genderanded Call for papers

Decolonizing Gender and Education Research: Guest Post by Caroline Manion and Payal Shah

For decades now, there have been sustained calls within the academic field to engage in research that challenges dominant knowledge production processes (Abu-Lughud 1991; Narayan 1993; Smith 2012; Takayama 2011). Given that critical feminist research has had a long-standing goal of challenging the essentialism, power hierarchies, and concepts of difference embedded in the research process, the editors (Manion & Shah) of a special issue of Gender and Education—Decolonizing Gender and Education Research: Exploring the Relationship Between Feminist Research on Education and Decolonizing, Indigenous Knowledges and Cosmologies—aim to catalyze and illuminate research that challenges the knowledge production process from a range of feminist epistemological perspectives.

Several key debates in gender and education and feminist studies will be highlighted, including but not limited to how knowledge is produced, by who, on what topics, and for what purposes; the role and significance of intersectionality in feminist research and action in education; the politics of sameness and difference in education research and practice; and the opportunities and challenges associated with supporting and  engaging with boys and men in feminist efforts to promote and achieve social justice in and through education (e.g. men as producers of feminist knowledge; men as allies in feminist movements; and the significance of masculinities and femininities in terms of education policy and practice).

For more information on this special issue, including when and how to submit a proposal, please see here.  

genderanded Call for papers

CfP for a Gender and Education Journal Special Issue: Decolonizing Gender and Education Research

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Gender and Education

Decolonizing Gender and Education Research: Exploring the Relationship Between Feminist Research on Education and Decolonizing, Indigenous Knowledges and Cosmologies

Special Issue Guest Editors: Caroline Manion & Payal Shah

Critical scholars across a variety of disciplines and geographic areas express the need to engage in intellectual projects that shift the dominant epistemic perspectives and

methodologies used in traditional research (Abu-Lughud 1991; Narayan 1993; Takayama 2011; Smith 2012). Feminist research has had a longstanding commitment of epistemically, theoretically, and methodologically interrogating issues of power and difference with the goal of emancipating women (Benhabib et al. 1995; Fraser 1989). Similarly, decolonizing research seeks to explicitly address colonial structures of knowledge production and the representation of marginalized and indigenous populations. Both feminist and decolonizing research challenge traditional hierarchies of knowledge and incorporate the scholarship and perspectives of non-Western, nondominant scholars to challenge the traditional self-other distinction (Abu-Lughud 1991; Lincoln and Gonzalez 2008; Smith 2012).

This special issue seeks to explore the intersection and overlap between feminist and

decolonizing research. Our goal is to bring together and showcase high quality and

intellectually provocative papers that theoretically and empirically interrogate why research at the nexus of gender and education needs to be ‘decolonized’, and which illuminate what this means and what it looks like. Additionally, we will welcome suitable papers that address the lineages of critique that shape the practice and underlying theory of decolonizing and feminist research today.

Epistemologically, this issue seeks to make visible and problematize the dominant positioning of the West as the central frame of reference in much social research. Thus, we seek to highlight scholarship that questions the concepts of culture, nation, and difference to challenge the binary logics and essentialism that have long underpinned their articulations across scholarship in the social sciences and humanities. In this special issue, we draw from scholars such as Atlas and Dei, who name and contest this ‘academic neocoloniality’ and “challenge imperial ideologies and colonial relations of knowledge production” (as cited in Takayama 2011, 450).

This decolonizing epistemological orientation is complementary to a critical feminist

epistemology where one goal is to reveal the participants’ lived realities deeply

contextualized in their socio-cultural milieu (Benhabib, 1987; El Saadawi, 1997). This

reflexive lens pushes researchers to reflect upon and gain better insight into the complex intersectionalities that constitute the lives of their participants (Benhabib et al. 1995; Fraser 1989). Such an orientation can also reposition how researchers engage with the subjectivities and representations of participants who are considered “marginalized” by dominant discourses.

We seek to include papers that engage broadly with research at the intersection of

decolonizing and feminist research in education. We seek papers that make both theoretical as well as empirical contributions across a variety of fields including but not limited to: comparative education, geography, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, women’s and gender studies, etc. Given the nature of the topic, papers that illuminate trans-disciplinary and intersectional perspectives on gender and education would be especially welcome. We are also interested in papers that interrogate and innovate research methods from decolonizing and feminist epistemological perspectives. Aligning with the overarching decolonizing ethos of the Special Issue, our goal is to include a diverse range of contributions from new as well as more seasoned scholars and practitioners from the Global South and Global North.

Contributions might address the following topics:

  • Comparative pieces that methodologically and theoretically challenge the colonial binary between Western and non-Western scholarship supporting the essentialist terms of Orientalist constructions, where a “rigid sense of difference” is based on representations of culture or nations as the base of comparison.
  • Pieces that challenge the traditional academic knowledge production and circulation process and illuminate research from non-Western, non-English speaking ‘peripheries’.
  • Articles that illuminate scholarship that interprets and shares the narratives of their participants in ways that emphasize their agency and strength and not in ways that reinforce their marginalization.
  • Exploration of the contributions and applications of decolonizing and anticolonial approaches in education research and practice.
  • Debates concerning the significance of value pluralism, difference and power in transnational feminist education research and advocacy.
  • Examples or case studies that reveal the opportunities and challenges for productively engaging and working across diverse Western and Indigenous feminisms and subjectivities in education research, policy and practice.
  • Possibilities for applying intersectionality theory in decolonizing and anticolonial feminist research in education.
  • Identity and the politics of decolonizing feminist research in education.
  • Collaboration and alliance-building in the context of decolonizing feminist research in education.
  • Embodied knowledge and decolonizing feminist research approaches.
  • Explorations of the contributions of non-dominant and Indigenous knowledge production and application in the context of decolonizing education research and practice.

