Category: Countdown to Conference

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!

 

C2C: Keynote Speaker Professor Raewyn Connell

 

Raewyn Connell is Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney and a Life Member of the National Tertiary Education Union. She has taught at Macquarie University, Flinders University, and several universities in other countries. Recent books are Southern Theory (2007), about social thought in the postcolonial world; Confronting Equality (2011), about social science and politics; Gender: In World Perspective (3rd edn, with Rebecca Pearse, 2015) and El género en serio [Gender for Real] (2015). Raewyn’s other books include Schools & Social Justice, Ruling Class Ruling Culture, Gender & Power, Masculinities, and Making the Difference. Her work has been translated into nineteen languages. She is the 2017 recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Jessie Bernard Award. Details can be found at her website www.raewynconnell.net and on Twitter @raewynconnell

 

As a keynote speaker for #GEAConf2018, Professor Raewyn Connell will be discussing the conference theme by highlighting the global dimension in gender relations, and current debates about knowledge.  ‘Post-truth politics’ is not peculiar to the global North, and is not separate from contemporary imperialism. Power on a world scale is still concentrated among groups of privileged men, including corporate managers, the super-wealthy, and military power-holders.  But their legitimacy is fragile, which is a reason for the revived appeal to violence in global politics and the turn, in media and domestic politics, to hostile fantasies of threat and protection.

Global feminism has disrupted patriarchal authority very widely, and mass education is one of the most important sites where this has happened. Feminist critique of the mainstream curriculum remains essential.  Yet we need to look critically at the global politics of our knowledge about gender, which itself has an imperial history and is challenged by decolonization campaigns

Global feminism has disrupted patriarchal authority very widely, and mass education is one of the most important sites where this has happened. Feminist critique of the mainstream curriculum remains essential.  Yet we need to look critically at the global politics of our knowledge about gender, which itself has an imperial history and is challenged by decolonization campaigns. Claims for the universality of knowledge, which provide some resistance to post-truth politics, are subject to familiar feminist critiques, yet cannot be replaced by claims of epistemic privilege.  We need, in current conditions, a feminist model of truthful practice as a basis for knowledge and curriculum. Professor Connell hopes to illustrate what this means for teachers’ working lives as well as in theory.

 

 

If you are attending conference, let us know on Twitter using the hashtag: #GEAconf2018

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: Women’s stories in mathematics
by  Sam Prough, University of Wisconsin-Madison

 

I am thrilled to become part of GEA as well as have the opportunity to attend the GEA 2018 conference! I’m excited to share my research that unpacks the math stories of individuals who identify as women in an effort to understand how they can be supported in learning by looking at their collective experiences as a new and meaningful form of truth.

As the world spirals into a realm of post-truth, people seem to be scrambling to find facts and prove objectivity in order to counteract statements and opinions lacking evidence and substance. When this tightening of accepted truths and truthful stories occurs across the news and even research, what or whose truth is valued? What or whose stories are heard?

What or whose truth is valued? What or whose stories are heard?

There’s a profound irony in how I have placed myself within the hierarchy of stories and truth telling in research. I was more than surprised to have my work accepted for the GEA 2018 conference. In fact, as an early graduate student, I had chalked up the application merely as an opportunity to practice my skills of promoting and concisely writing about my work. This entrenched lack of confidence that such work would be considered meaningful by others was really an internalized thought about what stories or truths would be considered meaningful within academia as a whole.

Within mathematics education the accepted truth of what counts as math learning is narrow and additionally emphasizes the perspective of men. Math is frequently framed as highly masculine and often accessible only to a select few. The ideas and learning of underrepresented individuals, such as women in mathematics, are frequently made invisible.

Research is at a crucial crossroads. I would argue that research can recognize a more meaningful array of truths by listening and embracing the stories of these often made invisible individuals. I’m interested in what new things this can show us about women’s experience in math education. By exploring multiple women’s stories in math, it is possible to recognize a range of experiences that create an environment of what counts as math learning for women.

What are other ways that gender education research can function in a post-truth society without erasing the voices of the very individuals that they study? I look forward to attending #GEACONF2018 to find out!

 

If you are attending conference, let us know on Twitter using the hashtag: #GEAconf2018

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 21^st 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

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: Science, Social Justice, and ‘Southern Discomfort’
by Dr Leslie S. Jones

I am not much of a blogger, in fact this is my first blog post EVER, but I am willing to give up my status as a “virgin blogger” in the spirit of the upcoming conference.

