This event held at the Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University, on 10^th March, marked the official launch of the international writing with impact development network for doctoral students and emerging researchers (I-WIN). The network was set up in October 2016 by Carol Taylor, Professor of Gender and Higher Education, and Rachel Handforth, a PhD student, both of whom work in the Sheffield Institute of Education at Sheffield Hallam University. The network has been funded by the Gender and Education Association. To find out more about the I-WIN network please go to our website.

Carol and Rachel wanted to set up a network which would focus on writing development for emerging researchers, addressing the pressures that newer researchers face in trying to ‘establish’ themselves in their field. The network provides web-based support on writing with impact, offering advice, support and resources on writing with impact across a range of different writing genres.

The aims of the network are:

1. To develop an international, interdisciplinary network of doctoral and emerging researchers working on gender and education with a focus on writing with impact;
2. To provide structured support in skills development across a range of writing formats, through providing advice and expertise from researchers;
3. To empower doctoral students and emerging researchers to develop their confidence and academic writing skills;
4. To provide a platform for participants’ skills sharing and support.

Delegates from institutions across the country, as well as researchers based at Sheffield Hallam University, attended the launch. We were fortunate enough to be joined by two external guest speakers, Dr Victoria Showunmi from the UCL Institute of Education and Dr Emily Henderson from the University of Warwick, both of whom are also members of the Gender and Education Association.

After a brief welcome from Carol and Rachel, Dr Victoria Showunmi gave a presentation entitled “The personal is still political! Writing with impact about intersectionality and troubling the ‘gender’ in gender and education“. She discussed some of her narrative research about young black women and their experiences of education, and reflected on being asked to present her research to the House of Commons. In doing so, she highlighted the different ways that we can consider the impact that our writing has, and the importance of sharing research outside of the academic community.

Professor Carol Taylor then offered practical advice on writing journal articles with impact. Drawing on her experience as co-editor of the journal Gender and Education, she discussed the increasing necessity of academic writing beyond the thesis for both doctoral students and emerging researchers. Professor Taylor conveyed the difficulties many academics face in balancing the demands of academic performativity with the love of writing. She emphasised the importance of setting aside time to write, getting the opinion of critical friends on first drafts, and crucially, not stopping work on an article until it is finished, by which she meant that it is in the best and most developed state you can get it in before you submit it to a journal!

In the afternoon, three emerging researchers discussed their approaches to writing with impact within a showcase of newer researchers’ work. Rachel Handforth discussed her use of blogs as a platform for reflecting on her doctoral research on the career aspirations of women PhD students, highlighting how her personal blog had enabled her to connect with other researchers and make links with relevant organisations. She also discussed the importance of using media outlets to promote research, and the impact of this beyond the academy.

Dr Joan Healey, Senior Lecturer in Occupational Therapy at Sheffield Hallam University, reflected on her writing since completing her doctorate. She discussed writing her first single-authored article from her thesis, she talked about how she dealt with reviewer feedback, and detailed her plans for a co-authored article with her doctoral supervisor, Professor Carol Taylor. Joan finished by reflecting on the challenges of balancing full-time work with her desire to write papers from her thesis.

Dr Emily Henderson, Assistant Professor in the Centre for Education Studies at the University of Warwick, presented some of the writing she had done since finishing her PhD. She drew on post-structural theory to reflect on the way in which different forms of writing are ascribed different levels of value within the academy, and how this distinction can be seen as gendered. Dr Henderson made the important distinction between writing (which is administrative and managerial) and writing (which is about writing with passion about one’s research) to argue that the way in which certain forms of writing are valued over others is not helpful.

So far, the network has hosted online events with key academics in the field of gender and education.  The event on collaborative writing with impact included a Telegram-enabled conversation between Dr Jonathan Wyatt from the University of Edinburgh, Carol and Rachel; our blog writing with impact event featured the work of Dr Emily Danvers from the University of Sussex; and using social media with impact was based around the work of Professor Yvette Taylor from the University of Strathclyde and Professor Deborah Gabriel from Bournemouth University.

