Author: genderanded

This post is part of the Countdown to Conference (C2C) series. We would love to feature a brief blog post from you too! Visit our main Countdown to Conference page for details! For more information about #GEAconf202 visit the conference website. 

C2C: #GEACONF2020 Keynote Speaker Rebecca Raby

Dr. Rebecca Raby is a Professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University in St. Catherine’s, Ontario. Dr. Raby’s research specializes in critical, feminist, and post-structural theory, particularly in the construction of childhood and adolescents in education as it intersects with gender, sexuality, race, and class.  She recently just co-published (With Chen & Albanese) The sociology of childhood and youth in Canada (Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2018). 

She also has published School rules: Obedience, discipline, and elusive democracy (University of Toronto Press, 2012) and Smart girls: Success, school and the myth of post-feminism (University of California Press). This was a SSHRC-funded study that examined girls, smartness, gender, and inequality in high school. Dr. Raby is also the co-editor of the textbook: Power and Everyday Practices (with Deborah Brock and Mark Thomas, York University), which draws on Marxist and Foucauldian thinking in order to complicate everyday activities.     

Dr. Raby also is the Director of the Social Justice Research Institute at Brock University. The Social Justice Research Institute establishes Brock as a Canadian and International leader in advanced trans-disciplinary social justice scholarship, innovative knowledge mobilization strategies and community-university partnerships.

The activism, advocacy and agency of the #MeToo era has exposed examples of sexual violence and harassment within an industry made possible by the patriarchal practices of its players. Inspired by this movement and its prevalence in academic research, we are two researchers from Cardiff University’s Journalism, Media and Culture department, working to provide a platform and opportunities for all those interrogating rape culture, both in and out of the academy. Rape culture is not new and our hope as a research network is to work towards understanding and challenging rape culture – keeping it at the forefront of public discourse and contributing to the resurgence and mainstreaming of a feminist agenda. Therefore, our key question we wish to address is: how can the work that we produce address the pervasiveness of rape culture in our society?

Our goals for the next year include the development of a website where researchers and practitioners can find opportunities for collaboration. We also aim to provide up to date information on related conferences and talks, as well as a roundup of relevant popular media objects. We will also be working on a 2020 conference, and providing a forum for academic publication. Alongside these efforts we provide a local monthly meeting where all those interested can come together and share their work, find support, and discuss various academic / non-academic texts (our current text is Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life). We’re happy to facilitate Skype-ins so just let us know if you’re interested! We will also be working with local groups and organisations on grassroots campaigns such as consent workshops, consciousness-raising circles and local Slutwalks.

Here’s a brief round-up of what we discussed last meeting, though it’s by no means comprehensive!

• The overlaps of data and art
• Inclusivity, codes of conduct
• Consent
• Call-out/ call-in culture
• Personal research impact
• Celebrity rape culture
• #MeToo anniversaries and legacy

The Rape Culture Research Network is dedicated to supporting both the theoretical and practical interrogations into rape culture and the ways in which it is embedded in both our systemic and social practices. Rape culture impacts all genders – therefore we are inclusive of all persons who strive for change. We would really love to hear from you so please feel free to get in touch via our Twitter (@RapeCultureRN) , FB, or by emailing rapecultureresearchnetwork@gmail.com. Our website is still in the works but you will be able to find it soon at: www.rapecultureresearchnetwork.com.

This post is part of the Countdown to Conference (C2C) series. We would love to feature a brief blog post from you too! Visit our main Countdown to Conference page for details! For more information about #GEAconf202 visit the conference website. 

C2C: #GEACONF2020 Keynote Speaker Lance McCready

Dr. McCready teaches School & Society in the Secondary Initial Teacher Education Program (B.Ed.) and Urban Education, Gender Equity, Qualitative Research Methods in the graduate Curriculum Studies and Teacher Development Program. He also serves as the department coordinator and instructor in the M.Ed. cohort in Urban Education.