If there were a gene for feminism, I would be absolutely certain that I have it. My earliest memories are constant battles with my mother over being forced to do things because “that is what girls are supposed to do.” I hate dolls, pastel pink dresses, and lacey anklet socks to this day, since they symbolize the gender roles I found so oppressive as a child. I know she meant well, considering it her duty to socialize me properly so that I would fit into the prescription of a “nice girl” that my two sisters found so easy to accept. The more she tried, the wilder I got, and the more I grew to resent ridiculous cultural boundaries, some fifty years ago, that kept me from doing things I wanted to do. When she told me “not to beat a boy” on a golf or tennis date because “they would never want to marry me,” I thought she was crazy. I have never been able to understand how a well-educated woman who majored in mathematics at a very prestigious college could wonder, “Why you girls insist on over-educating yourselves?” when my sisters and I went to graduate school leading to two MBAs and a PhD. My wonderful father, who came from a much less-privileged childhood, was tremendously proud of us and always defended my right to grow into whatever I wanted to be.

I hate dolls, pastel pink dresses, and lacey anklet socks to this day, since they symbolize the gender roles I found so oppressive as a child.

My first conscious exposure to racism was in 1961 when I saw 3 bathrooms and 2 water fountains with signs for “colored people” at a gas station on a visit to Mississippi. I insisted on an explanation, and my parents must have been terrified that the Ku Klux Klan was going to appear if they did not get their out-spoken child in the car. I spent a large part of my childhood in Hawaii, learning island cultural values including the fact that the world is full of different people. Growing up during the Civil Rights Era I could never accept any justification for what was happening to African Americans. The ugliness of both racial segregation and gender roles in the latter part of the 20th century were so obnoxious throughout my secondary, university, and early graduate schooling in the natural sciences that by the time I chose a dissertation topic, it was “The Impact of Racism and Sexism in Post-Secondary Science Education.”

I learned the word intersectionality twenty years after I had completed that research on racism and sexism in the natural sciences, but I had always said that the most profound conclusion I could make from the study was that Women of Color are treated worst, because these forms of discrimination are compounded when they both come into play. I had learned why my mother had pushed me to be compliant when I was punished in subtle ways for being smarter or a better athlete than males. However, more importantly, I consider what racism continues to do to African Americans is much crueler than the gendered discrimination I had experienced. I teach in a Biology department and trying to get white men to recognize the stubborn persistence of sexism in a department that is 50% women is almost a waste of time. Therefore, I devote most of my energy to challenging racism and other discrimination because nobody can dismiss that diversity work as being in my own self-interest. As a white woman, people listen when I speak about scientific racism and “race” being nothing more than a cultural artifact. As a scientist who studied reproductive physiology, I get plenty of respect when I challenge heterosexism within the complexity the influences of nature and nurture on human sexuality. Finally, with the academic freedom we have in the USA, I can teach biology in a deliberate manner to promote social justice as long as what I say is scientifically legitimate.

I wanted to share the link to a film that my friend and former colleague just released, Southern Discomfort (2017) because it sets the backdrop for the talk I will be giving at the conference. This is shocking, but no exaggeration.

http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/southern-discomfort-2017/

If anyone has any requests for American things you would like me to take over to the UK, I should have room in my suitcase.  Sweets?  or any foods you can’t get easily even with the web? I am going to take some candy-covered pecans to pass around because they are the big treat from my current home in Georgia.

I know I am going to be on a search for a special English hard candy that is honey-flavored and has very tart lemon powder inside.

See You Soon – I am psyched to visit England again!

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

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: #FEAS are coming to GEA! (And looking forward to it)
by Dr Emily Gray
Twitter:@FEASproject

Feminist Educators Against Sexism #FEAS are an Australian-based international feminist collective committed to interrupting, challenging and otherwise shouting out about sexism in the academy and other educational spaces. #FEAS was formed by Mindy Blaise, Emily Gray and Linda Knight in 2016 and emerged out of a funded project to develop arts-based interventions into sexism in higher education. Workshops were run with diverse women academics from all career stages and together we developed interventions that were performed at a large education conference. The interventions included sexist/anti-sexist bingo cards, pipeline myth t-shirts that display statistics about women’s employment in Australian universities, whistles to blow when no-one’s listening, butterfly nets for catching those elusive opportunities and a stand up comedy performance that used participants’ experiences as one-liners that aren’t really very funny at all, as well as deploying the literal figure of the feminist killjoy. By challenging sexism through humour, irreverence and collective action we hope to highlight the inequalities, absurdities and the dreary everydayness of sexism in the academy. From the original 3, #FEAS now number over 400 and are located in Australia and all over the world including UK, Aotearoa New Zealand, Sweden, Belgium, the USA, Canada and Saudi Arabia.

