Search

Previous research exploring how working-class women experience UK Higher Education (HE) work has made evident recurring themes around social segregation and corresponding difficulties with feeling they belong. This paper develops this work by exploring the ways in which UK, HE based working-class women lecturers talk about their sense of belonging. It was found that, in contemporary UK HE, lecturing work is located within a marketised space where caring for students is central and the deployment of emotional labour to seen to be a necessary requirement to meet those demands. In addition, this labour is understood to be work that working-class women can readily take up, and as one of the few vehicles to enable feelings of value and belonging. However, this work is also devalued, unaccounted for and potentially harmful to those who do engage in it, therefore shoring up/ reinforcing a class and gender stratified UK academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper rethinks education’s reliance on knowing who queer and trans youth are. It suggests that both desires to ‘know’ who youth are and the processes by which curriculum, policy, and scholarship come to know what is thought to be known about youth flattens and diminishes youths’ life experiences and what they might be/come. By examining the ideas that are thought to be known about queer and trans youth, the paper explores how these ideas tend to excise the specifics of youths’ lives, particularly along racial lines. Moreover, this paper considers how queer and trans adults’ desires to place queer and trans youth within historical lineages, present-day conundrums, and future imaginings limits youths’ own explorations and determinations of their own gendered and sexual presentations, expressions, and identities. In total, this paper asks: how might we get to unknow queer and trans youth? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores school structure in an all-girls, predominantly African American middle class school to examine the ways in which discourses of education, race, gender, and science work to position middle school, African American girls as outside of science. Using discourse analysis, two prominent school signs are presented, a bulletin board and a classroom sign, and examined alongside excerpts from student interviews. The results indicate that being a 'Nice Girl' is a prerequisite for being a 'Good Student' and is synonymous with being a 'STEM Girl', potentially alienating students from viewing themselves, or wishing to be viewed by others, as a science person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a global context where children are increasingly exposed to hostile humour in cartoons like Adventure Time and Spongebob Squarepants, it is not surprising that we see this play out in school settings. More concerning, however, is how teachers can misuse their position of power to wield such forms of humour against students who dare to question their authority. This paper draws on ethnographic data from three regional Australian primary schools to address how the performative violence of hostile 'humour' is enacted by male teachers at the expense of less violent and more 'responsible' alternatives. I employ gender-based theories and literature to argue that hostile humour is another mechanism through which hierarchies of hegemonic masculinity are maintained and 'the top dog' (or teacher) is positioned to have the last laugh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes as its subject the circulation of tolerance discourse within two pedagogical encounters in two Australian educational settings, and draws from the work of Wendy Brown on tolerance as a regulatory force. Brown argues that discourses of tolerance are produced within historical and cultural milieu that enable tolerance and aversion to exist simultaneously. This has significant implications for how we might come to understand the project of working towards a socially just educational system and the various struggles encountered within pedagogical sites. I also examine the pedagogical affects that are produced within different educational moments as we work to teach in or around difference and when we embody the Other in the classroom. I engage with how these experiences speak to the way in which tolerance as national ideal acts to both alleviate and circulate discourses of inequality such as sexism and homophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As working-class female academics, this paper examines the constructions of our identities focusing on both what unites and differentiates us as working-class women. We focus on the structuring forces in our lives such as our class, our whiteness and our gender, but we also discuss how our experiences have been shaped by space and place as a complex set of time-sensitive inter-relationships involving domination and subordination. Here, our different stories of where, when and how we grew up are discussed as we attempt to make sense of these in relation to our construction of class and its intersectionality with these important aspects of our lives. We examine how these shaping features of our identities influence the personal investment we place in our work and how the middle-class 'status' inferred upon us by our educational 'success' and engagement within academia almost always feels contradictory to our own subjectivities and working-class loyalties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how principles of multimodality can be effectively incorporated into game analysis in the context of social justice. The authors use a multimodal framework to assist developers, researchers, and educators in better understanding representations of class, race, and gender in videogames. Videogames are multimodal in nature: not only do they 'remediate' and adopt the representational practices of other media, but also employ algorithmic, procedural, haptic, and interactive forms of expression. Videogames are uniquely situated to represent systemic oppression and privilege through what Ian Bogost calls 'procedural rhetoric,' i.e. the representation of systems through computational media. Videogames' high multimodality allows players to experience and interact with systems of oppression and privilege in ways that other media cannot. To define these concepts, the paper will include examples from several videogames deal with issues of representation either implicitly or explicitly, including CartLife, a retail simulator; Overwatch, a competitive First-Person Shooter; and Apex: Legends, a battle-royale First-Person Shooter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the use of critical and post-critical pedagogies in a rural Australian high school for the purposes of unsettling life-limiting gender beliefs and practices. The paper problematises two examples whereby site-specific knowledges, curriculum dictates, media texts and critical pedagogies were enmeshed to create politically charged spaces for re-seeing, re-thinking and re-doing gender. The first example involves a unit of work in which students were required to critically analyse and evaluate a well-known Australian documentary film for the particular version of hypermasculinity that it was valorising. The second example involves the collaborative critiquing of a well-known local text. At the conclusion of the paper, I turn a critically reflexive eye upon myself as a way of considering the ethics and issues for educators of challenging power asymmetries from ‘the inside’. It is at this point that I discover it is possibly I who have been disrupted most of all. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Whilst most social and educational research on friendship focuses on children at school, it remains a crucially important factor for students in higher education – and can play a key role in the maintenance, exacerbation or subversion of dominant forms of social inequalities. This paper explores the complexities of such dynamics in relation to friendship and social life at university, utilising data from an in-depth qualitative study of HE students at a UK campus university. Students stressed the importance of friendship for comfort and a sense of 'belonging'. Nevertheless, students describe the continuation of cliques, hierarchies, and exclusions that are more commonly linked to sociality at school. Despite the conception that friendship is an individual experience, it is very much influenced by social positionings such as gender, class, age, and ethnicity – having significant repercussions for students in relation to happiness and wellbeing at university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we consider discourses of friendship and belonging mobilised by girls who are not part of the dominant ‘cool’ group in one English primary school. We explore how, by investing in alternative and, at times, resistant, discourses of ‘being nice’ and ‘being normal’ these ‘non-cool’ girls were able to avoid some of the struggles for dominance and related bullying and exclusion found by us and other researchers to be a feature of ‘cool girls’ groupings. We argue that there are multiple dynamics in girls' lives in which being ‘cool’ is only sometimes a dominant concern. There are some children for whom explicitly positioning themselves outside of the ‘cool’ group is both resistant and protective, providing a counter-discourse to the dominance of ‘coolness’. In this paper, which is based on observational and interview data in one school in the south of England, we focus on two main groupings of intermediate and lower status girls, as well as on one ‘wannabe’ ‘cool girl’. While belonging to a lower status group can bring disadvantages for the girls we studied, there were also benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I consider the adult focus of current mainstream gender theory. I relate this to how the concept of the heterosexual matrix originates in a social contract which excludes children from civil society. I argue that this exclusion is problematic both for theoretical reasons and from the perspective of children themselves. I start by discussing the nature of the heterosexual matrix and its foundations. I consider the implications for participation which arise from being named as a child, how that affects children's attempts to claim participation in civil society, and how this is related to children's naming of themselves as gendered. I then briefly consider the possibility that, because of their exclusion, children might also be considered to be exempt from the heterosexual matrix. However, I argue, there is considerable evidence that children are actively sexual beings who also work hard to claim inclusion in local practices of heterosexuality. I end by suggesting that there are three key reasons for this: that the discourses of normative sexuality provide children with a language to express sexual feelings; that self-insertion in the heterosexual matrix is a way for children to claim rights to participation; and that taking up heterosexual formations is a means whereby children can experience the power of naming themselves as part of the social world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people may face conflicting and confusing messages about what it means to respond well in relation to homophobia and transphobia. Consequently, we ask – What might it mean to respond well to homophobia and transphobia? This strategy, inspired by Anika Thiem and Judith Butler, is recognition of the ambivalent conditions which structure attempts to respond well to bullying related to gender and sexuality. Such an approach is counter to educational responses that suggest a remedy in advance of the enactment of perceived bullying. Our paper draws on research conducted by the authors in four such schools, two in Australia and two in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It is a deliberate turn away from focusing on who should be held to account for homophobia and transphobia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers how time is imagined, lived, and desired in young women’s lives as they undertake their final year of secondary school studies in Melbourne, Australia. It argues that economic and competitive imperatives have intensified for many young people in recent times, manifesting in an educational apparatus that increasingly defines the parameters of success and achievement in terms of self-regulation and personal responsibility, and that this is particularly pronounced for young people as they prepare for, and aspire towards tertiary pathways. This article draws upon interviews and a-synchronous ‘blog’ posts from two young women who participated in a year-long study of young people enrolled in their final year of secondary school studies. It suggests that the intensification, compression, and control of time in educational discourse around the senior year plays a powerful role in self-making for young women in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

School-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) has received growing attention in policy and practice over the past decade, increasingly attended to in national and international contexts. Yet we need to understand more fully the processes and actors through which this policy enactment takes place. This article analyses the understanding of SRGBV by policy stakeholders in Ethiopia and Zambia. It shows how the concept is discursively stretched by actors in positive ways, as well as shrunk and fixed in ways that limit its application, in gendered and political processes. We propose SRGBV offers a point where contestation between policy actors and sectors is inevitable. Opportunities for dialogue that include recognition of the everyday and gendered manifestations of violence may offer a contribution to facilitating policy enactment that moves towards a holistic and inclusive account of SRGBV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This interview explores the intellectual contours of Stuart Hall's work through the insights of Professor Avtar Brah, Emerita, Birkbeck College, whose feminist post-colonial voice has shaped generations of scholarship on diaspora thinking, achieving public intellectual status. HerCartographies of Diaspora(1996) received international acclaim, challenging nationalist feminisms to engage diasporic cultural politics. The longest standing member of theFeminist Revieweditorial collective, Brah's intertwining of feminist theorisation with transformative pedagogies is well known. It is rare that feminists of colour or diasporic feminists are celebrated as ‘public intellectuals’, even when they are exceptionally accomplished in multiple spheres of intellectual life. Thus, we have chosen to interview Professor Avtar Brah, whose transnationally recognised work both owes a debt to and extends Hall's work in some surprising directions. Our interview explores some questions together as a ‘we’ and others individually to respect and highlight our own respective theoretical, socio-political and transnational experiences. This approach to interviewing acknowledges our different voices, as well as our affinities through this collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]