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 #GEAConf2019 visit the conference website

In addition to the launch of the series Feminist Thought in Childhood Research at this year’s Gender and Education Association conference (details of which can be found in this blog post), Bloomsbury Academic is delighted to announce a further related new research series that is also open to proposals for new books.

The Bloomsbury Gender and Education series is co-edited by Marie-Pierre Moreau (Anglia Ruskin University, UK), Penny Jane Burke (The University of Newcastle, Australia) and Nancy S. Niemi (Yale University, USA).

This series publishes rigorous, critical and original research exploring the relationship between gender and education in a range of institutional, local, national and transnational contexts. Books in the series will cover a range of issues, themes and debates of key interest in contemporary societies and will be relevant to an international and diverse readership. The series will contribute work that speaks to key contemporary themes, debates and issues and to theoretical, methodological and empirical concerns in the field.

Themes explored across the series will include:

• attention to gender in relation to schooling, tertiary education and lifelong learning
• digital and social media
• educational policies and practice
• gendered and sexual violence
• gender identities and sexual orientation.

As such it is an essential resource for academics and researchers working in fields including gender and education, sociology and gender studies, as well as all those interested in gender issues and social justice more broadly.

If you have any questions or comments about the series or would like to discuss contributing, you can contact either the series editors or publisher:

• Marie-Pierre Moreau, marie-pierre.moreau @ anglia.ac.uk
• Penny Jane Burke, pennyjane.burke@newcastle.edu.au
• Nancy S. Niemi, nancy.niemi @ yale.edu
• Publisher: Alison Baker, alison.baker @ bloomsbury.com

If you’d like to be kept updated on this series as it develops, as well as to receive news and special offers on other books and publishing opportunities from Bloomsbury, why not sign up to their Academic Education e-newsletter? It’s quick and easy and you can unsubscribe at any time using the link in the footer of any email.

If you are attending conference, let us know on Twitter using the hashtag: #GEAconf2019

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 #GEAConf2019 visit the conference website

C2C: Non-Binary at Conferences
Dr Francis Ray White, University of Westminster
Twitter: @nbinhe

I’m looking forward to what will be both my first GEA conference, and the first time presenting a paper on the Non-Binary in Higher Education research project. My co-researchers Jennifer Fraser (University of Westminster), Raf Benato (City University), and I are conducting this project with the aim of better understanding how non-binary people, that is folk with gender identities that fall outside the male/female binary, move through higher education as both staff and students. More than that, we want to imagine what higher education, its institutions, its curricula, its teaching practices, might look like beyond the gender binary. Our project is ongoing and will include public events, skills sharing, interviews with staff and ‘future dreaming’ sessions with students.

Our GEA paper will start to discuss the findings from our recent online survey which was completed by over 350 non-binary higher education staff, students and alumni in the UK. An initial overview of the survey findings has started to reveal some of key struggles for non-binary people navigating higher education. Most of these reflect experience on the margins of cultural intelligibility – the lack of language, the lack of understanding, the lack of space (literal and metaphorical) in which to exist, the constant post-binary gender chore of explaining oneself to administrators, students, colleagues or tutors. Experiences often reflect the wide variation in the steps institutions have taken towards recognising and making space for people to be something other than male or female as they work or study. But, while there are the horror stories, there are also glimpses of what it is possible to carve out, both in the classroom and beyond, to make being non-binary possible in higher education today.

Our desire to do this research has undoubtedly come in part from our own experiences as non-binary and genderqueer academics who know only too well the ins and outs of university administrative systems and the day to day expectations, misreadings, misgenderings and the subtle and not so subtle erasures that shape non-binary life. Despite nearly eight years as an out non-binary academic this is still a daily reality for me, and one which I am still working out how to intervene in effectively. The irony of being the non-binary person who stands up in front of a conference to talk about being a non-binary person in higher education is that I don’t have the answers and can’t tell you how to avoid the pitfalls because I’m usually in one at the time!