This year, #FEAS have teamed up with Gender and Education and we are busy designing a new range of t-shirts, business cards and working on a brand new stand up performance for your viewing pleasure at the conference. We will also be presenting our research-creation journey so far, including our recently formed Cite Club where #FEAS share research with each other and cite each other where we can.

Mindy and Emily are familiar faces at Gender and Education conferences, both having attended many times in the past. Linda is brand new to Gender and Ed and so we are looking forward to introducing her to our favourite conference and to sharing our ideas and interventions with you all!

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

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: Learning from Across Borders: What Canadian Multiculturalism Teaches Us about Happiness
by Natalie Wall
Twitter: @mdximpact

When I was a little girl, my father told me that I could be anything; I could be Prime Minister of Canada, if I wanted to.

He was and still is… wrong.

Canada has never elected a female Prime Minister and the only woman (Progressive Conservative Kim Campbell) to have held the position attained it through hatred of the previous PM and was replaced by the Liberal Jean Chrétien within six months, and this is after having called the election because she showed a demonstrable lead in the polls. Canada has never had a non-white Prime Minister. Even as a child, I knew that my chances were not good and I can’t say that my father approved of my defeatist attitude when I explained my unlikelihood of becoming Canada’s first black, female Prime Minister. This was my first moment of being a black feminist killjoy.

Wait… can I be a black feminist killjoy?

Killing Joy and Taking Names

Sara Ahmed tells us that the feminist kill joy “is an affect alien for sure: she might even kill joy  precisely because she refuses to share an orientation towards certain things as being good” and that “[w]e can place the figure of the feminist kill joy alongside the figure of the angry black woman.” Let us suppose that the angry black woman and the feminist kill joy can exist in one body, so that I can become a black feminist kill joy. In fact, let me assume the mantle of black, Canadian feminist kill joy.

Crossing Borders and Becoming Foreign

Over the course of my PhD, I have become foreign. However, I have never felt so Canadian as I have once I became foreign. My foreignness makes me nostalgic for a home that never was, a place to which I never really belonged. I am a black Canadian woman whose father was an immigrant who moved from Trinidad to Canada in the seventies and whose mother grew up on in a country house in rural Cape Breton. I belonged to a group of friends who all shared the common experience of being first generation Caribbean Canadian black women. We were antiracist activists living in West Toronto where my high school was lauded as a stellar institution despite my memories of white supremacists handing out hate literature on site and girls being told that they should not speak out against the sexual harassment from faculty members. My antiracism and feminist sensibilities grew in this environment and were intrinsically linked to my self-identification as a black Caribbean Canadian woman.

But, I have become foreign.

As I have become foreign, so has the world around me.

Brexit campaigners told us that the British population needed to “take back control” and control was taken back. And where did Brexit campaigners find inspiration for taking back that control? Michael Gove cites Canadian and Australian immigration policies when pressed about migration on Question Time.

What Can We Learn from Canada?

After the introduction of Donald Trump’s Muslim Ban on January 28^th, 2017, the Prime Minister of Canada’s Twitter account (smugly, one might argue) posted the following:

To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada

— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) January 28, 2017

 

Amid a flurry of criticism and, yes, some popular approval, the Muslim Ban opened up an opportunity for Canada to remind the international community that it holds the line in North America for diversity and hospitality.

I started my PhD examining multiculturalism in Canada under the Harper government, at a time when the Conservative government was taking liberties with its population’s human rights and making Canada a less tolerant environment than it has traditionally painted itself. See Human Rights Watch’s “World Report 2016” where among other concerns are the refusal to conduct an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and the Anti-Terror Act of 2015, “law that imperils constitutionally enshrined human rights, including the freedoms of expression and association.”

I am finishing it up under a Justin Trudeau government, a Liberal Canada expressing itself through its proclaimed feminist and hospitable Prime Minister. Trudeau’s likeability and international popularity are reflective of a system of government that always works best when portrayed as idealistic and inclusive. It is a Canada that benefits in real, marketable, ways from its reputation as a multicultural utopia that operates to oppress and manage non-white bodies by using them as objects to parade before other, international and white, audiences.