There are a number of upcoming online events that the I-WIN network will be hosting, including writing book reviews with impact, writing peer reviews and writing book chapters.

We are also looking to develop the network further in the future. We would like to hear from you if you are interested in contributing to the future of the network. If you have ideas for future events, if you would like to collaborate in running one of the upcoming events, or if you have ideas about how to make the network more international, please get in touch with Carol Taylor C.A.Taylor@shu.ac.uk

UK children from jobless households more likely to experience poverty and be out of work as adults

Children from disadvantaged families in the UK are more likely to have lower education, be out of work and experience poverty in adult life than their peers in other European countries, apart from Ireland and Belgium, according to new research from the UCL Institute of Education (IOE).

The study, which was carried out by researchers from the Department of Social Science at the IOE in collaboration with the University of Bath, has been released in a working paper on Friday 10 March.

This is the first research to compare the long-term effects of social disadvantage, as captured by growing up in in a jobless household, across European countries. The study looked at two large date samples involving over 60,000 people in 16 countries.

The study used the commonly used indicator of social exclusion, the experience of a jobless household at age 14/15, to capture the experiences of childhood deprivation. The researchers looked at the link between this and education, worklessness and poverty in adulthood across countries.

In the UK, Belgium and Ireland, there appears to be a strong association between childhood deprivation and all three outcomes. In these countries, children who live in a jobless household at 14 are 16 to 25 percent more likely to be at risk of poverty compared to those with an employed parent.

In other countries, such as Finland, Greece and Denmark, there is no difference in the risk of adult poverty for those children from jobless compared with working households.

The impact on education outcomes was particularly marked in the UK where boys growing up in a jobless household are likely to get around one year of schooling less than those who have a working parent, while for girls it is almost two years less.

Dr Lindsey Macmillan,who led the research, said:

“What is most striking is that in the UK the likelihood of experiencing social disadvantage in childhood and this reproducing itself in adult life is particularly high. There is no reason to assume that this should automatically be the case as it is not in many of the other European countries that we looked at where growing up in a jobless household did not necessarily predict adult worklessness or poverty in adult life.”

There were strong links across countries between the effects of childhood deprivation on outcomes for men. In countries where children from jobless households had less education, they also tended to be more likely to be in poverty and workless as adults. In countries where there was a weaker association between childhood disadvantage and education, there were also weaker links with adult outcomes.

For women, the picture is less clear. The researchers found that there was a weaker link between education differences  resulting from childhood disadvantage; adult poverty, and in particular, differences in adult joblessness, as a result of childhood disadvantage for women.

The difference between the genders may be explained by the different choices available, said Dr Macmillan.

“In most countries there is typically only one main life course for men: education into employment. For women, there are alternative options: for example, it may be more common in some cultures to choose motherhood and marriage after education, rather than employment.”

From 2000, the proportion of people living in a jobless household became a key indicator of poverty and social exclusion used by the European Union. Since 2005, this has been extended to include the proportion of children (0 – 17 year olds) living in such households.  This is due to the likely impact on their access to health, housing, education, justice and other private services such as culture, sport and leisure, as well as lack of role models.  Therefore, experiencing a jobless household in childhood is viewed as a marker of disadvantage with potential long-term effects on those children.

The two data sources used were the EU-SILC (European Survey of Income and Living Conditions) and PISA (Programme for International Student Attainment).

With preparations well underway for our upcoming 2017 conference (for details, please see here), we now turn our attention to gearing up for June 2018.

The Gender and Education Association are pleased to announce that their next international conference will be held in June 2018. The GEA executive committee welcome proposals to host their long-standing international conference from higher education institutions across national contexts and from conference teams spanning a variety of academic disciplines, theoretical backgrounds and fields.

The deadline for submission will be 31^st May 2017. We welcome proposals from across international contexts.