Added to that, negotiating the academic conference itself offers up a whole other range of potential challenges. Although we haven’t specifically focused on conferences as an aspect of non-binary academic life in our research, I have always encountered them as curiously fraught spaces. It was actually attending a queer conference in Berlin back in 2010 that not only introduced me to someone using gender-neutral pronouns in real life for the first time, but helped bring in to focus my own need to re-name both myself and my gender. The thing about conferences is they often literally involve labels in the form of the ubiquitous conference name badge. Appearing under my unambiguously gendered former name at this conference felt particularly suffocating, the name tag failing to adequately capture either the kind of queer I felt I was, or the deep ambivalence I felt about the gender it signified. I’m not saying I only subsequently changed my name so I could have it on name badges at academic conferences…but I’d be lying if that wasn’t part of it!

Even with my more ambiguous name proudly printed on my name badge, conferences are still an unknown quantity for the non-binary attendee; will there be pronoun stickers? Will there be a gender-neutral toilet? Is it going to be the kind of gender conference where gender means women and everyone assumes you are one (even if you’ve shown up to give the talk on non-binary)? I’ve been both delighted and disappointed over the years and suspect that will be the case for many years to come.

For more information on the Non-Binary in Higher Education Research Project please see our website: https://nbinhe.com or follow us on Twitter: @nbinhe You can also email us at: NonBinaryinHE @ westminster.ac.uk

If you are attending conference, let us know on Twitter using the hashtag: #GEAconf2019

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 #GEAConf2019 visit the conference website

C2C: ‘I don’t think my sexuality would come into it at all’: Understanding Australian LGBT trainee teachers’ expectations
Dr Kate Russell, University of East Anglia
Twitter: @DrKRussell

I find it hard to identify myself as a researcher at times; I have a Psychology degree, a PhD in Sport Psychology and publications in body image research, child protection, teacher training, and the sociology of gender and sexuality in sport and education contexts. I have taught in Psychology, Sports Science, teacher training, and Education departments and shared my love and interest for all of these things wherever I have been.

My PhD in Sport Psychology looked at the participation motivation of female rugby players, netballers and cricketers. I focused on how body satisfaction influenced their identity within the sport and how the functionality of their bodies (as related to the ability to complete the requirements of their sport) factored heavily in this. I also found that body satisfaction was transient; many of the women who were initially positive about their body shape and size on their field of play, were often very negative about their bodies once they were in a social context. The frame of their judgements shifting from a performance oriented to a presentation mode that created a tension for them. Identity and gender have always been central tenets for me in my work.

In 2007, I emigrated to Australia to start a new life and to begin work as a teacher educator on a Health and Physical Education undergraduate training course. While I continued to research gender representations in elite sport there, I also began a new research focus on trainee teachers. I have been influenced heavily by the work of Tanja Ferfolja and Kerry Robinson in relation to the role of gender and sexual diversity training for trainee teachers in helping support their work with future pupils. Along with researchers like Harris and Gray, they have also focused on LGBTQ+ qualified teachers experiences in schools and the difficulties that many have faced but I was keen to focus more on the trainee experience. I was intrigued about the development of teacher identity and how/if sexual and gender diversity might influence ongoing thoughts about how to be a teacher.

My project (that I am presenting on at the conference), examined the experiences of 12 LGBT identified trainee teachers through their courses but also about what their hopes were for a teaching future. I was keen to explore if they felt that their gender and/or sexual diversity would/could/should influence the type of teacher they saw themselves becoming and how they would negotiate this in the heteronormative school climate. In New South Wales, where I was located, there is an exemption to anti-discrimination laws that means that religious schools can claim the right to refuse to hire, or to fire, an employee on the basis of their sexuality or gender identity and I wanted to know how LGBTQ+ trainees saw that. Faith based schools proliferate the Australian school system and was a destination of choice for many trainees – including those who identified as LGBTQ+. I have employed Janet Alsup’s Borderland discourse, as well as post-structural readings of the trainees stories to help frame the tensions identified; how they sought to negotiate the professional with the personal in a space where heteronormative dynamics take prominence and how difficult decisions needed to be made about where to teach in the future, what to hide, and how to live an open life. I argue that teacher training institutions need to do more to bring sexual and gender diversity into their classrooms to encourage (difficult) conversations about gender and sexual diversity, trainee teacher identity development and future aspirations. When some teacher educators espouse the mantra that teachers should keep the ‘professional and personal separate’, this feels very problematic or naïve at best. LGBTQ+ trainee teachers do not and will not live or work in a vacuum and these trainee stories show that there needs to be an open discussion about this as we train the next generation of teachers.  