Proposals should be for original works not previously published (including in conference proceedings) and that are not currently under consideration for another journal or edited collection. 350-500 word abstracts should be emailed to Caroline Manion or Payal Shah by 1 October 2017.

Formats for proposals include full-length papers (5000-8000 words) or viewpoint pieces (3000-5000 words). The guest editors are happy to discuss ideas prior to the deadline.

We anticipate that the special issue will appear in print in October 2018.

Abstracts and queries should be sent to: Caroline Manion, OISE, University of Toronto, Canada (carly.manion@utoronto.ca) or Payal Shah, University of South Carolina (pshah@mailbox.sc.edu).

 

genderanded Cite Club

#FEAS Cite Club: Contesting family-based violence

Cite Club: Contesting family-based violence
by Kate Marston, GEA Social Media Intern

Feminist Educators Against Sexism (#FEAS) are an Australian-based, international feminist collective committed to developing interventions into sexism in the academy and other educational spaces. One of their most recent interventions is Cite Club, an e-mail group where #FEAS send their works to one another and cite one another where possible. Last month we introduced GEA’s collaboration with #FEAS whereby each month we’ll be profiling a Cite Club publication on this blog. June’s Cite Club blog profiles a paper by Dr Genine Hook, an early career academic from The University of New England, Armidale, Australia who recently presented as part of #GEAconf2017.

Contesting family-based violence: sole parenting possibilities and alternatives

To cite this article:

Genine Hook (2017): Contesting family-based violence: sole parenting possibilities and alternatives, Journal of Family Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13229400.2017.1327881

Sole parent families have a long history of being subject to stigmatization and negative social discourses for their ‘deviance’ from the two-parent ‘norm’. In particular, ‘single mothers’ have been positioned by policy-makers, the media and academics as disadvantaged, deficit and a driving force behind crime, low educational attainment and alienation amongst teenagers. In an effort to counter these problematic legacies Genine Hook employs the term ‘sole parent families’ and considers how problematic recognisability and deficit constructions of such families contribute to the perpetuation of family-based violence.

Discussing family-based violence beyond notions of individualized choices and responses, Hook critiques the ways in which the institution of the family reproduces gender-based inequalities such as family-based violence. She employs a feminist approach that focuses on the (re)production of gender within family arrangements, how these arrangements are socially created and the ways they result in conditions of disadvantage for women. The term family-based violence is understood to include ‘physical, sexual, financial, emotional or psychological abuse…includ[ing] a range of controlling behaviours such as the use of verbal threats, enforced isolation from family and friends, restrictions on finances and public or private humiliation’ (Phillips & Vandenbroek, 2014, p. 6).

Drawing on media narratives and participant accounts from her prior research on sole parents negotiating postgraduate education, Hook’s paper explores the sociological implications of coupledom and the perceived illegitimacy of sole-parent families. She notes the reinforcement of deficit constructions of alternative familial arrangements as untenable and un-liveable and argues that such discourses are critical in influencing how a person can remove themselves and their children from domestic violence. The more hetero-coupledom families are privileged and equated with the promise of happiness the less imaginable alternative familial arrangements are: resulting in fewer options with which to remove oneself from unacceptable relationship conditions.

Consequently, Hook argues that reframing and recognising sole parenting families as ‘agentic’ and joyful is critical in refusing compulsory heteronormative family bias’ and mitigating family-based violence through opening up the possibilities of ‘thriving familial alternatives’ (p. 8). Over eleven pages, this paper offers a productive critique of sole parenting deficit discourses and heteronormative family structures as well as highlights an area of family-based violence worthy of further exploration. For more information about Genine Hook’s research click here.

References

Phillips, J., & Vandenbroek, P. (2014). Domestic, family and sexual violence in Australia: An over- view of the issues. Research Paper Series 2014–15. Department of Parliamentary Services, Australian Parliamen.

genderanded Call for papers

CfP for a Special Issue of Gender and Education: Picturing Care

Picturing Care: Re-framing Gender, Race, and Educational Justice

This special issue aims to advance the critical scholarship on carework and care injustice through visual and arts-based educational research. In a time of neoliberal accountability culture, school caring practices are being sidelined, while images of school success and failure are mainly messaged through the display of quantitative assessments—charts, tables, graphs, and statistics. Multi-modal and image-based research can provide tools for reframing discourses on school spaces, activities, and interactions, including care.  Such research can also speak to broader publics and provide a powerful platform for resistance. Taking up Mirzoeff’s (2011) theory of “countervisuality,” this special issue aims to challenge dominant dehumanizing discourses on school settings and populations, and to engage the imaginative and documentary work of picturing care—the multifaceted and largely invisible “healing justice” (Ginwright 2016) and caring work that shapes school life, rhythms, relationships, and “radical possibilities” (Anyon 2005) in education.

We seek submissions that use visual, digital and arts-based forms, such as photography, painting, portraiture, drawing and collage, mixed media, video, performance, sound, poetry and theater as a means of knowledge production, where these approaches are central to data collection, interpretation, and representation.  Research that utilizes traditional methods but is disseminated through alternative visual forms and media in order to make research more accessible and useful beyond the academy will also be considered.

