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Feminist classrooms employ a variety of teaching strategies that empower students and inspire equity and justice. In this paper, we argue that integrating student-made documentary filmmaking into the college classroom is a powerful and effective form of feminist teaching. Specifically, feminist pedagogy views students as knowledge creators and demands collaborative, non-hierarchical learning experiences. These outcomes suggest that documentary filmmaking is a compelling and effective way to engage students in our increasingly visual and video-based culture. Based on our experiences teaching sociology at a women's college in the U.S., we illustrate the impact that documentary filmmaking has for student learning, empowerment, and justice work. We also develop and strengthen students' technical, multi-media skills, arguing this outcome expands feminist pedagogy to meet contemporary culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There appears to be a globally unifying discourse that suggests Muslim communities are not supportive of girls' education12. This paper aims to destabilize such a discourse by inserting the narratives of Muslim parents pursuing girls' education in Assam's Nagaon district. By paying attention to the concepts of bhal suwali (good girlhood) and bhal ghor (good family) articulated by parents in my study, this paper connects the performances of certain types of gender practices with the pursuit of class aspirations. It shows that good girlhood works as symbolic capital that helps Muslim parents to culturally authorize their daughters as legitimate actors in the field of education, while legitimizing themselves as good family. This paper draws attention to three practices of respectable femininity through which good girlhoods are enacted in the field of education, namely: negotiating poverty respectably, prioritizing gendered discipline, and merging career aspirations with marital prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper details the gendered oppressions of young female teachers in three elite boys' private schools in Australia. Drawing on Foucauldian analytics and the theory of practice architectures, we explore the discourses and practices that work together to silence and disempower female teachers in these schools. There is an unevenness in these accounts, as there are also female teachers in the study who appear to successfully circumnavigate these issues. However, this apparent wherewithal of some female teachers speaks to the internalisations of gender oppression as much as it does to the teachers' agency. This paper illuminates these gender oppressions, which are made possible because they remain hidden and unchallenged. The findings of this study raise thorny issues for school-based leadership, but also for educational policy-makers, because gender oppression is seemingly inextricable from the social practices that elite private boys' schools both advocate and rely on for positional advantage in schooling markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic and the ideology of intensive mothering through analysis of posts on lockdown learning in an online mothering community. It is argued that although the school closures seemed to constitute an endorsement and normalisation of intensive mothering ideology [Hays (1996). The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven: Yale University Press] by the machinery of government, and increased the pressure upon many women, some mothers resisted these expectations in this online forum. The online community served as a space in which intensive mothering expectations were articulated [Lehner-Mear (2020). "Good Mother, Bad Mother? Maternal Identities and Cyber-Agency in the Primary School Homework Debate." Gender and Education 33 (3): 285–305] but also offered an arena for cyber-agency, enabling women to express negative emotions, and normalising the rejection of expert constructions of mothering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on in-depth interviews with five working class women who work/have worked as schoolteachers in inner city settings. The paper explores their subjective and continuing engagement with their class origins--their footprints in their past--as well as the way in which social class is implicated in their professional contemporary worlds--their footsteps forward. The paper argues that through exploring female classed experiences, social class can be seen as a complex amalgam of economic and material conditions as well as embodied lived experiences and subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper follows one small, Christian university’s five-year experience with student charity date auctions. The contemporary re-emergence of date auctions represents a backlash against gender and racial progress. Student leaders believe that in a post-racial and post-sexist society, race and gender are decontextualised neutral elements of identity. Students see their expressions of racist or sexist practices as quaint or ironic, as markers that they have sufficient cultural capital to reference historical events or practices. This perceived mastery of cultural signs is what marks these expressions as hipster racism and sexism. The date auction is difficult to unpack and challenge as it rests on privilege blindness, individualism, and the powerful rhetoric of irony. Using a close reading of the student newspaper, we analyse the discourse surrounding the date auction revealing the maintenance of patriarchy and white supremacy within the academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an ecological methodology in order to re-think the concept of situatedness in ways that can take into account that we live in relation to, and are of, a more-and-other-than-human world. In doing so, the paper proposes that situatedness should be understood in terms of processes of co-invention that, fractally and recursively, open onto other co-inventions that include the non-human. The paper illustrates this through the concept of patterning. It advances a number of terms – cutting, knotting, contrasting, figuring–as potential practices that can be drawn on to provide analyses of dynamic and multiple relations that cross the boundaries between human and non-human forces. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper revisits the missing discourse of female desire [Fine, M. 1988. Sexuality, schooling and adolescent females: The missing discourse of desire.Harvard Educational Review58, no. 1: 29–53] in secondary schools. Instead of echoing previous studies that have documented how female desire is missing, this research starts from the premise that female desire is an everyday (unofficial) presence at school. Through photo-diaries and photo-elicitation, this paper attempts to materialise [Butler, J. 1993.Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex’. New York: Routledge] female desire to literally ‘see it’ through young women's own eyes. In articulation with feminist debates around young women's exercise of agency, it argues that in relation to female sexual desire, this may look different from what we expect. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari [2004.Anti-oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press], it explores how ruptures to normative female desire are constantly reterritorialised and subsequently more ‘frustrated’ than claims of easily perceptible change. In this way, it seeks to add to a more nuanced and complex theorisation of female desire at school, rather than only as an absence or a problem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The field of youth sociology has been challenged to reconsider the role of parenting in the lives of young adults. This paper presents a multiple-case study investigation into young men’s transitions from school into further education in an Australian context. We will argue that relationships with parents are materially, socially and emotionally salient throughout the period during which young men move out of adolescence and into young adulthood during their final year of senior schooling and beyond. In considering how the young men constituted their identities in the context of family relationships, we will highlight the dynamic interplay between three relational identities: dependent, independent and interdependent. We show that a main locus of tension was the negotiation of power and agency in the representation of self in relation to parents, specifically in the context of a period in which educational achievement was highly emphasised. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper derives from a larger study, looking at how students in one secondary school in Ontario problematised and understood gender expression. This study applies a Foucaultian analytic framework of disciplinary space to the problem of the bathroom in public schools. It focuses specifically on the surveillance and regulation of gendered bodies within such a space. How young people understand the surveillance of their bodily presence is significant in terms of how they are constituted as a gendered subject. I use Foucault's [1977. Discipline and punish (translated by Alan Sheridan). New York: Vintage Books, Random House, Inc; 1980. Power-knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977 (Colin Gordon, ed.) (translated by Colin Gordon … [et al.]). Hassocks: Harvester Press] concept of subjectivation to investigate how a subject is formed through mechanisms of disciplinary power, as well as Butler's [1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge] gender performativity theory to trouble the notion of gender in non-binary, unfixed terms. Additionally, the public toilet space itself can be theorised using queer theory and trans studies, particularly in terms of conceptualising the washroom as a regulated space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual and gendered violence in the education sector is a worldwide concern, but in the UK it has been marginalised in research and policy. In this paper we present findings from the National Union of Students' study Hidden Marks, the first nationwide survey of women students' experiences of violence. This research established high levels of prevalence, with one in four respondents being subject to unwanted sexual behaviour during their studies. We analyse why the issue of violence against women students has remained low profile in this country, whereas in the USA, where victimisation rates are similar, it has had a high profile since the 1980s and interventions to tackle it have received a significant amount of federal support. We urge UK policymakers, universities, students' unions and academics to address the problem, and make suggestions about initial actions to take. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research shows that in Pakistan, daughters of educated mothers are likely to be enrolled in school, thus proposing a decontextualised relationship between mothers and their daughters' education. This article draws on interview data to narratively analyse the situated experiences of Pakistani mothers for supporting their daughters' education. When mothers' life stories are analysed, a lifelong strategy of silences is revealed. Through the construct of silences, I challenge myself and other educational researchers to 'unlearn' the hegemonic epistemic cues that bind us to certain ways of knowing instead develop a critical openness to the perspectives of mothers and become 'hearers'. This article situates itself within the debates on epistemic justice – proposing a practice of critical 'hearing' to understand the lifelong situated experiences of mothers in Pakistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High achievement, and in particular, the role of the academically diligent and successful ‘boffin’ or ‘geek’, are notably under-researched areas in the sociology of education. Issues around gender and other aspects of identity in relation to such pupils are particularly under-researched. In this Viewpoint article we draw on evidence from our recent research projects including young people interpolated to, or identifying with, the subject position of ‘boffin/geek’ and media representations of such positions. We debate some tensions between our work, drawing out shared findings. The article considers issues around capital, experience, and the extent of exclusion/inclusion for boffins/geeks, discussing to what extent such young people can be considered marginalised and abjected or agentic and privileged. We argue that structural factors such as gender, social class, ‘race’, age, and institutional location impact on these constructions and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores female faculty members' pregnancy and pregnant embodiment in academia. Based on semi-structured interviews with 32 faculty mothers from 21 academic institutions in the U.S., I examine their experiences of working while pregnant and highlight the ways that the pregnant body disrupts the masculine disembodied ideal academic worker norm. Pregnancy can still be an anomaly in the university classroom where the division between work and family – mind and body – is the norm and where the 'ideal academic worker' model can influence who succeeds or fails. The ideal of the disembodied academic influenced the pregnant women's decisions about when to announce their pregnancy, how they managed their pregnant body, and how colleagues and students responded to their growing physique. The conclusion calls for more research on how the academic workplace responds to the embodied realities brought about by the changing sex composition of university faculty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In universities, being mobile and international has become ever more important for academics' career prospects. This article explores junior and other insecurely employed researchers' experiences of geographical mobility in relation to their personal life, career, employability and value as scholars. The aim is to discover the gendered strategies researchers use to combine mobility with intimate relations and personal life. Furthermore, what gendered ideas of mobility, employability and career success do researchers themselves construct? These aspects of mobility, particularly focused on gender, are analysed in three cases: Finland, Italy and the United Kingdom. These states are all (currently) members of the European Union and have implemented its internationalisation policies. The data consists of qualitative interviews gathered in 2009 and 2010. We suggest that the value and capital of academic labour are evaluated differently in the three different locations. Additionally, gender, age, academic age and life situation motivate different mobility strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether secondary schools' gender composition and levels of laddish attitudes influence the degree of ethnic prejudice among Flemish pupils. We hypothesize that in addition to pupil-level predictors of prejudice, the school's gender composition and its laddish culture play roles in pupils' attitudes toward ethnic minorities. We use multilevel analysis with data obtained in 2014–2015 from 2250 Flemish pupils in 48 secondary schools in Flanders. Both girls' and boys' ethnic prejudice is related to their laddish attitudes. Boys' levels of ethnic prejudice are associated with the gender composition and the laddish culture of their school, while girls' ethnic prejudice is more likely to be influenced by the laddish culture of the school when the proportion of male pupils in the school increases. The findings suggest that in order to reduce ethnic prejudice it might be fruitful to focus on macro-level factors, such as tackling laddish cultures at school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parents, especially mothers, have been increasingly positioned as a central determinant of children's educational outcomes. Analysing articles from a Canadian parenting magazine, this study explores and compares understandings of what it means to be an involved parent in a child's education during two time periods: 1993–1995 and 2013–2015. Findings suggest that involved parenting with respect to children's education is complex and intensive, occurring in both the home and the school. Over time the necessity of parental involvement became more taken-for-granted and the ideal parental role moved from one of providing direct assistance to children to one of creating the right environment for children to take self-responsibility; a shift that involved more emotion management on the part of mothers. These changes are analysed in the context of neoliberal understandings and intensive mothering with attention paid to class and gender implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on data from 20 years of qualitative projects with parents to discuss and analyse four issues. The first is the apparent responsibilities of parents to deliver both the school and home setting which will provide ‘the best’ for their children. Second, the gendering of parental responsibilities. Third, I investigate how class and ethnicity shape parents’ relationships with educational institutions. Drawing on Bourdieu’s conceptual framework, I consider how parents’ habitus and the forms and volumes of capital they both possess and can activate inform their struggles for position in