If you are attending conference, let us know on Twitter using the hashtag: #GEAconf2019

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 #GEAConf2019 visit the conference website

C2C: Exploring the participatory experiences of transgender and non-binary people in sport
Abby Barras, Ph.D. Student, University of Brighton
Twitter: @AbbyBarras
Blog: www.abbybarras.com

I’m going to start this introduction off with a confession. This is going to be only the second conference I have ever presented at, ever. If you had told me two years ago that I would be standing in front of academics and talking about my PhD research, the chances of me believing you would be rock bottom. This is not because I have had a meteoric rise into academia, far from it. Rather I am here by a lucky fluke, a bit of hard work, and the good grace to know that it’s not an opportunity to be squandered. This post is as much an explanation as to how I got here as a thank you to those who helped and inspired me and continue to do so.

At the time of writing I am just finishing my second year as a full-time PhD student at the University of Brighton, based in the School of Applied Social Science. My research focuses on the participatory experiences of transgender and non-binary people in everyday sport and physical exercise in the UK. It’s a scholarly extension of my master’s dissertation (Gender Studies, University of Sussex) which looked at participation for elite level transgender athletes and why posters on the website Mumsnet had (and continue to have), such an issue with transgender people taking part in sport. My research is a bit of a balancing act, drawing on feminist standpoint and queer theory, hegemonic masculinity, sports sociology, gender studies and the significance of transgender people and bodies.

I came late, then, to postgrad education, doing my MA part time in 2014 when my son started school and I was working at the University of Brighton as an administrator. It was hard at times to juggle it all, but I found a home on that course, one which offered me non-judgemental explanations as to why I had been feeling so overwhelmed by motherhood. It gave me a renewed belief system, it re-politicised me and reconnected me to feminism. I found the topics which I could most relate to were those around bodies: pregnant bodies, bodies that move, health, fitness and sport. I was fascinated by the opposing arguments in academia and the media and wanted to explore these debates more fully. In October 2016 I applied to do a PhD and was accepted to the University of Brighton to start the following year. Without the support of my tutor Prof Alison Phipps and former supervisor Prof Katherine Johnson I would not be here, now writing about this PhD, and I will be forever grateful to them both for believing in me.

Don’t worry, I’m done with trying to understand what’s going on in Mumsnet-Land, but I did come to realise that there is a lack of in-depth qualitative research which directly asks transgender people about their participatory experiences in everyday sport and physical exercise. Transgender people still face greater barriers to participation than cis-gender people, so I wanted to find out exactly why and hopefully, work with people to reduce these health inequalities.

Lastly, my research would not exist were it not for the generosity of the people in the transgender community who spoke to me about their experiences. The biggest thanks will always be to them.

If you are attending conference, let us know on Twitter using the hashtag: #GEAconf2019

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 #GEAConf2019 visit the conference website

C2C: Navigating Sexual Violence Cases in US and English Universities
Erin Shannon, Ph.D. Student, University of York
Twitter: @Erin_R_Shannon

I never thought I would land in a Department of Education for my Ph.D. studies. Thanks to the nature of my research—sexual violence in universities—I have been in a different department for each of my degrees: I double majored in English Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies at The College of New Jersey, moved to an International Development department (and Brighton) in 2016 for my MA in Gender, Violence and Conflict at the University of Sussex, and am now in the second year of my doctorate in University of York’s Department of Education. Since I am relatively new to the field of educational studies, this will be my first time at a Gender and Education Association conference and I am very much looking forward to sharing some preliminary findings from my thesis.

My thesis is a comparative project examining how universities in the United States and in England respond to student disclosures of sexual harassment and sexual violence. In order to understand how universities handle these cases, I am examining three levels of response: written policy, how university staff members implement that written policy, and how student victims/survivors experience staff implementation of policy. I am beginning to conduct a policy discourse analysis to address the first of these response levels and am nearly finished with my fieldwork, which addresses the latter two. I conducted 44 interviews with university staff members (e.g. Wellbeing Advisors, Title IX Coordinators) at five diverse universities in each country as well as with self-selected student victims/survivors who had reported to their universities.

While student demographics and sexual violence victimisation rates (around 25% of students) are similar in England and the United States, responses differ significantly as the United States has a standardised federal response framework while England currently does not. In the 2016 Changing the Culture report, however, Universities UK noted that it was looking at established response frameworks, such as Australia’s and the United States’, for guidance in possibly creating a national model. Beyond national structure, university responses to sexual violence also look different in practice in each country: Title IX in the United States is a legalistic and punitive model while English universities often pursue a culture change model.