Themes

We seek submissions that take up the following topics and themes:

  • Work that troubles or complicates dominant White feminized images of school and family care,
  • Youth caring practices,
  • Culturally relevant care,
  • Models and images of carework rooted in non-Western and/or indigenous cultures/ contexts,
  • Decolonizing practices,
  • Care and the Movement for Black Lives,
  • Carework and worlds of boys and men, etc.

All submissions should speak to the role that visual methods or the arts will play in the articulation of the topics/ themes/ theories.  We invite authors/makers across the globe to submit abstracts and are especially looking for authors/makers from underrepresented and marginalized groups.  We ask that proposals include the following:

  • A title and abstract of 350 words
  • Details about the author’s/maker’s context: Geography (US, Latin America, Europe, Asia, etc; Urban, suburban, rural);
  • Links or attachments with example of visual media if used.
  • Please note: the journal can only accept hi-resolution still images and the online format must mirror the print publication. However, please feel free to include links to sound work, video, or other multimedia projects.

Abstracts are due by 1 October 2017. Please send abstracts and inquiries to Victoria Restler (vrestler@gradcenter.cuny.edu) or Wendy Luttrell (wluttrell@gc.cuny.edu). Please note that selected authors will be invited, on the strength of their abstract, to submit a full-length manuscript by 15 January 2018.

References

Anyon, J. (2005). Radical possibilities: Public policy, urban education, and a new social movement. New York: Routledge.

Ginwright, S. A. (2016). Hope and healing in urban education: How urban activists and teachers are reclaiming matters of the heart. New York: Routledge.

Top of Form

Mirzoeff, N. (2011). The right to look: A counterhistory of visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

genderanded Previous Conferences / Events

Padam… Padam… GEA Conference 2017: Dr Zoe Charalambous

By Dr. Zoe Charalambous, Anatolia College

“Cet air qui m’obsède jour et nuit
Cet air n’est pas né d’aujourd’hui
Il vient d’aussi loin que je viens
Traîné par cent mille musiciens
Un jour cet air me rendra folle
Cent fois j’ai voulu dire pourquoi
Mais il m’a coupé la parole
Il parle toujours avant moi
Et sa voix couvre ma voix”

Written by Henri Contet and Norbert Glanzberg, sang by Edit Piaf

Padam… Padam… the sound keeps being repeated in my head as my past returns.

“Not having a voice means you become empty from inside, you become dead,” I had mentioned consciously and unconsciously during the panel discussion titled:  “Teaching Intersectional Resistance: Global Feminist Teachers in Conversation.” I had said that actually not having a voice as a feminist may be symbolic of being a Greek feminist. I am still unsure of what feminist I am; I have to tell you the truth here before you read. We (myself and my students at Anatolia College) created Genderisms, a club exploring gender relations in high-school doing “amateur or not” research, reading Butler and Lacan, and playing with ideas on how to bring awareness of sexism going on – we created ‘AC Genderisms’ too on Facebook. Musings on Gender; we called it in Greek:  ‘ Φυλο-λογισμοί» (unsuited quotes here intended).

I have not read much Feminist theory, though I love Irigaray’s wave-like writing and Bracha Ettinger’s echoes of the primitive womb of all connections for that which we all seek. I am also in love with fantasies and their stories of prohibition, and the uncontrollable madness of the symbolic muting the Real – Padam- Padam- Lacan…so bear with me, with the fruit I shall bear. We always begin with a disclaimer in this capitalist society, don’t we?

When you are given a voice, how does the chimera of all that you have concealed come out unlike a tsunami?

I am thinking of a conference as a vessel packed with voices speaking their directions in the wind; then letting go of their articulated creations into the crowds of understanding to become something: what? Where do we go from here?

What happens after a conference? It is not just about the knowledge shared. It is about the solidarity and the generation of connections. Thank GEA we are not alone. Even the most minimal of discussions which happen between strangers about their work and passions produce threads of connections- interlacing us all back into realizing that we do can have an actual impact.

The 2017 Gender Education Association Conference at Middlesex University contained oceans of both visible and invisible questions about what it means to explore gender in education and what it means to be a feminist, (for me).

As I start this blog very abstractedly I wonder can the personal take on a communal meaning?

I begin with my story returning to London for this conference after unexpectedly returning to Greece, due to personal circumstances. From being an academic at university I became a teacher at a high-school : quite a violent return to my old school and being a metaphorical teenager myself.  And now, a re-turn to the future I was building here in my you-topian home London. The place where I found my own language, English, to write my dreams. I walked down a cemented pathway after leaving the Middlesex campus on day 1 of the conference and I thought of “circles- cycles” of generations.  We are generating new–reconfiguring material “discursive apparatuses” (someone and everyone) quoted from the conference) as we engage deep in and on the space (De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984 ). Documenting a walk of thought.  How can documenting our walks of thought in the past and in the present help us better understand how we are shaping our future as feminists?

For me this question becomes very important having to teach girls and boys at school, touching their minds with theory that may mean something or nothing or anything to them. How do we manage to make them aware of their own desire, their agenda, their human rights without imposing our own convoluted projections for what never came to be for us, or for what has become for us? I touch upon this concern as this is the key question in my own teaching/research – how do we teach without indoctrinating? How do we liberate without imprisoning?

This conference was a concave mirror for the practices and transformation currently going on within and beyond the academic landscape about ways of understanding gender and feminism. Here is a generalization. I will become more specific.