What’s Multiculturalism Got to Do with It?

Multiculturalism, both official and idealized, works to help define the culture of Canada, by offering a gesture to diversity that has become synonymous with Canadian identity, but also offering a mirror against which Canadian identity can articulate itself. The trope of multiculturalism in Canada works to define culture in two ways: policy that has become a part of the fabric of Canadian self-construction and the persistent differentiation of citizens so that there are real Canadians and the others that help to demarcate the relationship between real and marginalized.

Canada was the first country in the world to integrate idealized constructions of multiculturalism into official policy.  Multiculturalism is intrinsic to Canada’s understanding of citizenship: the Government of Canada says on its website that “Canadian multiculturalism is fundamental to our belief that all citizens are equal. Multiculturalism ensures that all citizens can keep their identities, can take pride in their ancestry and have a sense of belonging.” However, we also have to understand that immigration serves the state’s purpose, “national immigration policies are seen as mechanisms to supply workers for various industries” (Satzewich and Liodakis 62). As state policy, that is to say, multiculturalism can never be purely without benefit to the host state. In fact, immigration is part of nation-building project, where multiculturalism is both reliant upon that immigration and one of the methods with which the nation ensures the obedience of its subjects, allowing them their cultural identity so long as it is subsumed under their identities as productive Canadian citizens. The success of Canada’s multiculturalism policy is rooted in its marriage of ideology and policy into the very fabric of how Canadians understand what it means to be and act Canadian.

So, while “Canada has its own historical graveyards of shame which are routinely relegated to the footnotes of history” (Mullings et al.), including genocide, Chinese Head Tax, missing and murdered Indigenous women, just to name a few, Canadians are not willing to go on record as xenophobic bullies. In the end, Canadian’s identify so strongly with multiculturalism that Trudeau won against Harper’s xenophobic campaign in 2015. Canadians supported freedom of cultural identity instead of anti-muslim rhetoric, going so far as to wear traditional mummer’s costumes to the polls in protest over the niqab debate. The focus on the niqab in tandem with the enacting of the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, which focused unduly on Muslims, was the Conservative government’s undoing.

Alternatively, in the UK, multiculturalism is dead at the hands of home grown terrorism. Immigration fears largely influenced the Brexit vote and continue to make headlines as we head towards 8 June, 2017. As Ahmed tells us, “multiculturalism becomes a problem by being attributed as the cause of unhappiness. When we are ‘in’ multiculturalism, we are ‘out’ of our comfort zone.” As we head into another General Election, I am wondering to what degree the British public is voting for a happiness that stems from having neighbours that look like you, sound like, and think like you. Is multiculturalism the root of all unhappiness?

Or is there a lesson to be learned from across the pond?

A harsh and pragmatic lesson to be sure, but a lesson to be learned nonetheless. Because that’s what being a feminist kill joy is all about…

“Generative Feminism(s): working across/ within/ through borders”

At the upcoming Gender and Education Association Conference, titled “Generative Feminism(s): working across/within/through borders,” researchers and practitioners will be coming together to think about demarcation and delineation as feminists who are building new, innovative spaces that impacts the world around them.

The 2017 conference is being organised and hosted by Middlesex University, London and runs from run from Wednesday 21st until Friday 23rd June, 2017. As a member of the organising committee, I am excited by the breadth of topics and how disparate the backgrounds of the presenters. You can see the conference programme here and register using the following link.

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

 

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: What feminism’s got to do with dance
by Tamara Borovica
Twitter: @Blackie_in_Ozz

As a PhD candidate researching gender and the body, I find the key themes of this Gender and Education Conference – working through temporal, spatial, material and disciplinary borders – as appealing and challenging at the same time. My interest in the body as an active and agential assemblage comes from witnessing some of the extremes of human suffering, violence, hope and resilience when I was growing up in now ex-Yugoslavia, in 1990s. While most of these experiences carried a strong affective and emotional charge and made many of us irreversibly different, I got curious about the ways people continue to ‘become’. When as an adult I begin working with young people in Balkans and across Europe, my interest was in noticing complexities, contradictions, open-endedness and unevenness in their continuous becomings, even when situated in what appeared to be a grip of social structures. The same interest led me to discover and eventually start teaching dance as a form of embodied inquiry and to how the idea of this research was born.

