Maria Tamboukou
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 290401 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Maria Tamboukou |
| NOMBRES | Maria |
| APELLIDO | Tamboukou |
| FIRMA | TAMBOUKOU M |
| AFILIACIONES | University of East London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6380-4415 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 88 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 356 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 88 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1999 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Dark horizons
This paper examines Sofia Kovalevskaya’s arduous path to becoming the first woman professor of mathematics in modern Europe. Although she earned a doctorate from the University of Göttingen in 1874 under Karl Weierstrass’s private supervision, she faced a decade-long struggle before securing an academic appointment and attained a permanent chair only in 1889, shortly after receiving the prestigious Bordin Prize. Drawing on her correspondence with…
Figures of dissent
This paper examines the entangled relationships between mathematics, politics, and gender through the lives of two nineteenth-century women mathematicians, Mary Somerville and Sofia Kovalevskaya, using Bonnie Honig's (2021) ‘arc of refusal’ as a plane of analysis. By exploring their political and intellectual trajectories, I argue that their acts of refusal—whether in resisting prescribed gender roles, challenging institutional norms, or defying …
Memory machines in Ada Lovelace’s meta-archive
Taking Ada Lovelace’s careful orchestration of her own funeral and interment as a point of departure, this article examines how her memory has been constructed, mediated, and mobilised across time. It introduces the concept of memory machines to trace the layered entanglements of material traces, emotional residues, and institutional practices through which women mathematicians are remembered. Focusing on Lovelace’s meta-archive—understood as a s…
Automathographical Traces in Wang Zhenyi’s Travel Poetry
This paper examines the intellectual and literary work of Wang Zhenyi (1768–1797)—mathematician, astronomer, and poet of the Qing dynasty—within the broader landscape of premodern Chinese women’s scholarship. Although Wang Zhenyi is occasionally referenced in popular and reference accounts, sustained engagement with her writings remains limited. Situating her work within the rich intellectual cultures of late imperial China, the paper reads Wang …
From Palibino to Riviera
This paper explores the spatio-temporal rhythms in Sofia Kovalevskaya's literary writings.Renowned as the first woman professor of mathematics in modern Europe, Kovalevskaya made significant scientific contributions but also excelled in literature, producing novels, poetry, and plays.She believed that great mathematicians must possess "the soul of a poet."Despite the acclaim her literary work received, most research has focused on her mathematica…
Tracing Archival Personae
This paper proposes the archival persona as a way of engaging lives that surface through dispersed and fragmentary traces. Emphasising multiplicity and resonance over coherence, it reads Kassia’s scattered hymns, chronicles, letters, and secular texts as rhythmic echoes, composing a life in motion rather than a unified autobiography
An Award Letter Too Late to Receive
In 1816, Sophie Germain became the first woman to win the Grand Prix de Mathématiques, awarded by the Class of Mathematics and Physics of the French Institute for her work on the theory of elastic surfaces. However, due to a failure in communication, she never received the formal invitation with her ceremony tickets and ultimately did not attend. Instead, she received a brief notice at the last moment, advising her that she was welcome to be pres…
Echoes of the subject
Epistolary Becomings
In this paper, I offer the concept of diffraction as both a methodological approach and an epistemological lens. This dual move has guided my archival research, encompassing various types of archival documents, and has shaped my reading, understanding, and analysis of letters by European women mathematicians, who lived and worked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The discussion draws on a Leverhulme-funded research project of writing a …
Technologies of Automathographies
Labour Activists’ Archival Assemblages and Resistibility in Memory Work
Centring the lives and traces of three women labour activists contributes to labour history by showing how archival form becomes a terrain of struggle where questions of work, visibility, and historical legitimacy remain unsettled. In this article I examine the archival afterlives of Jean Désirée, Emma Goldman, and Rose Pesotta to develop the concept of archival assemblages and introduce resistibility as a critical method for engaging the politic…
The mechanics of the social
This paper traces a genealogical line of microsociology in the theoretical ideas of Sophie Germain, a 19th-century French mathematician and philosopher. While her contributions to mathematics have been rediscovered and re-evaluated in recent years, her theoretical writings remain largely overlooked. To address this gap, I examine Germain's contributions to the history of ideas, with a particular focus on her reflections on the social, political, …