the field of schooling. Fourth, I seek to complicate the binary between middle-class and working-class parents with the former commonly assumed to be powerful and effective in the field of schooling, and the latter powerless and ineffective. I conclude by considering the direction of future research on home–school relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on feminist activist academics who were instrumental in creating the UK Gender & Education Association at the turn of the twenty-first century. Drawing on my own intellectual biography (David, M. E. 2003. Personal and Political: Feminisms, Sociology and Family Lives Stoke-on-Trent. Trentham Books.) linked to the collective biography and life history of feminism in academia over the last 50 years, Feminism, Gender & Universities: Politics, Passion and Pedagogies (David, M. E. 2014. Feminism, Gender & Universities: Politics, Passion & Pedagogies. Farnham: Wheatsheaf.), I consider how we, as feminist educators, developed our pedagogies and professional approaches to gender and education. In so doing, I also look at three cohorts or generations of feminist academics, from the university pioneers of second-wave feminists like myself, through to those who might be considered third wave feminists. In this it is clear that whilst feminist values of women's liberation and/or gender equality shine through, there are clear differences of emphasis. This is in relation to personal, political and professional values, and approaches to education through teaching or the social sciences. Indeed, neither feminism nor gender was in the lexicon of higher education or public policy when we were starting out, and by the third cohort gender equality had become incorporated into forms of neo-liberalism. In reviewing the developments of feminisms in higher education, I also look towards what might be considered a feminist future in global higher education, given learning from previous waves to new waves of feminists such as fourth wave and beyond. Here I briefly consider the work of our EU Daphne funded research project (2013–2015) into challenging gender-related violence (GRV) through education and training for professionals working with children and young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is little research that has examined the role of mothers in their children's education in the rural space of the school, particularly in relation to the experiences of Black and minority ethnic (BME) families who are newcomers to the rural space. This article attempts to redress the balance and examine how BME mothers are positioned in rural primary schools in England (UK) which are predominantly White. This article is based on 20 in-depth interviews conducted with mothers who identified themselves as Black or from a minority ethnic background (India, Pakistan or Bangladesh). All of the respondents had moved into the areas in the last 10 years. The findings from this research suggest that mothers are active agents in the education of their children; however, their experiences reveal that within the White space of the school they are positioned as ‘other’ and ‘outsiders’ as they navigate the diasporic space of the White countryside. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Managerialism and neoliberal changes and demands influence the work and family lives of academics differently in different positions and contexts. In this article, I explore how Finnish academics on short fixed-term contracts have been treated, and how they interpret recent changes and their effects on their work and private lives. I ask how the demands and changes are gendered and what consequences they have for work–family balance and gender equality, as well as whether the changes have been internalised or resisted. Managerialism seems to create new ways to govern oneself and to approach academic work, home, children and gender. I argue that these profound changes are veiled by more visible reforms that seem to threaten academic autonomy, such as time surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

History is often embedded, explicitly or implicitly, in discourses on contemporary aspects of gender and education, but relatively few scholars engage critically with history as they grapple with current issues. This article posits ‘historical sensibility’ as a means of engaging constructively with the past when scrutinising and working on current issues in gender and education. Four features of historical sensibility are mapped out and compared with established ways of approaching the relationship between the present and past. The utility of historical sensibility is demonstrated with reference to ongoing debates about the feminisation of schooling, the sexualisation of children and the leisure pursuits of young women. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gender gaps in learning and education outcomes have changed dramatically over the last few years. However, researchers have not adequately assessed how the high school learning environment differentially affects boys and girls. An important component of the learning environment in US secondary school is the opportunity to learn in an Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum, which allows high school students to do college-level work. Using the US National Education Longitudinal Study 1988–2000, we explain how high school AP curriculum interacts with gender to predict the selectivity of colleges that students attend. The results show that girls and boys who attend high schools with a larger percentage of students in AP curriculum attend more selective colleges (that require higher standardised scores for admissions); yet the positive effect of the opportunity to learn in an AP curriculum is greater for girls than for boys. This research furthers the debate