My interest in the body as an active and agential assemblage comes from witnessing some of the extremes of human suffering, violence, hope and resilience when I was growing up in now ex-Yugoslavia, in 1990s.

In my work on the embodiment of womanhood, I imagine embodiment as relational, interconnected, always in flux and becoming, as a part of various assemblages and in numerous encounters (some of which are increasing and some decreasing bodily potentials). To explore young women’s embodiment, I have conducted a performance ethnography with a group of Melbourne University students interested in creative methods and feminist issues. We were a group of non- dancers who danced to produce and explore new feelings, thoughts, ideas, sensations and/or creative artefacts about embodied womanhood, in order to, potentially, open up ‘the affective economy’ of our bodily beings. The paper I will present, ‘Dancing the strata- affective flows of moving/dancing bodies and the possibilities for becoming otherwise’, will illustrate my approach to researching the embodiment of young womanhood where I aim to engage with the materiality of (human and more-than-human) bodies while attuning to movement, rhythm, fluidity, multiplicity and flows.  This paper will focus on one encounter of dancing bodies where we danced with the strata (categories such as sex, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, age, and ability) to look at what embodiment of these categories produces for young women’s lives and how our bodies take an active role in this production.

At the beginning of the third year of my Candidature, I can profoundly benefit from presenting at conferences such as Gender & Education, where a number of academics are engaging in similar kinds of work. More than a few of G&E scholars have been influential in informing my approach to this research, and I am looking forward to being further inspired by their work presented at GEA2017. Until we meet in London!

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

This post is part of our new Countdown to Conference (C2C) series. Are you attending conference? We would love to feature a brief blog post from you too! Visit our main Countdown to Conference page for details!

C2C: Social media and gender identity work
by Josie Anne Reade
Twitter: @JosieAnneReade

As a PhD candidate researching gender and the body, I was delighted to receive an invitation to present a paper at the 2017 GEA Conference hosted by Middlesex University in London. In my paper, ‘Assembling fitspirational bodies: Social media and gender identity work’, I will be sharing some of the emerging data from my PhD which explores how women experience their bodies and gender in relation to the digitally mediated ‘fitspo’ phenomenon. This paper will be highly theoretical as well as empirical and will directly relate to this year’s thematic emphasis on generative feminism(s). After the conference, I intend to submit a journal article for publication based on the paper I present and will also be writing a blog post for the GEA website reflecting on my conference experience.

One of Australia’s defining characteristics is its geographical isolation from the rest of the world. As an PhD candidate who wishes to achieve greater connectivity with scholars working in my field globally, this creates a significant challenge. Presenting at this conference will provide a unique opportunity to share and collaborate with scholars globally alongside my colleagues and supervisors traveling from Australia. Given my thesis draws upon relatively recent developments in feminist theory, such as feminist new materialism and the ‘affective turn’, this connectivity is imperative. Receiving feedback on the development of my ideas half way through my PhD candidature will moreover be extremely beneficial.

I look forward to attending the conference and sharing my work with the GEA community!

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

 

This post is part of our new Countdown to Conference (C2C) series. Are you attending conference? We would love to feature a brief blog post from you too! Visit our main Countdown to Conference page for details!

C2C: My current research is my teaching and my teaching is my current research
by  Dr Zoe Charalambous

My attendance at the Gender and Education Conference will immensely benefit my students by undoubtedly advancing my professional and academic development. I have been “chased after” by students in halls asking me when the “Genderisms” club will run again. Being a teacher at a private school, and in a traditional patriarchal Greek society, (though nowadays in a not so salient way), it is difficult to be granted the time and space to help bring awareness to gender issues.  My attendance at the Conference will provide me with the academic possibility of an articulation of my efforts as a feminist teacher, with the support and knowledge of other feminist teachers and researchers in order to generate more collaborations and funding to keep this project going. This “teaching project” goes beyond our generation, this generation and affects all generations. Within/across and through borders of what can be generated within/across and through gender. I will be informed and further educated by attending the conference in a manner that will provide me with further “armoury” and openness to advocate for my efforts at running a feminist club in my school and at bringing awareness, even at school level.  Exchanging ideas with other feminist teachers will most certainly help me develop professionally as a teacher and potentially find new, both academic and pedagogic, resources with which to continue my teaching/work/generation of “Genderisms.”