What I heard in this conference became separated in my mind in these four categories, themes touched on:

a) The safety in learning and education linked with community connections and boundaries.                                   

Leading and relating to…

b) Reflections: is it about us? Teachers? Academics?

Producing wondering experiments/discussions/presentations on the question of…

c) How do we do this? via projects/workshops/bodies/art discussing bags, music, dirt .

Moving to Metaphors in order to view these issues and understand them….

d) Theory about and conceptualizations of situations linked with gender and feminism.

All of these moves/categories happening at the same time and not in a linear sequential order.

All of these articulations (for me) somehow encompassed by the echo of Ahmed’s title: “Leading a Feminist Academic Life”

It is impossible to touch upon all the presentations and material covered in the conference. So, I will briefly mention the presentations/ideas that most relate to teaching English at my school.

Jessica Ringrose, Hanna Retallack and Ileana Jimenez have been significant in my coming to this conference. They have been my supporters and believers. Thus, attending “Nasty Feminist Teachers” took on a special meaning for me at the conference.  During this session, Hanna and Ileana spoke about their ongoing collaboration to create a feminism syllabus to teach their classes and Hanna’s visit to Ileana’s school in New York. Ileana touched upon the unsaid incidents happening within her school having to do with sexual harassment and how this course actually managed to push for an actual change in the school’s policy. Activism and education hand-in-hand.   It was most inspiring to listen to Briony O’Keefe’s efforts to create a campaign with her students, creating posters against sexism, her funded writing of teaching resource material and the open manner she conducts her classes.  I loved that her students call her by first name. She highlighted that she always tries to be at one level with them, not playing the “monopoly” of the teacher, as I understood this.  Briony really helped me understand how far we, as teachers, can take a multi-modal project we do with human rights into having an effect on the community.

“Bag experiments: Working the borders of gender fluidity” by Constance Elmenhorst, Nikki Fairchild, Carol Taylor, Mikra Koro-Ljunberg, Angelo Benozzo and Neil Carey was especially poignant in that in the doing and undoing and writing about and for bags we were just creating and breaking down borders in our minds with our bodies.  In many ways, embodying the social borders of gender and the fluidity of gender is not an easy reality to mouth! Thus, I found great inspiration in doing and undoing bags, and the idea of what is inside, what is an extension. This is  an activity high-school students could use to wonder – along perhaps with a small excerpt from “Gender Trouble” or “ On giving an account of oneself.”

Other useful ideas were:  using music projects to communicate (“troubled”) masculinities. Elly Scrine’s project of using Drake’s song and re-making it with two students in order to help them work through anger was also an inspiration. At the same time, via the presentations of Anne-Sofie Nystrom, Minna Salminen Karlsson and Carolyn Jackson the importance of exploring the “masculine” anxiety reared its beautiful head.

Dr Iris van der Tuin’s key note lecture on “The Generative Curriculum: On the Past, Present and Future of Feminist Teaching and Learning” was hugely intriguing in the sense that as I listened to the melodies of theories and wondrous abstractions – going against the grain in terms of simple and accessible key note lectures – I recognized many of the Middle Years Practices (in IB Schools) which we attempt to work with at our high-school – allowing students to find their own questions – their topics – the Personal Project, which colleagues of mine have been working on and have really been watching wonders happening in the minds and passionate pursuits of the students. That is the beauty of when theory and practice actually meet and recognize each other as always having been each other’s fate.

In many ways, this is an ongoing question at schools – a question I had encountered when I was teaching a module for the B. Ed at the Institute of Education UCL – and one that I am now also faced with as a teacher- “Oh Zoe, this is theory – practice is what is important.” The dismissal of other ways in which we can see our life –practice-profession – the dismissal of our imagination is one of the biggest disappointments; yet it is not anymore.  One must waddle through the water one chooses to waddle in. I wonder whether the acceptance of the struggle is the first step towards grounding our fears of subjection to a system that requires us to be “practical” and not “theoretical” ;but we must view (theorize ) what we do (praxis).

Research too is significant: to listen to the very detailed results of the session titled: “Examining family and educational experiences of gender diverse and transgender children and young people: methodologies, policies and practices” chaired by Rachel Skinner and presentations by Ulman, J, Davis C., and Robinson, K. was precious evidence pinpointing the significance of realizing that concealing hurts ;  the percentages of self-harm and suicide rates of kids who are not allowed a voice to speak what they are exploring- the lack of sexuality education – looking through the internet to find a label for what you are going through- the harm we cause because we are afraid of the Other. This reminded me of Zizek’s “Neighbours and Other Monsters”(2005). We are afraid to look at our neighbour’s mangled/hurt arm because it is something we contain inside of us – the shame of containing that which you cannot talk about.

This takes me to the very interesting following sessions about “Affective Relationality as Response-ability” with presentations by Gowlett C, Hook G, Mayers, E and Wolfe, M. What really stayed with me was the “resistance” discussed by Genine Hook in her undergraduate teaching and the attacks she underwent for having a feminist syllabus.  I wonder aren’t we teachers for those who attack us? What is the limit? Lacan argues that when we perceive resistance from others it is always our own. (Charalambous, 2014, p. 126) – Someone at the conference told me “You are very generous Zoe” when I had said that we must listen and ask questions when someone disagrees with us, instead of going on the attack or defense.  Here comes the mirror – do we look into the other’s mirror and become one with them or do we mirror back to them – what we create with our stance? Do we surprise others with our generosity? Can this generate a new generation of feminists? Of genderists….? Of human beings?

