Gender and Mobility: A Feminist Geographer’s Perspective

Martin Wachs Lecture || March 1, 2008 || UC Berkeley

Presented by: Susan Hanson, Clark University

In the 3rd annual Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture, Susan Hanson, professor emerita of geography at Clark University, tackled the complex issues surrounding gender and mobility. Lending her perspective to this conversation, Hanson emphasized how feminists have long known that gender and mobility are inseparable, influencing each other in profound and often subtle ways. In her talk, she discussed that tackling these complex societal problems will require improved understandings of the relationships between gender and mobility. Hanson illuminated the gaps in scholarship, as we saw how work on how mobility shapes gender has emphasized gender, to the neglect of mobility, whereas research on how gender shapes mobility has dealt with mobility in great detail and paid much less attention to gender.