In an earlier phase of my working life (well, I guess, not so long ago when you count that I’ve been in full time employment since 1 October 1983…), I was Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh from 2014 to 2017.
For one intense and exciting year, together with the Institute’s Manager and with the assistance of many individuals and institutions, we mounted a digital project entitled The Dangerous Women Project. The premise was to explore the question, “what does it mean to be a dangerous woman?”, and we secured buy in and support from many women who had been described as dangerous, such as Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish First Minister, Mary Beard, the classicist, and Shami Chakrabarti, previously Director of Liberty. Our digital project published at least one entry every day for a year, between IWD2016 and IWD2017, book-ended by marvellous launch and closure events at the Scottish Story-Telling centre. It was a wonderful exercise in community building, as well as providing a platform for many original voices, some of whom have already gone on to develop a more visible profile since they originally published with us.
Now that project, which remains online and has been used for different purposes by its readers, including teaching, is coming back to life in an altogether more traditional and yet enduring form: that of the book. Together with Ben Fletcher-Watson, who came to this project just as he stepped into the role of Institute Manager in 2017, I’ve co-edited a selection of original entries, updated and edited, on the topic of women, art and dangerousness. The Art of Being Dangerous, which will appear in early May, has been brought to life by our superb partners at Leuven University Press, who have done an excellent job of editing and designing the book. This blog is a bit of a meta-blog, as I already wrote a blog in the form of an interview for LUP, and that’s online here, and it also tells you a bit about the other project, for Unbound, which is ongoing. That presents another selection of 50 entries from the DWP on topics and power and identity, and it offered its own distinctive challenges as it has been crowd-funded (you can still pledge; the book will come out in early 2022, so might eventually have an in person launch event!).
What is particularly fulfilling about bringing this project to fruition now, though, stems from the impact that the pandemic has had on women’s lives and on the lives of all those engaged in the creative industries. The multiple impacts of the pandemic have affected issues of time, labour, care, and creativity in ways that we could never have imagined at the beginning of 2020. And now here we are, going into the middle of 2021, still with no definite exit point from the pandemic in sight.
If you want to learn a bit more about the whole project of bringing The Art of Being Dangerous to publication, you can also consult a news item on the IASH website, issued on IWD2021, when we were delighted officially to launch the book as forthcoming. That page also contains multiple links if you want to pre-order the book. It’s going to look fantastic, whether on a desk, a coffee table or a bookshelf, and as you can see from the publicity material, it’s definitely one for fans of crochet everywhere. So if that’s been your lockdown thing…, then the Art of Being Dangerous might be just the thing for you.