I absolutely was touched and troubled by all the dance performances and through the work of “Moving with the not-yet: choreographing with young people in space and time.” Something came out of my body with this embodied experience:  tears and sweat.  Fluids. It was really hot in that theatre. It is vital to become uncomfortable and comfortable with our bodies contacting us with the truth of our practices and theories. I somehow gazed into the abyss of so much emotion contained in the research by Renold, Ivinson and Anhgharad. This was too much/the unspoken excess needed to exit via a generous transmission of bodies.

Generosity and Viscous Porosity= the workshop by Carol Taylor and Nikki Fairchild played with our limits with “DIRT” – After the “theory” – the presenters presented us with bags and boxes containing dirt (teeth, hair, nails, etc.) and we engaged in a free-associative discussion about our reactions to these. I absolutely was fed with thought [–as the conversation somehow spiraled into “breastfeeding” and the role of the mother – whether it is natural or not – criticisms about discourses created- ] by what was said by the presenters : “Dirt is always with us” linked with what Marx has said (it was said) “the Poor are always with us”  and I must add “the Other is always with us.”

“Being Porous,” it was added, “is a good thing, skin is the boundary.”  A final entertainment of boundaries was discussed using Haraway’s concept of the cyborg (1984) – a little girl from Fairchild’s research working with a rice-tray that was one with her – as she was moving and going away and being with it at kindergarten school.

Playing. Punctuating, playing with punctuating. Playing with our bodies- with the bodies – with the body of this conference – in a manner that recognizes the validity of Other’s desires.  This text.

Somehow I have tried. In an incomplete manner and yet as complementary as I could and with EXCESS I had to process [one week I am unsure is enough to write into this].

I will finish off with a reference to our panel discussion on Day 2 – when Ileana, Hanna, Robin, Briony, and myself were put in discussion facilitated by Professor Miriam David. It was a joy to connect with all of the teachers/academics and to realize the many ways in which we are connected!  A true embodiment of “intimacies of solidarity” – which I have now experienced – and felt – not just thought about. This takes US back into the beginning of the cycle I have been writing into – : ultimately what we are seeking is a connection as human beings, as feminine<masculine<transgender<whatever the signifier. GEA conference 2017 absolutely and yet openly communicated this need to allow for connections rather than dismemberment and cut offs in both education and in our communities at large.  The matrixial borderspace of Ettinger (2006) comes to mind and something mentioned by Dr. Iris van der Tuin:

The phrase “You can’t challenge what remains unsaid,” which I heard in one of the sessions, made me curious.  What does it mean to “challenge”?

Can we challenge with the aim to return to each other rather than move away from?

Thank you all for openly connecting with me and disconnecting too.  Let me break the narrative of this blog post with my own “moral panic” –(using Jessica Ringrose’s phrase here, though not being unable to quote the paper) through the words of another:

“What is the agency of the one who registers the imprints from the other? This is not the agency of the ego, and neither is it the agency of one who is presumed to know. It is a registering and a transmutation that takes places in a largely, though not fully, preverball sphere, an autistic relay of loss and desire received from elsewhere, and only and always ambiguously made one’s own.” (Ettinger, 2006, p. xi)

References

Charalambous, Z. (2014). PhD Thesis. “A Lacanian Study of the Effects of Creative Writing Exercises: Writing Fantasies and the Constitution of Writer Subjectivity.” Institute of Education, University of London.

Ettinger, B. (2006).  The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.

Žižek, S.( 2005). Neighbors and Other Monsters. In : S. Žižek, E. Santner and K. Reinhard (eds) The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology.  Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, pp. 134-190.

genderanded Future Events

GEA 2018 ANNOUNCEMENT

Next year’s GEA conference will be held in
University of Newcastle,  AUSTRALIA!!
DATES: Sunday 9 to Wednesday 12 December, 2018
Organising Committee: Professor Penny Jane Burke; Professor Lisa Adkins; Professor Rosalind Gill; and Associate Professor Ros Smith; Dr Julia Coffey and Dr Akane Kanai, along with the broader CEEHE administrative team.
Theme: “Gender, Post-truth Populism and Pedagogies: Challenges and Strategies in a Shifting Political Landscape”
The conference theme is intended to provide a platform to critically engage with and interrogate the current political landscape in which debates about knowledge, authority, truth, power and harm are resurfacing and require feminist intervention. A central question underpinning this conference theme is: what does it mean to be pedagogical in a post-truth landscape? And how might feminist scholars work to intervene in this environment? The GEA 2018 conference will provide a forum to explore the challenges and strategies for educators, researchers and participants in higher education in these complex times.
The CFP for abstracts will be announced shortly.
WATCH THIS SPACE! #GEAconf2018
genderanded Previous Conferences / Events

GEA Editors Workshop for Early Career Researchers

Carol Taylor and Susanne Gannon led the editorial team from the Gender and Education journal on a pre-conference workshop for Early Career Researchers on “The secret life of journal articles: selecting, writing, reviewing, revising”. Over 15 participants from England, the Netherlands, Australia, and the United States attended. The editors discussed criteria for evaluating manuscripts, the reasons for rejection, and choosing a suitable journal. Background information on Gender and Education journal logistics such as who owns the journal, number of issues per year, impact factor, quartile ranking, readership and authorship were discussed – and reasons why authors might want to take these factors into account were explored. Participants were introduced to the Author Services provided by the publisher.