about the effects of school structure on gender stratification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reporting on a study of mature women training to work in childcare, this article demonstrates how some women choose to be part-time mothers, workers and students, wanting ‘the best of both worlds’. It presents a theory of integrated lives that contrasts with customary deficit models and shows how a series of reciprocal links bind the women's different roles together, introducing an adaptation of Coser's theory of greedy institutions to demonstrate how this is an inherently stable position. Whilst the theory can stand alone, it is usefully recast as a localised example of a capability set as it frames the co-realisable choices open to the women. Making further links with Amartya Sen's capability approach, it is suggested that we should encourage governmental interventions that enable individual choice and support those women who want to integrate their lives alongside those who seek parity in the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little research has examined whether the effects of race or socioeconomic status (SES) on educational attitudes differ by gender, limiting knowledge of unique vulnerabilities occurring at the intersection of multiple social statuses. Using data from 182 sixth-graders, interactions between gender, race/ethnicity, and SES in predicting educational aspirations, persistence, views of science, and educational self-efficacy are examined. African American and Latino boys express more negative attitudes relative to (1) higher-SES boys, (2) White boys, and (3) girls of any race/ethnicity or level of SES. The intersection of multiple inequalities in education across the early life course is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores issues of gender and race in the academic careers of female sociologists in South Africa by focusing on selected women who left academic departments in higher education institutions. In-depth interviews were conducted with 11 participants who left various Sociology departments at different times. It was found that young black female academics dwelled on issues of race in their careers, but paid scant attention to gender. Older white female academics, especially those who had been in senior positions, focused on gender issues, with only brief comments on racial issues. It is argued that racial challenges overshadow gender challenges for black female academics in South Africa and that gender discrimination is only experienced once women reach more senior academic positions. A minority status in academic departments contributes to experiences of racial or gender discrimination, although demographic changes within departments do not necessarily lead to the eradication thereof. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief viewpoint piece depicts educational (dis)engagements apparent in researching and (re)designing higher education in and through Accessions. Accessions, a collaborative research-design project, probed at how cultures, climates and conditions of higher education may be reproducing or reshaping social inequalities and divisions. Here, questions are asked about how these might be challenged within and potentially beyond the specific locale of one university campus. This research-design project hopes to enable a critical perspective on issues of ‘participation’, ‘impact’, ‘engagement’ and ‘internationalisation’, where regulations and measures may be resisted and disrupted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article places identification at the centre of a discussion about sisters, families, shaky class locations, and resistance and conformity towards schooling. Drawing on ideas from group psychology, and placing sisters centre stage, it seeks to shed light on some of the push and pull of unconscious processes and flows of affect across and between generations and groups, and their place in the educational identifications of working-class girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, young children’s narration in words and pictures is discussed from a gender perspective. The article is based on a project in which eight pre‐school children made their own books. In their stories, the children reused narratives picked up from different media, both traditional fairytales and popular cultural products. The reuse of those narratives gives children opportunities to explore gender positions in a playful way. The narratives produced by the children had, in certain respects, a gender‐stereotyped content. The girls and the boys selected gender‐specific themes for their stories. But in their stories, the children also made reinterpretations of traditional stories and gender patterns. The girls let the female characters play the active roles and the boys let their heroes become friends with the enemies. In this way, the children used the stories creatively, reshaping them to fit their own purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The feminist working-class academic is an exemplary queer subject, someone whose presence (and practice) questions the norms of the academy without ever being able to completely occupy the 'other' term. She is an archetypal late modern subject of reflexivity and mobility. This article explores some consequences of this position by looking at class as lived as a re/location, reflecting on its pleasures and pains. The author looks principally at autobiographically inspired accounts of class, as well as other auto/biographical material, which have influenced these personal narratives. In doing so she alludes to more research-based texts to point to the cumulative importance of this particular class literature to problematise a sociology without a society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]