Hidden in the Archive of Gender and Science
In this article the author looks at processes of becoming a woman philosopher and scientist in eighteenth-century Europe, by focusing on educational experiences, discourses and practices revolving around the Italian mathematician, scientist and philosopher Maria Gaetana Agnesi. The author uses the Arendtian notion of agonism as a lens through which she reads Agnesi’s manuscripts at the Ambrosiana Biblioteca in Milan, by pointing to the non-discur…
Fragments of Thought
In this paper I look at the philosophical work of Sophie Germain, a woman mathematician and philosopher in nineteenth-century France. Although forgotten after her death, Germain’s contribution to mathematical sciences has been revisited and reappraised in recent years, but with very few notable exceptions, her philosophical work is still in the margins. In addressing this gap in the literature, I revisit Germain’s contribution to the history of i…
Reading letters of an eighteenth-century femme philosophe
In this article the author considers the letters of Émilie Du Châtelet, an eighteenth-century woman mathematician, philosopher and scientist. The central argument of the paper is that Du Châtelet’s letters leave traces of the process of becoming a femme philosophe, while also throwing light in her involvement in the scientific, philosophical and cultural formations of the early modern period. In this context Du Châtelet’s personal letters carry i…
Ever yours, mathematically’
In this paper the author looks at the letters of two renowned women mathematicians and scientists of the Victorian period, Mary Somerville and Ada Lovelace, while also considering the imperceptibility of Sophie Germain, an important French mathematician and philosopher in their epistolary exchanges and philosophical writings. Drawing on the importance of mathematical correspondences and epistolary education in the creation, circulation and dissem…
Exceptional women in science education? Émilie Du Châtelet and Maria Gaetana Agnesi
In this paper the author considers the educational experiences and ideas of Émilie Du Châtelet and Maria Gaetana Agnesi, two women mathematicians, scientists and philosophers in eighteenth-century Europe. By tracing their historical emergence as subjects of scientific knowledge, as well as creators of philosophy and culture, the author argues that we need to revisit the history of women’s science education and deconstruct the image of “the except…
Antigone re-imagined
In this article I am thinking with Antigone, a political figuration that has been invested with many readings, interpretations and artistic expressions in feminist theory and beyond. The article draws on a research project of listening to migrant and refugee women's narratives of displacement and travelling. What connects these stories via the figure of Antigone is women's desire to tell their stories as an expression of their will to rewrite the…
Thinking with Stephen J. Ball
Becoming-cat or what a woman’s body can do
Drawing on a body of literature that considers narrative meaning emerging in intra-species entanglements, in this paper I read Gwen John’s letters revolving around her relationship with the many cats she lived with throughout her life. I am particularly interested in throwing light at moments when a woman’s body makes strong connections with the animal’s body blurring the boundaries between humans and non-humans through a cosmological ethics of c…
Fannia Mary Cohn et le mouvement pour l’éducation des ouvrières aux États-Unis
Cet article propose une généalogie du mouvement d’éducation des ouvrières aux États-Unis. Il s’appuie sur les écrits personnels et politiques de Fannia Mary Cohn (1885-1962), militante syndicale de l’industrie du textile à New York dans la première moitié du XXe siècle. Trois thèmes y sont développés et discutés : les défis méthodologiques de la recherche généalogique basée sur les archives et les documents autobiographiques ; l’impact de ce que …
Feeling the Real
Nomadism as a spatial concept denoting uncharted movements has opened up non-static ways of theorizing the subject in feminist theory and beyond. But it seems that the nomads of the real world and their torturing wanderings today have irrevocably challenged the romance of unregulated movement and force us to radically rethink the very concept of nomadism itself. In this paper I address the aporias that women's entanglement in current mobility ass…
Doing new materialisms
Including an interview as part of the special issue responds to one specific question that has to do with the production of scientific knowledge. During the Training School, the context in which the current special issue is framed, we highlighted the importance of creating inter-generational knowledges able to transverse across disciplines and the historicity of matter itself. The interview that we are transcribing in this journal represents this…
Almanac II
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Traces in the Archive