Dr. McCready’s research program is concerned with the education, health and well-being of urban youth. His dissertation and subsequent publications focused on “making space” for diverse masculinities in urban education and how the experiences of gay and gender non-conforming Black male students reframe the troubles Black males face in urban high schools. His most recent research focuses on the educational trajectories of young black men in Canadian urban centres, and programs and services for ethnic and racial minority males who are underrepresented in North American colleges and universities. Conceptually, he is interested in the ways intersectionality, social determinants of health, and gender relations frameworks can be mobilized to develop more effective programs that promote academic achievement, well-being, school engagement, and access to higher education.

Dr. McCready’s work exemplifies the themes of GC32020 of Gender, Complexity, Collaboration, and Connectedness.

This post is part of the Countdown to Conference (C2C) series. We would love to feature a brief blog post from you too! Visit our main Countdown to Conference page for details! For more information about #GEAconf202 visit the conference website. 

C2C: GEACONF2020 Keynote Speaker Kristopher Wells

Dr. Kristopher Wells is a Canadian Research Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Child and Youth Care, Faculty of Health and Community Studies at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta.  Dr. Well’s research specializes in sexual and gender minority youth, education, health, sport and culture.  He serves as the co-editor of the International Journal of LGBT Youth, which is the world’s leading research publication on LGBT youth. He is also the co-author of Growing into resilience: Sexual and gender minority youth in Canada (University of Toronto Press).

Dr. Wells is one of the driving forces behind the creation of many ground-breaking initiatives including Pride Tape and NoHomophobes.com. These initiatives have been featured in more than 50 published articles and have gained national and international attention. Additionally, Dr Wells has served as an expert scientific consultant to the Federal Government of Canada, Canadian Senate, Canadian Teachers’ Federation, RCMP, Public Health Agency of Canada, UNESCO, World Health Organization, and many other provincial and municipal governments across Canada.Dr. Kris Wells’ commitment as an educator, researcher, and advocate for gender equity and equality will certainly provide a highlight spotlight session you will not want to miss. Dr Wells’ work within LGTB communities exemplifies the GC3 theme for this conference. Dr. Wells’ ability in connecting theory to practice in the community through his Pride Tape and No Homophobes initiatives shows how thecomplexities of gender research can be done collaboratively with public and government officials.

This post is part of the Countdown to Conference (C2C) series. We would love to feature a brief blog post from you too! Visit our main Countdown to Conference page for details! For more information about #GEAconf202 visit the conference website.

C2C: GEACONF2020 Keynote Speaker Jessica Fields

Dr. Jessica Fields is Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Health & Society and Professor of Health Studies and Sociology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Fields’ research focuses on racialized and gendered discourses of vulnerability and risk. Fields is the author of Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality (Rutgers), which received the 2009 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Race, Class, and Gender Section and is currently completing another book, Problems We Pose: Feeling Differently about Qualitative Research (University of Minnesota Press), in which she welcomes emotion and feeling as a source of insight—not an obstacle to understanding—into the racialized, gendered, and sexual inequities that compromise health and well-being.

Fields leads The Beyond Bullying Project (with Drs.Laura Mamo, Nancy Lesko and Jen Gilbert and funded by the Ford Foundation), a community-based storytelling project that interrogates policymaking that challenge perceptions of LGBTQ sexualities and youth as problems and consider what is required for sexual health education to open up to the uncertainty, discomfort, and pleasure of learning from and about LGBTQ sexuality and lives.

Fields commitment and scholarship which interrogates educational conditions for learning as well as focusing on barriers experienced by marginalized communities will provide for a provoking spotlight session. Engaging in a dialogue on the complexity of gender through a collaborative approach to dismantling the barriers through her work by connecting theory to practice, will provide attendees with informative and practical ways to be more genderly inclusive within education.

Are you a teacher, youth worker or academic who has been inspired by the story of AGENDA: A young people’s guide to making positive relationships matter and put it to work in your setting? If so, we would love to hear from you. Professor Emma Renold and colleagues behind the AGENDA resource are currently seeking participants for a research project assessing its reach and impact.

Co-created with young people for young people, AGENDA started out as a bi-lingual, 75-page activist resource to address gender-based and sexual violence. Since 2016 AGENDA has expanded into an interactive online resource for practitioners and young people with additional new case studies and activities from England and Wales across both primary and secondary sectors (see www.agendaonline.co.uk).

