Alice Hoy is not a building

This Colloquium commences with an ethnographic performance, researched, devised and presented by four women researchers from the Faculty of Education. The performance Alice Hoy is Not a Building is a theatre-based representation of findings drawn from a collaborative research project investigating women’s experiences of education, past and present, at the University of Melbourne. Themes of resilience and commitment, multiple agendas and multiple roles, power and powerlessness, marginalisation and collaboration, the personal and the political, are considered and explored within historical and contemporary contexts of women’s experiences of education at a tertiary institution, and are framed by the question ‘how did you get here?’ The performance also seeks to highlight some of the tensions and possibilities encountered when transforming ethnographic data into an embodied, aesthetic, performative form. The performance was followed by a facilitated forum: inviting questions, comments, responses to the issues and provocations raised by this presentation of Alice Hoy is Not a Building at its original research site, the University of Melbourne.