In this paper, I draw on my research project of writing a feminist genealogy of automathographies, through excavating Sofia Kovalevskaya’s auto/biographical documents. As the first woman to hold a chair in mathematics in modern Europe, but also as a novelist and playwright, Kovaleskaya is a figure who has inspired generations of women mathematicians, as well as feminist and literary scholars around the world. And yet, apart from her autobiography…
Doing Narrative Research
List of Contributors Introduction: What is Narrative Research? - Maria Tamboukou and Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire Narratives of Events: Labovian Narrative Analysis and its Limitations - Wendy Patterson From Experience-Centred to Socioculturally-Oriented Approaches to Narrative - Corinne Squire Analysing Narrative Contexts - Ann Phoenix A Foucauldian Approach to Narratives - Maria Tamboukou Practising a Rhizomatic Perspective in Narrative Researc…
Writing Genealogies
Meeting' FoucaultLike many people of my generation, when I was young I thought that the world needed dramatic changes and that I should do something about it.After spending several years actively involved in various off-mainstream political and feminist groups, I foun d myself trapped in an impasse of both theory and practice .It was the early 1980s in Greece; Europe was changing, the world was changing and theories seemed insufficient to account…
Re-imagining the narratable subject
In this article I problematize sequence as a necessary condition for defining and making sense of narratives and argue that it is to the consideration of process that the interest in narrative research should shift. Process as an organizing plane focuses not on what stories are but on what they do and how their meaning is ceaselessly deferred, breaching the narratological conventions of coherence and closure. Drawing on my work with Gwen John's l…
Interrogating the 'emotionalturn
In this paper I use theoretical insights from Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari to explore what I have called 'the emotional turn' in education. In following trails of the pedagogical repercussions of the Foucauldian notion of the care of the self, I trace various ways that it has been used and transformed in discourses of progressive pedagogy. The Foucauldian conceptualization of the care of the self is further making connections with the Deleuzian…
The Paradox of Being a Woman Teacher
In this article, the author follows genealogical lines of analysis in an attempt to map the different discourses and practices that interweave women's position in education today. Education is theorised as a nexus of created paradoxical spaces, where the female self has attempted to surpass closed boundaries and to question the dichotomy of the feminised private and/or the masculine public. The author also considers the importance of time restric…
Archival research
In recent years, archival research in the social sciences is emerging as a vibrant field of qualitative research, with contributions from a range of disciplinary fields, epistemological standpoints, theoretical insights and methodological approaches. In this article, I explore archival research strategies in life-history research, drawing on my experience of working at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas at Austin, re…
Charting cartographies of resistance
In this paper I chart lines of flight in women artist's narratives. In focusing on the complex interrelations between the social milieus of education and art, what I suggest is that they should be analysed as an assemblage where power relations and forces of desire are constantly at play in creating conditions of possibility for women to resist, imagine themselves becoming other and for new possibilities in their lives to be actualised. As a nove…
Relational narratives
Machinic assemblages
In this paper I explore connections between women, art education and spatial relations drawing on the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of machinic assemblage as a useful analytical tool for making sense of the heterogeneity and meshwork of life narratives and their social milieus. In focusing on Mary Bradish Titcomb, a fin-de-siècle Bostonian woman who lived and worked in the interface of education and art, moving in between differentiated series of so…
Truth telling in Foucault and Arendt
In this paper, I consider the problem of truth telling through the notion of parrhesia as developed and explicated in Foucault’s last lectures at the College de France (1982–1983 and 1983–1984) and the figure of the pariah that runs throughout Arendt’s work. In tracing connections and tensions in the way the two thinkers explore questions and dilemmas around the courage to tell the truth in philosophy and politics, I look into the current climate…
Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces
Narrative rhythmanalysis
In this paper I draw on my experiences of listening to migrant and refugee women’s stories of displacement and explore questions around discourses and practices of listening across borders and languages. In doing so, I particularly focus on the materiality of listening, the force of corporeal voices, the rhythms of oral narratives and their effects on understanding and making connections within the web of human relations. Following tracks and tra…