It is a timely resource as relationships and sex education is poised to become compulsory in England and Wales. The AGENDA resource provides practitioners with a range of interactive and accessible activities to support children and young people to safely and creatively speak out on issues that matter to them. It is a resource that is designed to be adapted, therefore we are keen to understand how the resource is being used to develop whole school approaches to positive relationships and RSE provision, as well as the challenges and barriers that practitioners face when putting the resource to work in their settings.

We are inviting practitioners to complete this short survey about their experience with AGENDA. In addition, we are looking for practitioners who might be willing to participate in a follow-up interview to enable us learn more about different experiences of using and adapting the resource, as well as the challenges faced.

We hope that this study will help identify areas where additional support is needed and inform the future development of the AGENDA resource. If you are interested in participating in the Educating AGENDA research project, or would like to find out more about the study please e-mail marstonke@cardiff.ac.uk. 

Gender Complexity, Collaboration, Connectedness (GC3),

Gender and Education Association International conference,

Hosted by the University of Calgary, Werklund School of Education 

June 15th-18th, 2020 

Call for Papers

CfP deadline: 30th November 2019

The Gender and Education Association is seeking contributions to our 2020 International Conference, hosted by the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary.

The 2020 GEA conference theme, Gender Complexity, Collaboration, Connectedness (GC3), reflects on the pillar of gender as a central identifier in education. The primary goal this year is to provoke conversations attentive to the complexity of gender particularly as it relates to the current social, political context. The (dis)locating identities from a gendered lens speaks to the diverse and complex ways people are positioned, counted and made to matter through empowering and dis-empowering practices and knowledges. Nationally, internationally and locally we are witness to Calls to Action and the need for respectful dialogue across communities for greater intercultural understandings. We are in the midst of a troubling and troubled landscape wherein identity politics are used and misused.

The conference will be responsive to and reflective of the ways in which gender is complexly located within education. The complexity of gender points to the intersectionality and the matrices of power associated with gender in education. This conference will variously address the messiness of gender in the practical and theoretical realm with consideration of the implications this has for those in education as well as those outside of education.

It is also a conference that will address collaboration both in the purest sense in which gender is a collaborative process through which we are authored and co-authored as well as in the broader sense that feminists engage in collaborative research and activism to disrupt normative ideologies. Collaboration is highly valued and promoted and in fact, during this conference our team will endeavor to promote opportunities for collaboration and community, spaces and places throughout the conference that prompt dialogue and nurture national and international collaboration.

Finally, this conference is intended to speak to the connectedness possible when theory meets practice. A significant component of this year’s conference is the ways that theory informs and provides for practical implications particularly in education.This conference will showcase the complexity of gender in education at a time when mainstream rhetoric and the politicization of identities may in fact need it the most. This conference will dislodge deeply held views and understandings from the us/them, win/lose, he/she renderings of education realities and instead invite, nurture and encourage collaborative non-exclusionary understandings for a more fluid frame of reference with/in education. Navigating the theoretical and pedagogical, this conference is designed to open dialogues to collaboration.

A number of conference speakers have been confirmed:

• Dr. Tracey Bear
• Dr. Jessica Fields
• Dr. Lance McCready
• Dr. C J Pascoe
• Dr. Rebecca Raby
• Dr. Shirley Anne Tate
• Dr. Kristopher Wells

We invite papers that address some of the following themes, although this is not an exhaustive list:

• Gender policies and practices in schooling and higher education 
• Gendered educational subjects 
• Researching and theorizing gender 
• Community and practitioner engagements with gender 
• Intersectional Feminisms 
• Indigenous gender knowledges and education 
• LGBTQ2S, conceptions of queerness 
• Gender activism and social movements 
• Decolonizing gender and education 
• Gender (re) arrangements in educational spaces, 
• Gendered subjectivities, becoming, doing and being gendered 
• Trans-inclusive spaces/practices 
• Non-binary & gender non-conformity 
• Gender Equity, Diversity and Transformations 
• Sexual Diversity and Cultures 
• Learning and unlearning gender 
• Relationship and Sexuality Education 
• Gender in curriculum 
• Disability and ableism in education 
• Gendered and Sexual bullying, harassment, and violence 
• Racism in education 
• Class and classism in education 
• Gender Attainment, Achievement, Testing & (in)equalities 
• Health education, bodies and gender 
• Heteronormativity, homophobia and responses 
• Education and social justice 
• Neoliberalism in education 
• Digital gender and sexual cultures 
• Gendered educational data, & datification 
• Quantification, metrics, & gender 
• Feminist pedagogies and praxis 
• Male femininities, female masculinities

For a full outline of the #GEAconf2020 theme, and to find out how to submit a paper please visit the main conference website here.