My findings suggest that despite these differences in response structure, universities in England and the United States have a shared investment in protecting their institutional reputation over the wellbeing of their students, especially student victims/survivors. My participants shared with me that this need to preserve reputation comes in many forms, including protecting academic staff who perpetrate violence because they are seen as ‘valuable’ (e.g. they win large grants or provide important REF contributions), urging students not to go to the press about their cases, and even forcing a student to report so the university could fire a tenured professor to eliminate bad press. This prioritisation of institutional reputation over student wellbeing occurred in my sample despite the genuinely good intentions of individual staff members responsible for policy creation and implementation.  

I will be discussing this dynamic and more initial findings during my presentation, and am looking forward to connecting with other feminist education scholars. If you would like to know more about my research in the meantime, you can visit projectcursv.com

If you are attending conference, let us know on Twitter using the hashtag: #GEAconf2019

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 #GEAConf2019 visit the conference website

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new series entitled Feminist Thought in Childhood Research at the Gender and Education Conference this year.

Edited by Professors Jayne Osgood (Middlesex University, UK) and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw (University of Western Ontario, Canada) and published by Bloomsbury Academic, the series will be launched at the Gender and Education Association conference on Thursday 27^th June at 12pm in Portland Building, Room 2.33abc. All conference attendees are very welcome to bring their lunch and come along to the launch for the chance to find out more about the series as well as opportunities to contribute to it.

Drawing on feminist scholarship, this series explores the use of creative and experimental modes of researching and practising in childhood studies. Recognising the complex neo-liberal landscape and worrisome spaces of coloniality in the 21^st century, books in the series provide a forum for cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary conversations in childhood studies that engage feminist decolonial, anticolonial, more-than-human, new materialisms, post-humanist and other post-foundational perspectives that seek to reconfigure human experience. The series offers lively examples of feminist research praxis and politics that invite childhood studies scholars, students and educators to engage in collectively to imagine childhood otherwise.

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The series has three volumes available so far:

• Feminists Researching Gendered Childhoods: Generative Entanglements, edited by Jayne Osgood & Kerry H. Robinson
• Feminist Research for 21^st-century Childhoods: Common Worlds Methods, edited by B. Denise Hodgins
• Theorizing Feminist Ethics of Care in Early Childhood Practice: Possibilities and Dangers, edited by Rachel Langford

The series editors welcome proposals for new books – both authored and edited collections, from early career and established scholars – addressing past, present and future childhood research issues from a global context.

Delegates of the GEA Conference 2019 will also have the opportunity to receive 35% off the first three books in the series – so look out for a discount flyer in your delegate pack!

If you have any questions or comments about the series, you can contact the series editors or publisher:

• Jayne Osgood, j.osgood @ mdx.ac.uk
• Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, vpacinik @ uwo.ca
• Publisher: Mark Richardson, mark.richardson @ bloomsbury.com

If you are attending conference, let us know on Twitter using the hashtag: #GEAconf2019

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 #GEAConf2019 visit the conference website

Join us for the free pre-conference day for the Gender and Education Association international conference. Anyone can join, whether or not you are joining us for the rest of conference.

International Teacher Symposium, University of Portsmouth, Monday 24^th June 2019

Supporting Diversity in Schools and Communities

FREE, Registration required, spaces limited, lunch provided: http://bit.ly/GEA_Reg

All are welcome. The event is especially organised for teachers, education leaders, and education researchers. The full day event is scheduled for 9:30am-6pm. For event details, including session times, please visit the conference website

Download and share the Symposium flyer

Session Topics and Presenters

Keynote and Workshop: Becoming resource-ful: the making and mattering of creative activisms to address gender and sexual violence, Professor Emma Renold, Cardiff University

Workshop: Beyond Awareness: Breaking Implicit Bias Habits, Dr Jessica Gagnon, University of Portsmouth & Dr Arif Mahmud, University of Roehampton

Celebrating Differences: Whole School and Community Approaches to Supporting LGBTQ+ Students, Aaren-James Martin & Sarah Jolliffe (Portsmouth Pride), Josh Breach (Portsmouth City Council), & Jo Morgan (Portsmouth Grammar School)

