Metaphors

There are many ways in which to figure the world of higher education and developments within it. All are metaphors, though often they are so embedded in the language in which we speak every day that we regard them as simply descriptions of ‘how things are’, the discourse of common sense. The pursuit of knowledge is imaged at some times, particularly in the sciences, as colonial exploration and heroic discovery; at others, particularly in such fields as Communications Technology, Computing or Gene Technology, as ingenious invention and manufacture; at yet others — and such metaphors are to be found in such fields as the humanities and social sciences, too — as a boom in a building industry, with foundations being laid and frameworks being constructed. The metaphor most commonly used in the late 1990s about the pursuit of knowledge in any field is that of the identification of commodities which can be sold in an increasingly global market.

In this paper, I want to mobilise a different metaphor, drawn from the field of ecology, an image of an ecosystem in which the pursuit of knowledge will flourish best where there is concern with the preservation of biodiversity in a balanced and interdependent environment.

Since my subject is the state of Women's Studies, and — more broadly — feminist scholarship in Australia at the end of the twentieth century, I want to image three stages of being in ecological terms. The first is an image of luxuriant, if often struggling, growth — a way of figuring Women's Studies in universities in the 1970s and 1980s. The second is an image of a flattened landscape, with whole forests decimated to supply markets in construction, palm oil production and papersupply, hills razed by mining companies, the hole in the ozone layer growing larger while citizens in so-called northern economies fail to modify their use of domestic heating, cooling, or hydrocarbons — an image for Women's Studies in the 1990s, in particular, the mid-to-late 1990s.