The criteria and selection of choosing reviewers, the timing and timeline for reviewing and also how to interpret reviewers’ ratings of a manuscript were discussed. The editors provided an overview of the characteristics of a ‘good reviewer’, and explained that timely response to an invitation to review or decline to review is much appreciated in order to ensure a timely review process.

Carol provided participants with an extract from an article she had submitted to Gender and Education along with the reviews the initial submission had received She talked through how she changed the article in response to the reviews and the resubmission process through to eventual publication. There was a broader discussion on how an author responds to reviewer and editor’s comments, the process for re-writing manuscripts and the expectations for re-submission.

ECR’s commented that the workshop helpful and informative.  They also appreciated having the opportunity and time to share their experiences in submitting manuscripts for review and raise questions about the process.  The workshop created a collaborative space to share insights on research approaches, reviewing practices, publishing strategies and impact narratives for gender/feminist scholars doing qualitative and quantitative research.

If you are an ECR or doctoral student and you are interested in reviewing for Gender and Education please contact Helen Rowlands, our Editorial Manager.

Email: genderandeducation@outlook.com

Carol Taylor, Susanne Gannon, Jayne Osgood, Kathryn Scantlebury

http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cgee20/current

genderanded Issues

C2C: Creating Peaceful Dialogue Through GEA 2016 & 17

This post is part of our new 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!

C2C: Creating Peaceful Dialogue Through GEA 2016 & 17
by Yaron Schwartz

Although I just got my degree a year and a half ago, I’ve been involved in teaching gender classes for boys for 14 years. In the last 4 years I have written and coordinated gender programs for both religious and secular primary, middle, and high schools in Israel. This also includes social programs which work on elements like healthy sexuality as well as self defense. I will be speaking about one of these special programs at the 2017 conference.

For me, GEA 2017 is an opportunity to share how a dream can become a reality. In this sense, this conference is a direct continuation of GEA 2016. Back then, I came to the conference with a friend of mine. We both live in Jerusalem, we both just got our Ph.D’s, we both have an interest in gender and education and we share many other similarities.

But, we are different our genders. She is a woman and I’m a man. And there is another important difference between us. I am Israeli, representing the Jewish community, and she is an Arab. Her name is Dr. Dianna Da’abul and she represents the Palestinian community.

Yet another thing we shared is a common dream, to try and use our skills and deep belief in gender and education to generate a dialogue between our communities, the Jewish one and the Palestinian one. Every person who reads the daily newspapers knows that today there is almost no dialogue between Israeli and Palestinians citizens, especially not between Israeli and Palestinian educators, and especially not in Jerusalem, which is the heart of the misunderstanding between the two sides.

We started sharing this dream two years ago, and when we heard about the GEA 2016 interim conference, which took place in Sweden, we decided to come, listen and learn about what exists outside of our own area of conflict.
We wrote a brochure in which we explained our plan for peace through gender and education dialogue, and we invited researchers to participate in any way they would like in our program. We gave the brochure to many wonderful researchers we met at GEA 2016, but we didn’t get the feeling that people were too impressed by our ideas. Still, it was a good opportunity for us to declare out loud that we believe in peace, and that it can achieved.

Later, as we sat in on all of the conference lectures and listened to many interesting stories about including minorities in the processes of educating to gender equality, we were very surprised by what we learned. It was a “bad” surprise, but it gave us a fulcrum for our own work. We discovered that many European countries find it very hard to navigate the tension between gender equality and religious traditions. One central story mentioned was about Yasri Khan, the Swedish member of parliament who had to leave the parliament after refusing, based on his religious convictions, to shake hands with a woman reporter who interviewed him. The decision whether this is “good” or “bad” differs between countries and societies, but in our area of the Middle East, you can’t even dream or say something critical about religious tradition. One needs to do everything that he does with the understanding that the people with whom you work will always have some kind of religious path which must be taken into account. And if you are working with school students, as a teacher – you can’t ignore it, or deny it, nor can you say that gender equality cannot coexist alongside religious tradition (In fact, I am writing this paper while sitting in a conference in Israel listening to an ultra-Orthodox woman explaining what it mean to be an ultra-Orthodox feminist …)

So, for me, the GEA 2016 conference gave us the energy, the information and the basic understanding that if we want to create a dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian educators and students we need to base its fundamentals on coexistence between “gender equality” and “religious tradition”. We don’t have the luxury of separating them, and in fact, we have a tool that we can use to begin speaking with one another. This year, I return to GEA 2017, without my friend, Dr Diana Da’aboul, but with the full story of our J-A-G-E-C Project (Jewish Arab gender and education collaboration project), in which we eventually created an opportunity for Jewish educators to work together with 70 male and female Palestinian educators,  in which the basic shared assumption was the need to consider the importance of religious tradition in the context of gender education.

Anyone who is interested in knowing more about our peace program is very welcome to hear my lecture, which will be the last one of this conference ?.

 

genderanded Issues

C2C: Raising a Generation of Hope

This post is part of our new 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!