Engaging Boys and Men as Agents of Change in #MeToo: Powerful Pitfalls and Possibilities,
Professor Michael Kehler, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Teaching Feminist Digital Writing and Activism on #MeToo, Sexism, and Racism,
Ileana Jiménez, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York USA         

If you are attending, let us know on Twitter using the hashtag: #GEAconf2019

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 #GEAConf2019 visit the conference website

C2C: Keynote Speaker Professor Emma Renold
Twitter: @EmmaRenold and@agenda_matters
Keynote Date: Monday 24th June (FREE Pre-Conference Day)

Keynote and Workshop Title: Becoming resource-ful: the making and mattering of creative activisms to address gender and sexual violence

Abstract: This session shares the making and mattering of AGENDA: A Young people’s guide to making positive relationships matter (www.agenda.wales, Renold 2016). AGENDA was co-created with young people for young people, and started out as a bi-lingual, 75 page activist resource to address gender-based and sexual violence. Since 2016 AGENDA has expanded into an 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).

AGENDA is all about creating art-ful encounters that make space for young people to learn about gender-based and sexual violence in relations/hips through the rule-bending and rule-breaking practices of others. Carefully designed, it connects fields of practice together that are often estranged through divisive curricula (e.g. arts, science, humanities) or policy terrains (e.g. anti-bullying, children’s rights, violence against girls and women, safeguarding). Inspired by the Latin origins of activism (actus: “a doing, driving force, or an impulse”) AGENDA invites young people and their practitioner allies to learn and do something about what matters to them in the context of social justice, rights, equalities and diversity. From equal pay and poverty to misogynoir, street harassment and LGBTQI rights this resource lifts the silence on issues so often skirted over in schools with over 30 examples of creative change-making practices sourced from local and global youth activist stories and local case studies.

Creativity, transformation and affirmation are the heart-beat of the resource – processes that have been developed over years of experimenting with participatory research-engagement-activisms, inspired by queer/feminist materialist and posthuman scholar-activism, particularly within the field of gender and sexuality education (e.g. Taylor & Ivinson, 2013, Coleman & Ringrose, 2013; Taylor & Hughes, 2016; Allen & Rasmussen, 2017). Ringrose, Warfield and Baradisi, 2019, Osgood and Robinson 2019, Taylor, Jones and Coll 2019). The aim of this session is to share some of this process through film, images and artefacts and invite participants to try out some of the AGENDA stARTer activities. Throughout, there will be plenty of opportunity to explore the challenges and affordances of how to become more crafty and resource-ful in mobilising creative activisms and pedagogy for addressing gender and sexual violence, and making Relationships and Sexuality Education matter in new ways more widely.   

Bio: Emma Renold is Professor of Childhood Studies at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales. She is the author of ‘Girls, Boys and Junior Sexualities’ (2005), Children, Sexuality and Sexualisation’ (with Ringrose and Egan, 2015) and co-editor of the book series “Routledge Critical Studies in Gender and Sexuality in Education”. Inspired by feminist, queer and new materialist posthumanist theory, her research investigates how gender and sexuality come to matter in children and young people’s everyday lives across diverse sites, spaces and locales. Here, (see www.productivemargins.ac.uk) she has explored the affordances of co-productive, creative and affective methodologies to engage social and political change with young people on gendered and sexual violence, including the co-production of the creative-activist resource for young people and practitioners, ‘AGENDA’ (see www.agendaonline.co.uk). In 2018 Emma was winner of the ESRC Impact in Society Prize – a landmark achievement for how feminist-queer qualitative research-activisms can inform policy and practice.

Watch the ESRC video of Professor Renold’s research, ‘Transforming Relationships and Sexuality Education in Wales’:

If you are attending conference, let us know on Twitter using the hashtag: #GEAconf2019

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 #GEAConf2019 visit the conference website

C2C: Keynote Speaker Professor Deevia Bhana
Keynote Date: Wednesday 26th June

Keynote Title: Facing South: Love, sex and teenage sexual cultures in South Africa

