Manchester Metropolitan University

27-30 May 2025

Conference theme: Re-Routing and Re-Imagining Gender and Education conference

Exploring multiple and alternative routes for generating feminist knowledge otherwise actively challenges the many normative ways ‘to conference’ (Osgood et al. 2022). GEA2025 was an opportunity to explore our roots and imagine new possible futures and directions as we recontextualise our work in a new age of extremes. 

By focusing on the roots and routes of gender in education participants to entered into debates about what it might mean to look back to our varied histories, routes and pathways, and rethink how we might diversify routes into the future, including its natal forms, so as to trans*form routes, activate routes and rethink pathways for policy and practice. 

Diversifying routes to, from and through intersectional (Crenshaw, 1994) and intra-sectional (Puar, 2012) feminist practices in education necessarily requires approaches that reside in our sense of rootlessness as a way towards transformation – in the active sense of always being “on the run” (Spivak 2004). 

Keynotes and panel discussions

Knowing Routes – Valerie Walkerdine, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University

Diversifying Routes – Fikile Nxumalo, Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

Trans*forming Routes – Marquis Bey, Department of Black Studies, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Activating Routes

Feminist Educators Against Sexism. FEAS is an international feminist collective committed to developing interventions against sexism in the academy and other educational spaces.

Finn Mackay, University of the West of England

Sid Mohandas, independent scholar

Zoha Zokaei, Department of Media, Arts and Humanities, University of Sussex

Re-routing Policy

Alison Phipps, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University

EJ Renold, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University

Jessica Ringrose, Faculty of Education and Society, Institute of Education, University College London

Vanita Sundaram, Department of Education, University of York

people talk at a conference
Lucy Humphries Photography.