Insider insights: Institutionalising Gender Studies at University College Dublin through the Gender Studies Community–University Outreach Programme

In this article, I consider the persistence of Women’s and Gender Studies at University College Dublin through the lens of a Community–University Outreach Partnership Programme in Women, Gender and Social Justice, which has been central to the institutionalisation of Women’s and Gender Studies at University College Dublin over a 30-year period. Adopting an archival, genealogical approach, I draw on four autoethnographic vignettes based on my personal association with the outreach programme as academic director for the past 25 years. Deeply descriptive, the vignettes I present are messy, imperfect and partial. They are also reparative as I feel my way backwards as an act of re-membering and in part re-claiming this complex and messy history. I use them as a prompt to read across the complex genealogies that have characterised and continue to inform this programme’s evolution. They are invitational and highlight key moments that reflect both the institutional architecture and the community landscapes that have shaped the programme. The vignettes also serve to make visible the processes of institutionalising gender studies within the academy and, in particular, the often-fraught relationship with disciplinary knowledge-making, academic stealth and invisibilised labour and the centrality of place-based pedagogies. This partial genealogy makes visible the professional and affective impact these explicitly feminist, community–university outreach programmes have had on those involved in their continuous delivery over a quarter decade centrally located in the academy in theory, yet peripherally marginal in practice.