The extended deadline for abstract submission (7 September) is approaching. Further details are available here
Straight A and Okay? Researching Academically Successful Girls in the Wake of Post-Feminism
We began studying academically successful girls in 2007. Some researchers and the popular media had already been asking “What about the boys?” for over a decade, but the discourse was becoming a runaway train in the new millennium. Everywhere we looked, magazine covers and newspaper headlines anxiously suggested that girls were now the “new dominant sex,” and that their success had come as a result of a “feminized” education system and at boys’ expense. So ingrained was this panic that whenever we discussed our interest in girls’ academic success, someone would invariably ask, “Why are you studying girls? I thought boys were the ones who needed to be studied now.” Continue reading “Straight A and Okay? Researching Academically Successful Girls in the Wake of Post-Feminism”
Familiar and strange fathers in education
They say ethnographers are supposed to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. That, however, can be a difficult task since we tend to be ignorant about our own customs and ideologies. For instance, research on parenthood has often taken traditional gender roles for granted. In most western cultures, mothers’ unpaid educational work has been seen as natural, something that educational researchers have reproduced by talking about parent involvement instead of the more accurate term mother involvement. Prominent feminist scholars, such as Miriam David and Dorothy Smith, have for long called attention to the considerable amount of educational work that women carry out on a daily basis. But what about men’s relations to their children’s schooling and education? My article published in the forthcoming Gender and Education 23(5) addresses this question. Continue reading “Familiar and strange fathers in education”
Special Issue: Thinking Education Feminisms: Engagements with the Work of Diana Leonard
Call for Papers
Many readers of Gender and Education will remember Diana Leonard, who died aged 68 on 27 November 2010, and most will be familiar with some aspect of her work. Diana was a supporter of, contributor to and long time editorial board member of the journal. She established the Centre for Research and Education on Gender (CREG) at the Institute of Education, London, in 1984, which was a hub of feminist educational thinking and activism for the next twenty years. Diana was also instrumental in establishing the Gender and Education Association, with which the journal is now linked. Continue reading “Special Issue: Thinking Education Feminisms: Engagements with the Work of Diana Leonard”