Abstract: Under conditions of ongoing economic misery and precarious social existences, the sexualities of young South Africans are often positioned within the realm of sexual danger and written and thought about as loveless. Instead, close-up studies of teenage sexualities brings teenagers’ pleasures, pains and desires to centre stage, and takes heed of its gendered effects and local configurations of power. It remains an embryonic field of study, and in this keynote presentation I join in the conversation in facing teenage sexualities in the South. I situate teenage con-structions of love, sexuality and desire within a wider social and cultural context underwritten by the histories of colonialism and apartheid, chronic unemployment, poverty, and stark economic and infrastructural inequalities. I draw on a larger research project titled Learning from the Learners, which views teenagers as active agents and has thus generated a more nuanced picture of young peoples’ desires, and the dangers and dilemmas they must navigate as they explore their sexuality. I show how teenagers’ are deeply invested in—and concerned about—many types of love: queer, romantic, pure, violent, material, and provider. I argue that teenagers’ conceptions of love, romance, fear and desire serve as important anchors in the social constitution of teenage sexuality; conversely, the expression of sexuality is often distressing in the context of structural violence, cultural norms, the regulation of female sexuality, and the hegemonic power of heterosexuality. Taking into account African teenagers’ in-your-face realities, this paper encourages an acknowledgment of their sexualities that rejects the stereotypes of fear and danger, and offers new entry points into more relevant sexuality education that can meet the needs of those that matter.

Bio: Professor Deevia Bhana is the NRF/DST South African Research Chair and Professor in Gender and Childhood Sexuality at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She is known for her interdisciplinary approach and critical stance in researching childhood sexuality, gender, schooling and young people in South Africa and her international outlook in shaping the field of young people’s sexualities. Among her recent book publications are Love, Sex and Teenage Sexual Cultures in South Africa; 16 turning 17 (2018) and Childhood Sexuality and AIDS Education: The price of innocence (2016); Gender and Childhood Sexuality in Primary School (2016) and Under Pressure: the regulation of sexualities in South African Secondary Schools (2014).

See Professor Bhana deliver her inaugural lecture at University of KwaZulu-Natal:

https://youtu.be/p0UPkBZ3RP8

If you are attending conference, let us know on Twitter using the hashtag: #GEAconf2019

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 #GEAConf2019 visit the conference website

C2C: Looking Back, Looking Forward
Zibah Nwako, University of Bristol

So, how did I get here? Looking back, I would describe my PhD study as an indirect consequence of my professional background as a self-development trainer and consultant. Although my main experience is from administration and informal education – as a proprietor of several out-of-school clubs – my career trajectory has certainly not been a linear one.

Having spent 8 years serving children in pre-school/nursery, primary and secondary schools, I moved on to becoming a licensed trainer for the Springboard Women’s Development Programme, run by the Springboard Consultancy in the UK. In 2008, I had the privilege of establishing the programme in Nigeria, West Africa where I train up to 30 participants per course. One of the outputs from this was a culturalisation of the Springboard workbook to suit the Nigerian context, which was an enlightening experience.

Fast forward to 2014 and I headed to the University of Bristol to study for a Masters’ degree in Educational Leadership, Policy and Development. For my research dissertation, I studied the impact of informal learning on the aspirations and experiences of girls in rural Nigeria – including through folklore, ethnic practices, traditions and village customs.

On the professional side, I expanded my portfolio (again with the Springboard Consultancy) by becoming a ‘Sprint’ trainer – the Springboard equivalent for female university students. When it was time to choose a topic for doctorate study, one of my previous supervisors suggested, ‘Why don’t you marry your two interests – self-development and young women?’ She was right, and the topic was birthed! I am now therefore exploring the wellbeing of female undergraduate students in Nigeria from a social justice perspective and using the capability approach.

From her research on the capabilities that matter for gender equality, Prof. Melanie Walker wrote in a policy brief, ‘Women were expected to study in conditions where the expectations, norms, values, traditions and ways of behaving are derived from masculinised conceptions of what is “normal”’ (Walker, 2017 p. 1). This is certainly reflected in this study which I conducted with the female students as my research partners.

As this is my first time of attending the GEA conference, I am keen to share some of my research partners’ lived experiences and to reflect on the wider factors (socio-cultural, environmental and political) that impact on their wellbeing. In accordance with the conference theme, I will highlight the prevailing gender-based invisibilities and inequalities that they face, particularly in student political activism. I also look forward to a communication of ideas with which to contextualise the Sprint programme in support of the wellbeing of female students in Nigerian higher education.

If you are attending conference, let us know on Twitter using the hashtag: #GEAconf2019