Reading Qantas History: Discourses of Intersectionality and the Early Years of Qantas

RESEARCH CAFÉ November 8 with Soc&kom’s new International Reader, Professor Jean Helms Mills presenting her research on Qantas Airlines.

Soc&kom’s new International Reader, Professor Jean Helms Mills (Saint Mary’s University, Canada) presents her research done with E. Shaffner and AJ Mills at a research café at Soc&kom November 8 2017.

In this research, they draw on ‘histories’ of Qantas Airlines, by co-founder Hudson Fysh. The purpose is to provide discursive accounts (dominant constructions of the idea of the airline and the times in which it was/is located) and to serve as a heuris­tic for locating people and events depicted as central to the airline. That is, who is privileged, marginalized, ignored in the stories of Qantas.

To do this Helms Mills, Shaffner and Mills use Critical historiography: to show how the relationship between his­tory and the past is problematic (Munslow, 2010) and to show how history is both discursive (Jenkins, 1991) and the outcome of a series of relational practices.

Intersectionality provides a lens to highlight the orderings of privilege and marginali­zation of groups within the histories and Critical Discourse Analysis is used to exam­ine the texts for what is present, and what is absent and to allow voices, both overt & invisible to emerge and to make contextual sense of the broad themes & discours­es which surface through our engagement.

Soc&kom’s Research Café

Wednesday 8th November 2017, 14:15

Soc&kom, room 234, Snellmaninkatu 12

Welcome!

Read also: Pro­fessor Jean Helms Mills is a new In­ter­na­tional Reader at Soc&kom

Research café

The research cafés are accessible events to become acquainted with current research at Soc&kom. Join for coffee and discussion.