For guidance on how to apply to be a host for our 2018 conference, please see here: Biennial 2018 CfP

For an application form, please see here GEA Conf App Form 2018

Victoria Robinson, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York, has guest edited a special issue of Discover Society. She argues;

More than ever, we need to talk about the continuing, and frankly, not very helpful demarcation between the academy and the ‘real world’. The current UK higher education impact agenda is framed so that academics are increasingly asked (required even) to work with ‘external partners’ and to foster knowledge exchange across this assumed spacial and intellectual chasm. Theorists consistently define their work in terms of how their ideas have ‘real life’ implications. They make efforts to demystify the ‘ivory tower’ and allow greater access for previously marginalised groups outside of it. Government rhetoric demands that higher education provides students with transferable skills to equip them for work in ‘everyday life’.

But, in breath-taking changing social, economic and political times a failure to re-examine the linguistic premise of this terminology, and the terms in which the resulting dialogue takes place, can unwittingly maintain these barriers and not break them down. Not that these impact intentions do not have merit, or indeed, have not had meaningful consequences at local and national levels. However, looking at Women’s and Gender Studies in historical, contemporary and global contexts serves as a reminder that these fields have always strived, and still do, to problematise the relationship of the academy to the evolving and shifting world ‘outside’.

This special edition focuses on these issues and in sum, the articles here are conceptually and empirically focused on the structural manifestations of questions around knowledge and activism, in the academy and beyond. 

With articles on the outsourcing of domestic work, a look back at the history of the women’s liberation movement and exploring feminist teaching amongst many other pieces that are culturally relevant and engaging, this special edition is a fantastic read and we wanted to take the opportunity to share it with the GEA audience.

The GEA Conference has long provided an important home for established and aspiring feminist researchers to foreground and share deep commitments and passions to addressing gender inequity across all educational contexts and spheres. The 11th GEA conference intends to build upon this tradition to create space and opportunities for a range of feminist scholars, working at disciplinary interstices, to share innovative interventions that push at generating understandings about impact – upon research, practice, pedagogy, policy and activism. Crucially, the conference also intends to inspire and support emerging gender scholars and to act as an international collaborative resource for those fighting gendered inequality in multiple ways in local contexts.

In order to help with the costs involved in attending the conference, a number of small bursaries are available. To apply, please download and complete the following application form.

Please return your application form to Anna Vadilonga at Middlesex University by 7th March 2017

email address: a.vadilonga.mdx.ac.uk

Conference Bursary Form

We have a great guest post from sj Miller today, discussing how we can work together to collectively challenge instances of injustice in light of Trump’s presidency.

What’s Up?

“And so I wake in the morning

And I step outside

And I take a deep breath and I get real high

And I scream from the top of my lungs

What’s going on?”

-4 Non Blondes

“What’s Up?” In 1992, The 4 Non Blondes sang these lyrics “what’s going on” which were once (and still) prophetic but now, timely. Drawing from this song, I am reminded that our country has always been at war just in different ways and about different topics. So, why is “now” any different than then? As we say at Passover—slight turn of phrase- “Why is this election different than any other?” Well, here’s why.

Many people including myself, are struggling with sleep, reacting more hastily and with agitation than ordinarily. My anxiety is at an all-time high, my mind is racing 129 miles an hour. My head is spinning around like the head spinning doll in The Exorcist. I have become possessed by the government and my gaze is completely hijacked by the demagogue in DC. Lest I turn off the news, I fear that something else is going to happen and I want to, er, need to know, as much as I can— or, that is actually being shared with us—so I/we can take immediate action. The problem is, where to start? The Trump Plan is to uber-overwhelm the general population into protest fatigue, and wear ourselves so thin, that we will be divided, rather than united in our struggle for equity and equality. When a population is stunned into stratification, it ceases to dismantle the interlocking infrastructures that incarcerate and surveil. I find myself in a constant state of saying, “What now?” “Is this for real?” “Uhm, what’s going on?” but, my wish is to say, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Taking up this litany of questions, we can find ourselves renewed by each other’s commitment to reclaim our country as we put foot to pavement, soil, dirt, trail, leaves, cobblestones, water, etc., and move ourselves into individual and collective actions. Looking at the massive protests spawned as a result of the feckless brush of a strangled pen, held by an impetuous man-child who lacks dexterity, our country and its allies around the world are not taking these executive orders lightly. We are finding common ground in spaces and on issues that many had not considered, or who had yet to stand up or in for. Now, people are coming out of the woodwork like termites, ready to use the natural materials and gifts of our earth to co-create universal sanctuaried-spaces and rebuild fissured and gutted infrastructures in the image they want it to be, need it to be. We are swarming like bees, and will make honey along the way. We will fight for our refugees, for our Muslim kin, LGBT folk, and any persecuted group now or in the not-so-distant future. We will leave the government to ask, “What’s going on?”