Some initial concrete goals I have set upon my return from the conference are:

a) a presentation for the faculty with regards the content I have accessed and the exchanges I have had informing them of recent approaches with regards gender and education
b) a re-submission of a proposal to conduct research with a school in London and New York designing a feminist unit of teaching in our curriculum with the goal to unite/share and create knowledge within/across and through borders,
c) a re-organization of the club Genderisms forging new connections with students from other schools in the world via classroom connections and other media, such as using our Facebook page : AC GENDERISMS (https://www.facebook.com/acgenderisms/ (run by my students).

My current research is my teaching and my teaching is my current research as I navigate a world of having to carefully “name” a club, “explain myself” as a feminist teacher in Greece and negotiate delicate borders of understanding and acceptance in my classes.  I think that without knowing I have been helping generate a generation/generations of generative feminism.

My current research is my teaching and my teaching is my current research as I navigate a world of having to carefully “name” a club, “explain myself” as a feminist teacher in Greece and negotiate delicate borders of understanding and acceptance in my classes. I think that without knowing I have been helping generate a generation/generations of generative feminism. Since November 2014, I teach English Literature and language at Anatolia College high school, an International private school in Northern Greece. My pedagogic stance connects to my previous doctoral research and my feminist orientation vis-à-vis feminine creativity.

My doctoral research between 2011 and 2014 focused on the concept of a non-directive pedagogy of Creative Writing in Higher Education using a Lacanian psychosocial methodology. In a simple formulation, I was wondering how it might pedagogically affect student/writers to have their assumptions about their writing abilities questioned via in-class writing interventions.  In a broader context, however, my thesis explored a way to investigate fantasies of subjectivities and their disruption (or interference with) using the whole enigmatic research project and setting – as an intervention inherent in the investigation, aimed at disrupting or shifting fantasmatic attachments. This constitutes an approach to exploring fantasy that has not, as far as I am aware, been used in other psychosocial projects.  Parts of the analysis used Bracha Ettinger’s theory of the matrixial object to begin to conceptualize moments in the creative process where a shift of fantasy – a shift in the way a student/writer would write- occurred.  Thus, metaphorically, my w(a)ndering began from an interest in the phallus/discourse to be born again in the primordial space of womb: a wondering for what (my) desire is…

Having explored a non-directive pedagogy at Higher Level Education during my PhD research I have been very keen to consider how such an approach might work at a secondary education level and what it might mean to facilitate discussions that shift students’ assumptions about their learning. I have found, both via my daily teaching experience and from student feedback, that ambiguity in providing answers at the age of 16 is not well-received. It makes teenagers much more uncomfortable than adults.  On the other hand, it has been this very “faith” in ambiguity and enigmatic facilitation that helped initiate the beginnings of a club called “Genderisms” at Anatolia College.  The club has ran for two years in an attempt to generate awareness about gender issues in multiple ways: research gender attitudes via questionnaires and interviews (student-led), educating students about sociological research methods and discussions/explorations of key texts in the feminist field. My teaching integrates and embodies the above approaches in one of the English Literature thematic units I have created. My contribution at the conference would be key in generating an impetus at my school and in Northern Greece to help me address this research more officially.

Finally, starting from this year I began to help organize the annual TeAch conference, a conference for teachers which runs at Anatolia every year. I am currently working on the call for proposals, which will include the issue of gender in education in the broader theme of “Education for Active Citizenship.”

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

This post is part of our new Countdown to Conference (C2C) series. Are you attending conference? We would love to feature a brief blog post from you too! Visit our main Countdown to Conference page for details!

C2C: Connections and new directions
by  Nicole Christen

Attending the Gender and Education Conference will benefit my academic development by adding to my knowledge of the research that exists at the intersection of gender and education, and the new directions that are being explored. For the sake of ensuring that my research is based on a rich, theoretical foundation, this knowledge is imperative. Furthermore, professionally speaking, as my goal is to establish a research career at the nexus of education (digital learning ecologies and informal learning), gender, and capacity development, I want to connect with and build relationships with others in the field.

My research is highly applicable to the theme of generative feminism and the concept of borders. Through a sequential mixed design strategy, that applies both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, I will describe and analyse the digital learning ecologies of Canadian entrepreneurs (who pursue entrepreneurship within the context of motherhood). The primary research goal it to explore how these entrepreneurs scaffold and develop their digital learning ecologies for capacity development through informal learning. The expectation, as a result of the multidimensional and pragmatic nature of this study, is to deliver educational recommendations, guidelines, strategies, and actions regarding the development of digital learning ecologies for informal learning and, ultimately, for capacity development.

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