TiP Talk by Toni Weller

The Racialisation Of British Women During The Long Nineteenth Century:
How White Women’s Bodies Became Tools of Control and Surveillance

Where: IT University of Copenhagen, auditorium 4 When: 4.April 2019, 14.00—16.00

The Technologies in Practice (TiP) research group at the ITU is happy to present one of the leading scholars in the field of information history Toni Weller from De Montfort University, as our next speaker in our TiP Talk Speaker Series.

Abstract The period between 1780 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 witnessed a distinctive chapter in the racialisation of British women. During this period, the long-standing idea that women were biologically distinct from men became, for the first time, legitimised by science. Combined with an emergent and increasingly powerful Victorian information state, women’s physical bodies themselves became platforms for surveillance. Based on Dr. Weller’s chapter in the forthcoming Khiara M. Bridges and Jeffrey Vagle (Eds.) Cambridge Handbook of Race and Surveillance, (CUP, in press), this talk explores these fascinating inter-connected discourses of the Victorian information state, surveillance, race, gender and power in the nineteenth century Britain.

Bio Dr. Toni Weller is currently a Visiting Research Fellow in History, formerly Senior Lecturer in History, at De Montfort University. She holds degrees in History and Information Science from Cambridge University and City University of London. Her research interests are focused around the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of information history, of which
she has long been an advocate. Specifically, she is interested in how information was thought of and used in a social and cultural capacity, as a distinct move away from the traditions of thinking of information in terms of its technological or organisational tools and processes. Her publications include Information History: An Introduction (2008), The Victorians and Information (2009), Information History in the Modern World (2010) and History in the Digital Age (2012). Dr. Weller is currently working on three different information history projects, respectively relating to surveillance, power, and women during the nineteenth century.

TiP Talks – a series of talks
The Technologies in Practice research group at the ITU is the organizer behind this series of talks, “TiP Talks”, where we have invited academically distinguished speakers to ITU to share their research, which we consider as being of inspiration for academics who are interested in qualitative studies of technologically mediated practices in organizations.

This is talk is open for everyone, but the content is intended for an academic audience as it builds upon previous research.

No registration needed.