March Forum: Roots and Routes: A Resistant Reading of Family History

Presented by Dr Kate Carruthers Thomas

Kate is an interdisciplinary scholar of gender, who has also spent the last two decades researching her family history. This talk is about the entanglement of those two roles. There has been a lot of technological progress in the techniques of researching family history, but some things have not changed so fast. Family histories continue to be weighted towards white male lines of descent and activity, reflecting genealogy’s continuing bias in favour of patriarchy and the colonial. In response, Kate has tried to tell stories hitherto sidelined or silenced, and the talk will discuss how she's done this, through fieldwork, podcasting and a micro-exhibition.

About the Presenter

Kate is a Senior Research Fellow at Birmingham City University. Her research interests are gender and contemporary higher education, academic writing practices, and creative research methodologies. She is Co-Convenor of a national research network: Higher Education and the COVID-19 Pandemic (HEC19) hosted by the Society for Research in Higher Education (SRHE). She is the author of variety of publications and has a series of podcasts called A Feminist Family History in Eight Lives.

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