
Maria Tamboukou
Maria Tamboukou is Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of East London, UK. She is also Affiliated Professor in Gender Studies at Linnaeus University Sweden and Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Educational Research at Griffith University, Australia. Her research activity develops in the areas of philosophies and epistemologies in the social sciences, feminist theories, narrative analytics and archival research. She is the author of 7 books and more than 70 journal articles.
Biography
Maria Tamboukou (BA, MA, PhD) is Professor of Feminist Studies at the School of Social Sciences, University of East London, UK. She has held visiting research positions in a number of institutions and is currently Affiliated Professor in Gender Studies at Linnaeus University Sweden and Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Educational Research at Griffith University, Australia. Maria got her PhD in Sociology from King's College, University of London in 1999. Her research activity develops in the areas of philosophies and epistemologies in the social sciences, feminist theories, narrative analytics and archival research. She is the author of 7 monographs, 2 co-authored books, 3 co-edited volumes on research methods and more than 70 articles and book chapters. Writing histories of the present is the central focus of her work, currently configured as an assemblage of feminist genealogies.Areas of Research / Professional Expertise
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Philosophies and Epistemologies in the Social Sciences
Feminist Theories
Narrative Analysis
Archival Research
History of Women's Education
Women's Labour Histories
Foucaulsian and Deleuzian analytics
Personal Interests
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literature, cinema, theatre, music, art, swimming
Websites
Books
Articles

Education as action/the adventure of education: thinking with Arendt and Whitehe
Published: Feb 10, 2016 by Journal of Educational Administration and History
Authors: Tamboukou
Taking action, process, imagination and adventure as my central ideas, in this paper, I make connections between Arendt and Whitehead in an attempt to think about education within and beyond ‘dark times’.

The Work of Memory: embodiment, materiality and home in Jeanne Bouvier's autobio
Published: May 12, 2015 by Women's History Review
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
In this paper I follow trails in the memory of work by reading the books and papers of Jeanne Bouvier, a French seamstress, ardent trade-unionist and passionate writer, who left a rich body of labour literature including four published historical studies, as well as the memoirs of her life, work and struggles.

Narrative Personae and Visual Signs: Reading Leonard's Intimate Photo Memoir
Published: Dec 13, 2014 by a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
In this article, the author looks at Joanne Leonard’s Being in Pictures and engages in a critical dialogue with the assemblage of visual and textual narratives that comprise her intimate photo memoir.

The autobiographical you: letters in the gendered politics of the labour movemen
Published: Sep 10, 2014 by Journal of Gender Studies
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
In this article, I consider the importance of epistolary narratives in the interface of autobiography and politics. In doing this, I read the letters of Fannia Mary Cohn, a Jewish immigrant worker, trade union activist and ardent labour organizer in the garment industry in the USA in the first half of the twentieth century.

‘Not everything that the bourgeois world created is bad’: aesthetics and politic
Published: Apr 04, 2014 by Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
In this paper, I look into the papers of Fannia Cohn, an immigrant labour organizer, who served the Education Department of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) between 1918 and 1962 and became one of its few women vice-presidents. As an internationally recognized figure in the history of workers' education

Educating the seamstress: studying and writing the memory of work
Published: Jul 01, 2013 by History of Education: Journal of the History of Education Society
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
In this paper I look at the history of women workers' education through the life history of Rose Pesotta, an anarchist labour organizer.

Farewell to the Self: Between the Letter and the Self-Portrait
Published: Jun 25, 2013 by Life Writing
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
In this paper I consider interfaces between visual and textual representations of the female self in art. I am looking in particular at Gwen John's self-portraits and the letters revolving around them.

Truth telling in Foucault and Arendt
Published: Jul 10, 2012 by Journal of Education Policy
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
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.

Heterotopic and holey spaces as tents for the nomad
Published: Oct 19, 2011 by Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
In this article I look into the letters and paintings of the expatriate Welsh artist Gwen John, tracing her spatial practices in the urban spaces of modernity. John's fluid spatiality is thus conceived as an event that interrogates static conceptualizations of spaces and identities and foregrounds difference, movement and forces of desire as constitutive of the real.

Charting cartographies of resistance
Published: Nov 24, 2010 by Gender and Education
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
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.

Working With Stories As Multiplicities, Opening up the Black Box of the Archive
Published: May 17, 2010 by Life Writing
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
This paper opens up a dialogue between narrative researchers working within and between history and the social sciences. I consider issues arising from the social sciences, particularly focusing on questions that destabilise narratological conventions around sequence, closure and agency.

Narratives from within: an Arendtian approach
Published: Apr 26, 2010 by Journal of Educational Administration and History
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
In this paper I draw on my research of writing a genealogy of women artists, focusing in particular on the life history of the American working‐class artist, May Stevens (1924–). I follow Hannah Arendt’s conceptualisation of biographies within the political and I highlight the importance of history painting in creating critical communities of remembrance.

LEAVING THE SELF
Published: Jul 28, 2009 by Australian Feminist Studies
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
In this article I look at the memoir of the Greek artist Sofia Laskaridou

Machinic assemblages: women, art education and space
Published: Aug 14, 2008 by Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
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.

Power, Desire and Emotions in Education
Published: May 10, 2006 by Gender and Education
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
In this paper I will attempt to consider emotions in the context of three womens 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.

Educational heterotopias and the self
Published: Sep 10, 2004 by Pedagogy, Culture & Society
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
This article looks at the first university-associated colleges in the United Kingdom at the turn of the nineteenth century, and at how the first women students of these colleges lived within the limits of their society, but also beyond them, in yet unrecognised ‘different social spaces’, which Foucault has described as heterotopias.

Tracing heterotopias: writing women educators in Greece
Published: Apr 02, 2004 by Gender and Education
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
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 that some women educators attempted to define and describe themselves at the turn of the nineteenth century in Greece.

Enjoy their symptom
Published: Mar 01, 2004 by Women, A Cultural Review
Authors: Angie Voela, Maria Tamboukou
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

Writing Feminist Genealogies
Published: Mar 04, 2003 by Journal of Gender Studies,
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
In this paper I consider the critical role of auto/biographies in the writing of a Foucauldian genealogy of women teachers at the turn of the nineteenth century in Britain.

Nomadic Subjects: young black women in Britain
Published: Dec 01, 2002 by Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education
Authors: Maria Tamboukou, Stephen Ball
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.

Erasing Sexuality from the Blackboard
Published: Sep 18, 2002 by Australian Feminist Studies
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
In this paper I consider women teachers' approaches to sexuality at the turn of the 19th century in Britain

Of Other Spaces
Published: Sep 04, 2000 by Gender, Place and Culture - A Journal of Feminist Geography
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
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.

The Paradox of Being a Woman Teacher
Published: Jul 02, 2000 by Gender and Education
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
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.

Writing Genealogies
Published: Aug 04, 1999 by Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
In this paper I explore Foucault's genealogical strategies for doing research

Spacing Herself
Published: May 02, 1999 by Gender and Education
Authors: Maria Tamboukou
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.