairs from my room, make for an incredibly comfortable and peaceful working environment.