Feeling the Real
Nomadism as a spatial concept denoting uncharted movements has opened up non-static ways of theorizing the subject in feminist theory and beyond. But it seems that the nomads of the real world and their torturing wanderings today have irrevocably challenged the romance of unregulated movement and force us to radically rethink the very concept of nomadism itself. In this paper I address the aporias that women's entanglement in current mobility ass…
Leaving the Self
In this paper I follow nomadic passages in the memoir of Sofia Laskaridou, a Greek woman artist. I \nam interested into how her dislocation from familiar places and spaces in the beginning of the twentieth \ncentury opened up unforeseen territories for her self to be constituted as a travel logbook, a chart tracing \npaths of becoming. As a writer and painter of her own modernity, Laskaridou reconstitutes herself in \nretracing her paths in the c…
Power, desire and emotions in education
In this paper I will attempt to consider emotions in the context of three women’s lives, whose passion for education brought them together and then tore them apart along axes of difference defined by race, class and age in apartheid South Africa. I am looking in particular into the correspondence between Lily Moya, Mabel Palmer, and Sibusisiwe Makhanya, published in 1987 Marks, S. 1987. Not either an experimental doll: the separate worlds of thre…
Of Other Spaces
This article explores the first British university-associated women's colleges at the turn of the nineteenth century. Drawing on Foucault, the article looks into the dualistic opposition between private and public, as well as women's attempts to transcend this dichotomy. In theorising women's colleges as Foucauldian heterotopias, spaces in the interstices of power relations and dominant social structures, the author focuses on the interplay of co…
Mobility assemblages and lines of flight in women’s narratives of forced displacement
In this article I take the notion of the mobility assemblage as a theoretical lens through which I consider entanglements between refugee and migrant women on the move, intense experiences of gendered labour, and affective encounters in crossing borders and following lines of flight. The analysis revolves around the life-story of a young refugee woman, who recounts her experiences of travelling to Greece. What emerges from her narrative is a whir…
Nomadic Subjects
This paper reads the fragmented life stories of four young black women in the UK, at a transitional point of their lives, when they are making decisions about their post-compulsory education. We argue that the notion of nomadism is a useful, albeit not unproblematic, tool to theorize the multifarious ways that these black young women negotiate subject positions, make choices and shape their lives. We further trace how these women are struggling a…
Spacing Herself
This article is concerned with the problematic status of the female self, seen from the perspective of women in education. Studying women's autobiographical writings, the author uses a genealogical approach to interrogate the historical and cultural conditions of the construction of the female self. The article looks specifically at those practices women have used to act upon themselves and create a lifestyle of their own, technologies of the fem…
Rethinking the subject in feminist research
In this paper, I discuss the question of 'the death of the subject' within feminist narratology and beyond. In doing this, I bring forward the notion of the 'narrative persona', a configuration that refers to the writing of feminist genealogies by drawing on women's auto/biographical narratives. The narrative personae of my inquiries emerge from Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy and Arendt's political thought: they are taken as conceptual and aes…
Education as action/the adventure of education
Understanding and action are central themes in Hannah Arendt's thought and an idea that runs throughout her work is that whenever human beings act, they start processes. It is in this light that she saw education as a process whose aim is to make human beings feel at home in the world. Given the centrality of process in understanding action, early on in her work, Arendt reflected and drew upon the ideas of Alfred Whitehead, the philosopher of pro…
Love, Narratives, Politics
In this article I explore relationships between love and politics by looking into Rosa Luxemburg's letters to her lover and comrade Leo Jogiches. My discussion is framed within Hannah Arendt's conceptualization of love as a manifestation of existence through the Augustinian journey of memory and as an existential force binding together the three faculties of the mind in her philosophical analysis: thinking, willing and judging. What I argue is th…
Writing Feminist Genealogies
In this paper I consider the critical role of auto/biographies in the writing of a \nFoucauldian genealogy of women teachers at the turn of the nineteenth century in Britain. In isolating points of convergence between feminist theories and the Foucauldian genealogical project, I explore the deployment of self-technologies of women teachers in a particular historical stage and geographical site, which I have identified as having a particular genea…