C2C: Raising a Generation of Hope:
Showcasing sisterhood among adolescent girls of color that transcends borders
by Nina Nagib

I am excited to join the GEA community and honored that I get to attend conference during my first year as a Ph.D. student! As a former school counselor, I have always been passionate about working with girls, especially adolescent girls of color regarding worth and identity, including all the internal factors that affect them, both in the US and in the Global South. A few years ago, I watched a documentary that changed my life. Girl Rising chronicles the lives of nine girls from nine different countries and their respective barriers to global education. Watching reporters and activists interviewing the girls in their villages made me think, “I want to be her.” So, I planned to visit Malawi that summer, through a connection at my church, and run a girls’ empowerment program (co-facilitated with their leaders), Rise Malawi: Raising a Generation of Hope (RAGOH), a nonprofit initiative in the rural village of Madisi. While planning for the trip, I took my middle school students to Philadelphia to see Girl Rising. As I was educating them about the human rights issues that many of their global peers face, I saw something click within each of them. I witnessed girls known for getting into fights or skipping class, begin to take ownership of their education and choices. Not only did they begin to see how much they were taking for granted in their lives, but they also became aware of how much their actions, or lack thereof, impacted others. The girls attending the anger management groups at the beginning of the school year were now initiating fundraising projects for their disadvantaged peers! My experience in Malawi was life-changing. Hearing firsthand how child marriage, HIV, poverty, and cultural norms directly impact lives, I knew I would not return the same. I wanted to devote my life to fostering education and raising hope for girls everywhere, from urban communities in the U.S. to the most remote villages across the world. Hence, RAGOH was born. On May 31, 2014, RAGOH became a fiscal sponsorship project of Germantown Life Enrichment Center (GLEC), a 501(c)(3) public charity, which led me to my current situation.

I wanted to devote my life to fostering education and raising hope for girls everywhere, from urban communities in the U.S. to the most remote villages across the world.

The more I learned about girls’ barriers to education in the Global South, the more I began to speculate how centering the experiences and voices of our girls could transform them and their environments. For instance, creating partnerships between my girls in Philly and Malawi could be transformative for both of them. How do we develop a sense of protection in our girls that can act as preventative measures? How do we center the voices of girls of color into our work with them? How do we develop a critical consciousness within them, through which they and the society would see them as the solution, rather than either the recipients of programs or delinquents (both of which are equally dehumanizing, in my opinion)? How do we equip and train educators and schools to develop these factors in our girls? How do we empower and equip them to see the power in their own voices? Pursuing my PhD in Education with a concentration in Counselor Education, my research focuses on restructuring RAGOH as a school-based sex trafficking prevention program for girls of color, grounded in Critical Race Feminism with the development of critical consciousness in our girls.

Adolescent girls of color who have experienced trauma face unique challenges globally in their pursuit of education. As minimal attention is paid to the modern-day slavery crisis of human trafficking and a host of other injustices that girls face globally, I am honored to join GEA in my first year as a Doctoral student. I decided to come from Philadelphia because I knew I wanted to be a part of the global community of scholars committed to fighting these injustices in different ways. I am most excited about learning from every scholar there and building connections, which, undoubtedly, will transform my future research.

I want to focus my career and center my research on answering the questions I have listed above! My poster at the conference will display RAGOH’s core of centering everything we do regarding creating spaces for the existence of the voices of this marginalized group. RAGOH equips teen girls to raise their voices as leaders, advocates girls’ access to education in the Global South, and develops a critical consciousness to view and impact their community and the world. I hope you’ll take the opportunity to stop by my poster, “Raising a Generation of Hope: Showcasing a sisterhood among adolescent girls of color that transcends borders” to see and hear their words for yourself!

In closing, I have never been to London before and plan to stay through June 28th. Any tips or advice on places to stay, visit, or experience would be greatly appreciated!

Looking forward to meeting you all and joining this community of scholarly activities soon!

If you are attending conference, let us know on Twitter using the hashtag: #GEAconf2017

genderanded Countdown to Conference

C2C: Your guide to the #GEAconf2017 Keynote Speakers

This post is part of our new 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!

C2C: Your guide to the #GEAconf2017 Keynote Speakers
by Kate Marston, GEA Social Media Intern

We are delighted to have six amazing keynote speakers presenting four keynote sessions at the 2017 GEA Conference: Generative Feminism(s): working across / within / through borders.

Below we offer a brief overview of our speakers and what is in store for #GEAconf2017!

Professor Kerry Robinson, Western Sydney University
(Day 1 – 10:30 – 12:00)

Schooling, gender and sexuality: Children’s and young people’s narratives in an era of global conservative backlash.

Despite notable gains for feminist, queer and trans politics in Australia, the global expansionism of conservative right-wing politics in recent years has led to a culture war as key institutions see the reestablishment of heteronormative social orders and dualistic conceptions of sexuality and gender. Framed by this unfolding Australian experience, Professor Robinson will discuss several qualitative and quantitative research projects conducted over the past six years: exploring schooling, gender and sexuality with children, young people, parents/carers and educators. She will consider what we are learning from children and young people about gender, gender diversity and sexuality in the early 21st century and how this knowledge is being received in an era of global conservative backlash. Drawing on feminist, trans and queer theory, this keynote will be looking for ways forward offered by generations of feminist thought.

Kerry Robinson is a Professor in Sociology in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology at Western Sydney University, Australia. She is the director of the Sexualities and Genders Research group in the School and her expertise lie in the fields of gender and sexuality studies; childhood; children’s sexual citizenship; diversity and difference; sexuality education; sociology of education; and sociology of knowledge. She has published widely in these areas, including: lead co-author of Growing Up Queer; monograph, Innocence, Knowledge and the construction of childhood: The contradictory relationship between sexuality and censorship in children’s contemporary lives; a co-edited collection Rethinking school violence; and is the co-author of Diversity and Difference in Early Childhood Education: Issues for Theory and Practice.