So, what do we do?

* Coalition Building-We can create coalitions and work together in our communities and unite with different constituents across our states and the country;

* Protest and Demonstrations-We can walk in the streets, gather in airports, speak out, speak up, be loud, be concise, be where we need to be, and stand in solidarity;

* Sing and Chant- We can remind ourselves and each other of the important quotes and turn of phrases that inspire us:

* Revisit the Visionaries- We can re-read (or read for the first time) works of the great thinkers, activists, spiritual guides, artists, etc., who can help to guide each of us down these roads that we are co-creating.

I leave you with these lyrics as you continue to build, protest, demonstrate, and sing:

“And I pray, oh my god do I pray

I pray every single day

For a revolution.”

In the struggle with you,

sj

We are thrilled to share a feature written by Dr Marios Kostas. Marios is a Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Education and Care at Canterbury Campus of the University. Marios has a doctorate in Social Psychology of Education from the UCL Institute of Education. His current research focuses on post-structuralist approaches to gender and subjectivity and in particular on the work of Judith Butler. Prior to working for Canterbury Christ Church University, Marios lectured at higher education institutions in the UK and abroad and trained and taught in primary schools in London.

The Prince on the Black Horse: Is unlearning to ‘bet on the Prince’ possible through reading classic fairy tales against the grain? 

In the 1960s, second-wave feminists raised concerns about the potential deleterious impact of the traditional portrayals of male and female characters in children’s literature on boys’ and girls’ perceptions of gender roles and their gender identity development, for storytelling is one of the most high-yielding ways of conveying values and cultivating attitudes. Feminists of the ’60s argued that ‘putting children to sleep’ with traditional princes and princesses may be a source of social ‘nightmares’ of gender inequality, because through literature children crystallize society’s expectations of them on the basis of their gender.

Traditional folktales such as Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty were at the centre of the feminist critique. The ostensibly innocent male and female characters in classic fairy tales promote gender stereotypes. In these tales, female characters are often portrayed as passive, sweet, naive, conforming, and dependent on men, whereas male characters appear strong, adventurous, independent, skilled, and talented. The prosaic and utopian portrayals of beautiful and weak princesses in need of rescuing by a strong, heroic and handsome prince predisposes children not to question existing social relationships and encourages them to behave in gender-stereotyped ways.

To many people, these traditional gender portrayals in children’s stories reflect biological differences between the two sexes. To feminists, however, these rigid gender representations do not mirror a social reality but, on the contrary, create and perpetuate a social actuality by reinforcing traditional patriarchal values, which make gender differences appear natural and the product of innate biological differences.

The feminist response to traditional folktales was to provide alternative stories with female protagonists portrayed as physically powerful, dynamic, and autonomous. In these tales, heroines subvert existing power structures and conventional expectations with the intent of shaking off the shackles of gender stereotypes promoted through classic fairy tales.

Based on the theoretical foundations laid by Bandura’s conceptualisation of socialisation through observational learning, feminist fairy tales were seen as a panacea for deconstructing patriarchy and promoting gender equality in society. In particular, through the lens of social learning theory children were perceived as passive recipients of the socialisation process who simply soak up the gender stereotypes promoted through the literature they read. In this view, children’s exposure to non-normative gender representations would be a sufficient antidote in combating sexism and cultivating gender-egalitarian views.

