{"id":20002,"date":"2026-11-12T07:00:24","date_gmt":"2026-11-12T07:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=20002"},"modified":"2026-11-03T22:10:04","modified_gmt":"2026-11-03T22:10:04","slug":"feminist-interview-project-hilary-robinson-in-conversation-with-jehan-mullin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=20002","title":{"rendered":"Feminist Interview Project: Hilary Robinson in Conversation with Jehan Mullin"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u202f<\/span><\/span>Feminist Interview Project<\/span><\/span><\/a>, <\/span>organized by<\/span> CAA\u2019s <\/span><\/span>Committee on Women in the Arts<\/span><\/span><\/a> (CWA) <\/span><\/span>examines the practices of feminism by interviewing a range of scholars and artists. <\/span>The project aims<\/span> to preserve the living histories of feminist art practices, while interrogating and expanding the boundaries of what might be considered feminist. Through its interviews, this project reimagines the<\/span><\/span>\u202f<\/span><\/span>possibilities of feminist practice<\/span><\/span>\u202f<\/span><\/span>and feminist futures by exploring a diversity of perspectives and approaches to research. This collection<\/span> of<\/span><\/span>\u202f<\/span><\/span>interviews<\/span><\/span>\u202f<\/span><\/span>aspires to critically examine the relationships between feminism, feminist art, and the lived realities of women, nonbinary and female-identified<\/span>\u202f<\/span>artists<\/span>\u202f<\/span>and scholars across the globe.<\/span> <\/span>For our<\/span> ongoing collaboration with <\/span><\/span>Art Journal Open<\/span><\/span>, we are excited to present Hilary Robinson in conversation wit<\/span>h<\/span> Jehan Mullin.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Dr. Hilary Robinson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Each year, CWA awards one artist and one scholar the <\/span>Distinguished Feminist Award<\/span><\/a>. In 2024, <\/span>Dr. Hilary Robison<\/span><\/a> received the award for her invaluable contributions to feminist art history, theory, and criticism, and for her <\/span>decades-long commitment to feminist education. The following October, CWA sat down with Hilary over Zoom to discuss her lifelong engagement with feminism. From feminist pedagogy to questions of historiography, from the politics of location to the importance of citation practices, Professor Robinson detailed the ways that feminism has shaped her practice over the past 40 years\u2014and the way it continues to do so today.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Jehan Mullin<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

. . . [F]eminism is a way of being in the world. It’s a set of politics. It’s how you live, it’s how you think, it’s how you analyze things. It’s not something that you just turn on for a particular purpose, and I hope that it also brings with it a set of ethics about how you behave with others.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jehan Mullin: I\u2019ll begin by asking you a question we ask all interviewees for the Feminist Interview Project. What does feminism mean to you?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Hilary Robinson: <\/b>That is such a huge question. Where do I start? I think that some form of feminism was always with me. Both my parents came from working class backgrounds, and the women’s struggle was definitely part of that. So, I was kind of inculcated with it. My mother was a fierce and very engaged woman, and she raised me in a particular way. She was born in 1923 and came from a socialist working-class background. Most of her family all left school when they were fourteen years old. She was able to stay on because she was the youngest and everything opened up for her after the war. She became a teacher herself. My father also came from a working-class background. He left school at fourteen and became apprenticed as a book binder and eventually became internationally known as a fine binder. There is a reason why I’m going on this tangent. His mother’s father came from Barbados and was a sailor and landed in England and met my great grandmother-to-be who was a suffragette. So, it’s in my family going back generations. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For me, though, feminism is a way of being in the world. It’s a set of politics. It’s how you live, it’s how you think, it’s how you analyze things. It’s not something that you just turn on for a particular purpose, and I hope that it also brings with it a set of ethics about how you behave with others. <\/span>To me it’s something very dynamic. It cannot be reduced to any single definition because it will vary depending on the local cultures and politics and practices that people find themselves in. And, yes, it’s to do with being a woman, but because it’s a set of politics, it’s not confined to women at all.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

JM: Could you talk more about this understanding of feminism as a set of political practices and how it informs your work as a scholar?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

HR:<\/strong> I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot recently, as I\u2019ve been going back through some of my earlier writings, and what I see there is that feminism, of course, is antagonistic to disciplines, to academic disciplines, to cultural categorizations and the canon because such things were developed very much within a Eurocentric, colonialist, and patriarchal set of structures. Lisa Tickner said it best back in 1988 when she said that feminism is not a methodology.1<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/span><\/span> You can’t just apply it to something. I think this is why feminists and feminisms have often had problems within the academy and problems within canon-forming institutions because they want to deconstruct the structures of power that have produced certain cultural and pedagogical practices.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So, feminism informs my work at every level. For me as a scholar, feminism affects the way that I teach. It affects how I interact with other scholars. It affects my working relationships with others. And it affects the kinds of projects I want to do.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