I am Natasha Richards, a doctoral student at the University of Essex. The 2019 conference was my first experience with GEA – and it was incredible. The atmosphere was extremely welcoming, every single talk/workshop I attended was intriguing and informative, and the mix of academic and social activities provided excellent opportunities for networking. I made some useful contacts and (more importantly) some wonderful friends.

One of the standout sessions for me was on the first day with keynote speaker Professor EJ Renold. Their depictions of new research methodologies encouraged me to see and think differently within my own research. They highlighted the struggles with forming research methodologies, which I have found as a Practice as Research doctoral student, and emphasised that research practice operates at the threshold of academia and activism. They suggested that using art in research methodologies reconnects us to the history of subversive activism. There is currently powerful youth activism emerging around the world, so linking research, education, and activism when working with young people is pertinent and matters. Professor Renold stated that there are currently few dedicated resources to empowering young people. They showed a video of their work with AGENDA, which utilises creative approaches to educating young people. The session linked perfectly to my own research on creative approaches to relationship and sex education. At the end of the session I felt energised and inspired.

One of the elements of the conference that I loved was the raw honesty and vulnerability displayed by many of the speakers. In the panel discussion Navigating academia: From PhD to Professor, each speaker depicted different elements of their experiences, exposing the difficulties as well as the triumphs of their career journey.  I appreciated the insistence that working class academics need to learn to stop being grateful in a system that is, actually, quite exploitative. Two of the panel members, Dr Jessica Gagnon (University of Portsmouth) and Dr Carli Rowell (University of Glasgow), conducted another session on being unapologetically working class. Their words were my words. They made me feel like I did belong in an environment that was not built for people like me. They expanded on the notions of gratitude as being linked with feeling like you shouldn’t be there. I left their session feeling validated. I left feeling inspired to believe in my own voice and to value my own journey into academia.

Feeling like you do not belong in academia is not solely an experience of working-class academics though. It was encouraging to hear a diverse range of academics discussing their feelings of “imposter syndrome” throughout the conference. In the talk Uplifting gender and sexualities education research: memoirs and manifestos for early career academics, Dr Leanne Coll (Deakin University) recited stories from people working in sexuality studies. She depicted feelings of having arrived too soon or being out of time. She encouraged academics to rethink the negative. The session encouraged me to consider two important points: “The story of becoming an academic is never a singular journey” and “you must make an informed choice of what kind of scholar you want to be”.

Many speakers in the conference addressed the inequalities experience by BAME students and academics. The conference made me consider unconscious bias, the notion of white fragility, and the impact that money can have on institutions’ inclination to act on intersecting inequalities. In her powerful keynote speech Competing Inequalities: Gender, Race and White Privilege in Higher Education Institutions in the UK, Professor Kalwant Bhopal (University of Birmingham) emphasises that “money doesn’t talk, money screams”. Investment into fighting inequalities, particularly with regards to race, needs to be financially backed, and it is likely this will only happen in institutions if it directly benefits the institutions themselves.

Going forward, I think it would be great to have a PhD student on the Executive Members Committee, or a separate advisory group of doctoral candidates, to bring a student voice to GEA planning and discussion and to help develop networks which encourage and generate the exchange of information and ideas between doctoral students and researchers at all career levels.

These are some of the key points from the conference that I am still contemplating:

• To believe in myself more
• To collaborate with a diverse range of people
• To feel confident to share initial research findings and gain feedback
• To understand and address unconscious bias
• To interrogate the extent to which my research is intersectional
• To appreciate that there is no right way to do academia

To close, I would like to encourage my readers to consider their own role in fighting intersecting inequalities, both within academic institutions but also wider society. In the words of keynote speaker Professor Emerita Heidi Safia Mirza (UCL Institute of Education): “Let’s be mischief makers”.