Nevertheless, scholars who have explored children’s sense-making of non-traditional gender representations have postulated that children as readers are active producers of meanings, not merely passive recipients of pre-determined denotations in texts (see Davies, 1989; and Kostas, 2016). More specifically, children give multiple meanings to texts by either challenging or reproducing specific gender stereotypes, for they use their own understanding and knowledge of other stories as well as their own experiences of the social world to make sense of gender roles in narratives. In addition, parents’ professional statuses and education levels, especially the mothers’ professional statuses, seem to affect boys’ and girls’ sense-making of gender stereotypes. Children with mothers in paid employment, in particular, are more critical of traditional gender representations in children’s literature. This positive relationship is even stronger when the mother holds a position that gives her agency or authority. Similarly, several studies have shown that gender exerts a catalytic influence on children’s ability to break away from gender stereotypes. In particular, girls are often more prepared than boys to participate in the disruption of traditional gender stereotypes, mainly because by negating traditional gender structures they challenge the disempowerment of femininity, which is reinforced by these traditional representations of womanhood in the children’s literature. In this sense, texts are polysemous sites and children are not passive learners/readers who do not passively take on the gender stereotypes of male and female roles promoted through the literature.

Although feminist tales provide an alternative to a traditional, sexist worldview and encourage children to challenge traditional gender stereotypes, they are often not powerful enough to disrupt it. While several catalysts affect children’s ability to break away from traditional gender stereotypes in literature, previous exposure to gender-egalitarian views of masculinity and femininity appears to be the most influential. Therefore, amendments to the content of gender socialisation in the family (e.g. gender-neutral toys) and a complete reform of the education system (e.g. rewriting school textbooks from a gendererspective and training educators on gender-equality issues) are imperative for overcoming the obstacles to promoting gender equality in society.

If you would like to contribute to the GEA site, please see here for details.

GEA Internalisation Exec Member, Emily Gray is up now to share her experience of marching in Melbourne. Don’t forget to check out our other stories on this issue;

Jessica Ringrose

Victoria Shouwnumi

Sharon Lamb

The backdrop to the women’s march in Melbourne was male violence. The day before, a man had deliberately driven a car into people in the centre of the city during a police chase, killing five. Before that, he had stabbed his own brother allegedly because his brother is gay and he “couldn’t handle it”. Such violent actions underscored the need to stand up and speak back, not only to Trump but also to our own people, to our own politicians. In Australia in 2016 71 women were murdered by violent partners, refugees rights continue to be violated at Australian offshore detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru, Indigenous children continue to be disproportionately removed from their families by social services and Aboriginal deaths in custody also remain unacceptably, shamefully disproportionate.  In addition same-sex marriage has still not been legalised and the One Nation party led by Pauline Hanson is gaining ground with their own brand of Islamophobia and post-truthisms and have “had it up to here with tolerance”.

The Women’s March placed these issues at the centre, so that the 5000 strong gathering was not just about an angry, orange-faced man in a faraway place but also a chance to stand up to our own angry white men and women and to demonstrate that they do not represent us.

There have been numerous critiques of the women’s marches and of the exclusionary nature of them, that they are too white, too heteronormative, too middle class. We have to engage with these critiques and do better. In this moment, which feels so seismic I wanted to follow Lauren Berlant’s principle, “which is that you have to show up with whatever you have to fight the unacceptable situation”.

Thanks to the Gender and Education Association’s support, Feminist Readings Network held a dissemination workshop in suburban Paris in mid-December 2016. This was an occasion to come together, older and new members, to debate and invent meanings and practices for the young network that aims to approach reading as a pedagogical, creative, transformative movement.

The first day, six members of the network met to discuss the practicalities of organising a new network at Ivry-sur-Seine, in the southern suburb of Paris at Laboratoire d’études de genre et de sexualité (LEGS). The following day an open workshop took place at the Paris 8 University in Saint-Denis, a northern suburb of Paris. Here a group of participants coming from Leeds, Paris and Helsinki came together for a day of activities, discussing main ideas and practices that the network will engage with and push forward. The question we put to ourselves was: how can we help create a platform, not only for our work but feminist research more broadly?

