The Thinking Woman

Research Background: This major creative work (a literary non-fiction book) seeks to address the absence of living women philosophers in contemporary public discourse by articulating, validating and forming a dialogue with their philosophical work in a manner accessible to a broad readership. It is a provocative response to recent popular philosophy by AC Grayling (2013, 2015) and Alain de Botton (2000, 2004, 2012, 2014), whose writing silences and disregards work by women. Specifically, The Thinking Woman responds to the question: What might popular feminist philosophy look like? Research Contribution: Without losing sight of its objective to reach a broad readership, The Thinking Woman is an experiment in form. The work collapses the personal and the philosophical, the academic and popular, the didactic and the poetic through an innovative blend of memoir, philosophy and engagement (dialogue) with the key philosophers who are the subject of the book. This is a deliberately generous, immersive approach, reminiscent of work by leading US writers Andrew Solomon and Leslie Jameson, but new to popular philosophy and rarely seen in Australia. Ideas of interconnection, and identity formation as a collective, kinetic work-in-progress are central to the methodology. Research Significance: The Thinking Woman makes a major contribution to an emerging field of literature. The book "eschew(s) the limitations of genre and the temptation of neat conclusions... inviting the reader into the meaning-making process" (The Age). Evidence of the quality and significance of the project includes: (1) funding towards its development awarded through the Literature Board of Australia Council for the Arts; (2) validation by critics in Australia's leading literary pages (The Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Book Review); (3) numerous invitations to discuss the work in the media and as keynote speaker at leading public institutions.