JM: What does this look like in your working practices? Can you provide an example?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

HR: <\/strong>Yes, let me tell you a little anecdote. I got my first full-time teaching job in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1992, before the first ceasefire in 1994, before the peace process, and before the Good Friday Agreement, which happened a few years later in 1998. I knew that the Troubles were ongoing but, you know, I was quite na\u00efve. After I got the job, I found a place to live, packed up a van and got over there two or three weeks later to find that the people next door had left and there was a bullet hole in the window. The first week I was there, I was awoken twice in the night by the sound of bombs going off in the center of town. That was a kind of \u201cWhat have I landed into?\u201d type of moment for me. But this also came into my teaching. In my classes, it was often the first time that students from both sides had met each other because primary and secondary schools were segregated\u2014Protestant and Catholic\u2014and there was no trust. If a bomb went off or if a killing happened, half the students just wouldn’t come to university for a week or so, sometimes longer.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was also a means of trying to build trust in that situation, in what was a low-grade civil war\u2014and it was important for me to try to build that trust. I drew upon my feminist experience as a means of working on that.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, the second year I was there, I started teaching elective modules and I used consciousness-raising techniques in the seminar room. We all sat in a circle and tried to acknowledge the kinds of differences of experience that we all brought. For example, there was a group of slightly older women there, and some of them had children, and I didn’t have children, so immediately there was an understanding that they would have knowledge they\u2019d bring with them that I didn\u2019t have. It was that type of dynamic where we\u2019d ask, \u201cWhat constitutes knowledge in the classroom? What do you bring to bear on the subject under discussion?\u201d <\/span>It was also a means of trying to build trust in that situation, in what was a low-grade civil war\u2014and it was important for me to try to build that trust. I drew upon my feminist experience as a means of working on that.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe I should add another pedagogical practice that I’ve been working on since 2018 with my PhD students. We all meet as an informal group about once a month for an afternoon. One of the things that we often do when we meet is conduct a slow reading of a text. By slow reading, I mean that we select a text that we would like to study, we bring it to the classroom, somebody reads a paragraph out loud, we discuss it, and then we move on to the next paragraph, and we discuss that one too, and so on. While it’s a very close reading, it’s also a collective and collaborative bringing of understandings to a particular text, which is beneficial because what we’re reading could be extraordinarily difficult theoretically or some of it could be very difficult emotionally. It might also be a text that everybody knows so no one reads closely anymore. And I find it really great because, again, it sort of . . . not flattens it, but it produces a kind of \u00e9galit\u00e9 in the room because people bring different knowledge to different things, and it’s a lovely way to work with a group of PhD students. The people in the room have been all genders, have ranged from their twenties to their sixties, and, you know, there’s usually at least four different accents in the room at once. It’s really great to bring those sorts of differences into the very active and creative discussion of a text. I just wanted to throw that in as another pedagogical practice that I use. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

JM: In hearing you speak about pedagogy, I’d like to ask you about the mentors and teachers who\u2019ve shaped your practice. Who has influenced you most, and how has your practice developed over time? <\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

HR:<\/strong> Yeah, well, when I was an undergraduate\u20141974 to 1979\u2014I was an art student. I studied Fine Art. I’m not an art historian. I\u2019ve never trained in art history. While I was very interested in what women artists were doing, and in feminist art and what that might be, in my practice at university that hardly showed. This was in Newcastle upon Tyne in the northeast of England, a strong political city from the left. While there was a lot of feminist stuff happening there, it just didn’t cross over into the art school, where all but one of my teachers were men. So, I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on Matisse as a draftsman, and then ran away to London. After a few months, I got myself a part-time job at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. That first year in London was transformative. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I remember there were a series of three exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1980: <\/span>Women\u2019s Images of Men<\/span><\/i>, which was exactly what it said and was mainly painting. There was another exhibition called <\/span>About Time<\/span><\/i>, which was performance and installation and video work, and then <\/span>Issue: Social Strategies by Women Artists<\/span><\/i>, which was explicitly political work, and that was curated by Lucy Lippard.2<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/span>And then there was a two- or three-day conference that I went to. I still remember very clearly one panel with Lisa Tickner. She was talking about hegemonic practices and so on. It was packed\u2014standing room only. At one point a woman standing fairly close to me put her hand up and said, \u201cLook, you’re using language that I don’t understand. What does this mean? What does this word hegemonic mean? Don’t assume that we’ve all had the same access to learning that you\u2019ve had.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I thought, \u201cOh, brave question.\u201d Then Lisa sort of settled back in her chair, took a deep breath and then explained the term in a very lucid manner. It was a very gracious, generous exchange, and I thought, \u201cThis is what I should have had at university. This is somebody who knows how to teach. This is somebody who could stretch my thinking.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n