Practical matters, involved with setting up a new international network, were obviously a key concern as well as more theoretical issues. We, thus, pinpointed some central challenges and key directions for a transnational and bi- or even trans-lingual network across several geographical locations.

We began with the important task of tracing the history of the network so far. It began in 2015 in Paris with the first bilingual event Lectures féministes/Feminist Readings.  Thanks to our energetic participants from Leeds another event was held in the following year in Yorkshire, and now our colleagues in Helsinki are organising another symposium where we will come together and share our research.  In our workshop we reiterated the initial ideas behind the network and consolidated our main ideas going forward. In particular, we noted our desire to work together not only as academics but also as feminists and creative thinkers interested in cultivating and nurturing transnational friendships.
We discussed the specific issues relevant to early career feminist researchers. Talking about how we are situated, not only intellectually but also institutionally and geographically. As such, we stressed the importance of trying to figure out what are the particular feminist practices that each context calls for. One of the key questions we thought about was how can the network work for everyone with our different locations, languages and contexts individually respected? Developing feminist readings as a creative and transformative tool has its roots in our concrete situations to start with, in the mix of cultures, languages and disciplines that create the conditions for thinking about and practising intersectionality and transdisciplinarity inside and at the borders of the academia.

Given this history, we were particularly happy to talk about the call for papers for the upcoming symposium in Helsinki on May 26^th and 27^th 2017. Feminist readings III will revolve around feminist writing, based on our collective experience that reading and writing are indeed not separable from each other. Helsinki organisers were free to choose the shape of the two-day event, and during the workshop discussion all the participants were inspired by their idea to organise the event partly outside university premises, and to encourage presentations in between academic and artistic formats.

While our South African partners could not physically participate in the workshop, we were in touch with them by mail and thought hard about the importance of shifting perspectives outside of central Europe for the network. This included practical issues, for example call for papers need to be shared with enough time for people to raise funds and get visas to come to events in Europe. Thinking about this raised a bigger point: partners who are not based in Europe are often expected to come to European countries, more than the other way around. As it stands, the Feminist Readings Network will work toward events outside of Europe, in South Africa in 2018. We also talked about organising workshops in North Africa, since several members of the Paris 8 research group have important networks in Maghreb countries. This led us to discuss the importance of practicing intersectionality and transnational feminism through inventing modes of action that do not always favour those with European passports.

The final aim of the workshop was to talk about the challenges of disseminating feminist readings and create ideas for the pluri-lingual website, which will be launched in February. All participants were invited to contribute to an intensive brainstorming around the website. The aim with the website is to create a central platform to connect ideas and disseminate our work. Doing this we hope to get more people involved in feminist readings of all kinds!

The main challenge of the website is building a bi- and pluri-lingual online space capable of attracting different readers. We want to share information about the events we organise so more people can get involved and archive online the work already done, while also keeping it a lively and interesting site for people to encounter.

Two interesting ideas put forward were the “feminist reading of the week” and the “pluri-lingual dictionary for feminist terms”. The first one would be a weekly changing very short “feminist reading”, addressing something that just happened, that we just read or saw, whether it comes from an old book or from a scene on the street. The latter is imagined as a space that challenges – to a certain degree since the texts will often still be written in English or French – the hegemony of our two main languages. We want to take specific terms related to feminism and gender from languages such as Kabyle or Finnish that do not exist in English or French. Through the dictionary we want to try and describe what their presences allows in their respective languages, or what is left unsayable in other languages by such an absence. We also aim to write about the ways different terms and concepts coming from hegemonic languages have been translated into e.g. Czech or Afrikaans.

For the participants, the workshop was a much welcome opportunity to (re)connect with other feminists passionate about gender issues and the many ways to read them, inside and outside academia. It was inspiring to exchange ideas with colleagues and peers who are looking to forge new writings and readings and to seek out international feminist alliances. We all felt this as something that is deeply important as we face political regression that is often coupled with university cutbacks and intellectual setbacks.

Check out our earlier post. If you would like to join Feminist Readings Network, or to offer suggestions about any aspect of our project please get in touch!

Contact: feministreadings@gmail.com