The labels swot, ear ’ole, boffin, keeno, geek and nerd resonate meaningfully across generations of school-goers and echo through the terrains of popular culture. Our Gender and Education viewpoint started life as a conversation about our own research into how such identities are imagined and lived. We wondered: Has ‘the rise of the nerd’ meant that being a ‘boffin’ at school has lost its stigma? Continue reading “Boffins and geeks: geek or chic?”
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”
Are girls victims of their own sexual agency? Sexualisation, sexual violence and schooling
On the 15th October the End Violence Against Women (EVAW) organisation called upon the Coalition Government to urgently address the “alarming levels” of sexual harassment and violence against young women in schools. Their YouGov 2010 online survey of 788 16-18 year olds found that a third (29%) of young women reported unwanted sexual touching at school and witnessed routine sexual name-calling on a daily or twice-weekly basis. Over a quarter (28%) said they had seen sexual pictures on mobile phones at school twice a month or more. In the same month, Girl Guiding UK continued to fight the sexualisation of girl culture by delivering a 25,000 signature petition to Downing Street calling for the Government to introduce compulsory labelling for all airbrushed images. This concern addressed the findings from their Girls’ Attitudes Survey, in which 50% of the girls reported that they would consider having surgery to change their looks and more than half had been bullied for their appearance. Indeed, the impact of ‘sexualisation’ upon girls and young women has become the subject of high profile controversial reports and inquiries from a number of government and non-governmental bodies (Home Office 2010). Continue reading “Are girls victims of their own sexual agency? Sexualisation, sexual violence and schooling”