Traces in the Archive
In this paper, I draw on my research project of writing a feminist genealogy of automathographies, through excavating Sofia Kovalevskaya’s auto/biographical documents. As the first woman to hold a chair in mathematics in modern Europe, but also as a novelist and playwright, Kovaleskaya is a figure who has inspired generations of women mathematicians, as well as feminist and literary scholars around the world. And yet, apart from her autobiography…
Moving between worlds
In this paper I look at refugee women’s narratives of border crossings and inhabiting borderlands. Following tracks and traces of feminist geopolitics, the paper unfolds in three parts: first I explore borders as political, cultural and material practices, particularly focusing on the sea borders of the Aegean islands as gateways to ‘the fortress Europe’. Then I consider border situations within symbolic and imaginary spaces inspired by feminist …
Spacing Herself
This article is concerned with the problematic status of the female self, seen from the perspective of women in education. Studying women's autobiographical writings, the author uses a genealogical approach to interrogate the historical and cultural conditions of the construction of the female self. The article looks specifically at those practices women have used to act upon themselves and create a lifestyle of their own, technologies of the fem…
Writing Genealogies
Meeting' FoucaultLike many people of my generation, when I was young I thought that the world needed dramatic changes and that I should do something about it.After spending several years actively involved in various off-mainstream political and feminist groups, I foun d myself trapped in an impasse of both theory and practice .It was the early 1980s in Greece; Europe was changing, the world was changing and theories seemed insufficient to account…
Of Other Spaces
This article explores the first British university-associated women's colleges at the turn of the nineteenth century. Drawing on Foucault, the article looks into the dualistic opposition between private and public, as well as women's attempts to transcend this dichotomy. In theorising women's colleges as Foucauldian heterotopias, spaces in the interstices of power relations and dominant social structures, the author focuses on the interplay of co…
The Paradox of Being a Woman Teacher
In this article, the author follows genealogical lines of analysis in an attempt to map the different discourses and practices that interweave women's position in education today. Education is theorised as a nexus of created paradoxical spaces, where the female self has attempted to surpass closed boundaries and to question the dichotomy of the feminised private and/or the masculine public. The author also considers the importance of time restric…
Erasing Sexuality from the Blackboard
a foremost campaigner for women's rights in education, in a way the story has come full circle back to the focal point of this article: women in education as speaking subjects of 'a sexuality of their own'.Elmy was not the only feminist writer who began her struggle from the Movement for the Higher Education of Women.In her autobiography, Cicely Hamilton, an active feminist and author of Marriage as a Trade, recounts how she started her career as…
Nomadic Subjects
This paper reads the fragmented life stories of four young black women in the UK, at a transitional point of their lives, when they are making decisions about their post-compulsory education. We argue that the notion of nomadism is a useful, albeit not unproblematic, tool to theorize the multifarious ways that these black young women negotiate subject positions, make choices and shape their lives. We further trace how these women are struggling a…
Women, Education and the Self
Maria Tamboukou links Foucauldian ideas to feminism and education. Its central argument is that the Foucauldian notion of 'technologies of the self' needs to be gendered and contextualized. This argum
Interrogating the 'emotionalturn
In this paper I use theoretical insights from Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari to explore what I have called 'the emotional turn' in education. In following trails of the pedagogical repercussions of the Foucauldian notion of the care of the self, I trace various ways that it has been used and transformed in discourses of progressive pedagogy. The Foucauldian conceptualization of the care of the self is further making connections with the Deleuzian…
Writing Feminist Genealogies
In this paper I consider the critical role of auto/biographies in the writing of a \nFoucauldian genealogy of women teachers at the turn of the nineteenth century in Britain. In isolating points of convergence between feminist theories and the Foucauldian genealogical project, I explore the deployment of self-technologies of women teachers in a particular historical stage and geographical site, which I have identified as having a particular genea…
Enjoy their symptom