 

Dr Iris Van Der Tuin, Utrecht University
(Day 1 – 17:00 – 18:00)

The Generative Curriculum: On the Past, Present and Future of Feminist Teaching and Learning

Re-directing generational logics of feminism away from phallogentricism and simplistic ideas of conflict, Iris Van Der Tuin paves the way for a more complex notion of generationality. In this keynote she will address the generative approach to generational feminism as it reconfigures exchange of women in patriarchal societies, the mother-daughter plot in feminism, and correspondence theories of truth and method: providing a theory and practice for 21st century feminist teaching and learning. Reading generative generational feminism specifically through the growing phenomenon of Liberal Arts & Sciences (LAS) education in Europe, Iris Van Der Tuin explores a developing feminist education for, and of, the future.

Iris van der Tuin is an associate professor in and program director of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Utrecht University (The Netherlands). Trained as a feminist epistemologist, she specializes in gender studies and new materialisms (especially pertaining to humanities scholarship that traverses “the two cultures”). She co-authored New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies with Rick Dolphijn, and edited Gender: Nature for Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks. Her book Generational Feminism: New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach inspired, in part, the theme for #GEAconf2017.

 

Professor Emma Renold, Cardiff University;
Professor Gabrielle Ivinson, Manchester Metropolitan University;
& Jên Angharad, Future Matters Collective
(Day 2 – 12:30 – 13:30)

Moving with the not-yet: choreographing the political with young people in space, place and time

Extending a long tradition of feminist work on the marginalised position of minoritarian Others (Irigaray, 1984; Braidotti, 2006) and new materialist feminist philosophy (particularly Manning 2012, 2013, 2016), Emma Renold and Gabrielle Ivinson will present aspects of their on-going pARTicipatory research with young people (aged 12 – 18) living in the ex-mining/coal/steel towns of the south Wales valleys. Working with choreographer Jên Angharad they will share a series of dartafacts (Renold 2017) created across a range of research creations and contribute an interactive performance piece that brings to life new materialist feminist research methodologies. The intention is that through creative research practices the team will demonstrate the means by which educational research can transcend conventional boundaries and expectations to put the in-act into enacted activism.

Emma Renold is a Professor of Childhood Studies at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University. Her research explores gendered and sexual subjectivities across diverse institutional sites and public spaces across the young life course. She chairs the Welsh government’s expert advisory group on healthy relationships and recently led the production of Wales’ – and the UK’s – first online toolkit to support young people to raise awareness of gender-based and sexual violence in schools and local communities (in collaboration with Welsh Women’s Aid, NSPCC Cymru and the Children’s Commissioner).

Gabrielle Ivinson is Professor of Education and Community in the Faculty of Education, Manchester Metropolitan University. She is interested in how the specific habits, practices and gender worlds that supported dangerous work in industrial locales can be regenerated as social and educational resources for children and young people today. She leads the BERA Poverty and Policy Commission, which aims to influence and broaden public debate on the role of education to improve the life chances of children & youth living in poverty.

Jên Angharad trained in Dance Theatre and Advanced Performance at the Laban Centre for Movement & Dance, London. Her career began in performance before building a portfolio of work independently as a bilingual choreographer, workshop facilitator and movement director in education, community, theatre and television. She is a member of the Future Matters Collective in Cardiff and collaborates with Cardiff University colleagues and artists on research projects as movement facilitator, choreographer and performer.

https://vimeo.com/160137856

 

Professor Ann Phoenix, Institute of Education, University of London
(Day 3 – 14:40 – 16:00)

Generating feminisms? Negotiating intersectional borders and boundaries over time

The power struggles that result from intersectional differences between women have been central to the generativity of feminisms, fuelling new ways of seeing and shifts in relations between women and new claims to feminist theory. Whilst it can be easy to romanticise these histories, fissures within feminisms in and out of the academy have been intense in some sites and ignored in others over the last few years. At the same time, borders have proliferated as migration, concerns about terrorism and state responses to it have made many citizens contributors to the policing of national borders in their everyday lives (including in the academy).

In this closing keynote, Professor Ann Phoenix will examine some of the ways in which feminisms, through intersectional lenses, are currently generating new ways of seeing and working across borders. This process is often a heated and painful one, where new generations of feminists, multiply positioned in terms of ethnicisation, racialisation, genders and sexualities, find their own ways of taking up affordances from feminisms and resisting exclusionary practices within and outside feminisms. Professor Phoenix will consider the ways in which old issues (e.g. of racialisation, genders and sexuality) are both recursive and take new forms. Her presentations explores how disciplinary practices in the academy serve to (re)produce hierarchical gendered inequalities by shoring up old borders that sometimes exhaust generative energy and examines the psychosocial impact of this in policy, practice and research.

Ann Phoenix is a Professor in Psychosocial Studies based at Thomas Coram Research Unit, Department of Social Sciences, UCL Institute of Education and she is the Principal Investigator of the research network NOVELLA (Narratives of Varied Everyday Lives and Linked Analyses). She has over 200 publications which include work on narratives, theoretical and empirical aspects of social identities, gender, masculinity, youth, intersectionality, racialization, ethnicisation, migration and transnational families. From 2016-7 she is the Erkko Professor at the Helsinki University Collegium for Advanced Studies.

 

 

If you are attending conference, let us know on Twitter using the hashtag: #GEAconf2017