Voela and Tamboukou use Slavoj Žižek’s notion of the symptom as a lens through which to look at representations of female figures in Greek literary texts of the early twentieth century by Gregorios Xenopoulos. In mapping the construction of the figure of the modern woman in the matrix of discourses, fantasies and power relations of fin-de-siècle Greece, they draw on psychoanalytic insights, interrupted by Foucauldian interventions. Following Judi…
Tracing heterotopias
Over the last fifteen years, feminist theorists have sought to redefine female subjectivity. Amongst a wide range of critical notions of the female self, this paper focuses on what Foucault has defined as heterotopias, 'different places' which disrupt the dominance of the one single 'real' social place, offering shelter to subjects in crisis. I will argue that this Foucauldian notion is a useful tool for the exploration of the multifarious ways t…
Power, desire and emotions in education
In this paper I will attempt to consider emotions in the context of three women’s lives, whose passion for education brought them together and then tore them apart along axes of difference defined by race, class and age in apartheid South Africa. I am looking in particular into the correspondence between Lily Moya, Mabel Palmer, and Sibusisiwe Makhanya, published in 1987 Marks, S. 1987. Not either an experimental doll: the separate worlds of thre…
A Foucauldian Approach to Narratives
Introduction
I live in terror of not being misunderstood (Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’) In the last three decades, narrative has acquired an increasingly high profile in social research
Educating the other
Doing Narrative Research
List of Contributors Introduction: What is Narrative Research? - Maria Tamboukou and Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire Narratives of Events: Labovian Narrative Analysis and its Limitations - Wendy Patterson From Experience-Centred to Socioculturally-Oriented Approaches to Narrative - Corinne Squire Analysing Narrative Contexts - Ann Phoenix A Foucauldian Approach to Narratives - Maria Tamboukou Practising a Rhizomatic Perspective in Narrative Researc…
Machinic assemblages
In this paper I explore connections between women, art education and spatial relations drawing on the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of machinic assemblage as a useful analytical tool for making sense of the heterogeneity and meshwork of life narratives and their social milieus. In focusing on Mary Bradish Titcomb, a fin-de-siècle Bostonian woman who lived and worked in the interface of education and art, moving in between differentiated series of so…
Re-imagining the narratable subject
In this article I problematize sequence as a necessary condition for defining and making sense of narratives and argue that it is to the consideration of process that the interest in narrative research should shift. Process as an organizing plane focuses not on what stories are but on what they do and how their meaning is ceaselessly deferred, breaching the narratological conventions of coherence and closure. Drawing on my work with Gwen John's l…
Leaving the Self
In this paper I follow nomadic passages in the memoir of Sofia Laskaridou, a Greek woman artist. I \nam interested into how her dislocation from familiar places and spaces in the beginning of the twentieth \ncentury opened up unforeseen territories for her self to be constituted as a travel logbook, a chart tracing \npaths of becoming. As a writer and painter of her own modernity, Laskaridou reconstitutes herself in \nretracing her paths in the c…
Working With Stories As Multiplicities, Opening up the Black Box of the Archive
This paper opens up a dialogue between narrative researchers working within and between history and the social sciences. Following Israel's (this issue) account of how narratives of lives are useful subjects for historical analysis, I consider issues arising from the social sciences, particularly focusing on questions that destabilise narratological conventions around sequence, closure and agency. In agreement with Israel, I suggest that narrativ…
Commentary on Hyvärinen
Letters written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (Oxford World’s Classics)
Charting cartographies of resistance
In this paper I chart lines of flight in women artist's narratives. In focusing on the complex interrelations between the social milieus of education and art, what I suggest is that they should be analysed as an assemblage where power relations and forces of desire are constantly at play in creating conditions of possibility for women to resist, imagine themselves becoming other and for new possibilities in their lives to be actualised. As a nove…
Deleuzian encounters
Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 270 pp., £47.50 (hardback), ISBN 978‐0‐230‐506923 This is a very interesting collection of essays drawing on DeleuzoGuattarian concepts and methodologies in r
Relational narratives
Sociology (62 obras) · Art (44 obras) · Philosophy (36 obras) · Narrative (34 obras) · Literature (33 obras) · Aesthetics (32 obras) · Epistemology (31 obras) · Political science (31 obras) · History (26 obras) · Gender Studies (25 obras)