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Presenting research findings outside of the form of a traditional research report requires different modes of making and communicating. This paper offers an account of how The #FEAS Report, a satirical news video, was made to communicate the findings from interviews and a survey as part of the mixed-methods study, Sexism, Higher Education, and COVID-19: The Australian Perspective to a wider public. Three creative tactics for research communication were used: DIY aesthetics, humour, and situated bodies. These communication tactics enabled the researchers to think differently about what research findings mean, and how to articulate them in ways that are intelligible. The paper shows how these tactics worked to bring findings to audiences beyond the academy and ask audiences within the academy to think differently about research reporting and knowledge communication. The paper considers how performing research in this way generates different conversations that compliment those started by more common ways of presenting research findings, and most importantly, how crucial it is for feminist researchers to make space for the creative within contemporary higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the construction of an 'ideal' level of female education in China by reflecting on the social phenomenon of 'leftover women', and the perpetuation of this stigma by both Chinese state media. It contributes an in-depth engagement with the educational dimensions of 'leftover women' through innovative discourse analysis that examines the content of one of the most popular Chinese dating shows in the last decade. This analysis reveals the role of 'experts' in preserving myths about being or becoming 'leftover', as well as the influence of family, in particular mothers, on young Chinese women's choices and self-perception. This paper argues that by attending to popular discourses and their reframing of older Chinese ideas, in particular, 'ignorance is women's virtue', we can offer qualitative insights to the relatively lower numbers of Chinese women at doctoral education levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the career experiences of women academics at three South African universities. To understand the experiences of women academics, we conducted an intersectional interrogation of the politics and practices of belonging in departmental cultures. The sample consisted of thirty women academics whose interviews were analysed through a discursive thematic frame. We found that while all participants experienced gender-based discrimination which hinders academic progression, the barriers experienced by black women academics are compounded by the intersections of race, gender, and motherhood. Patriarchal and racist institutional, disciplinary and departmental cultures served as further challenges to belonging. On the other hand, through counter storytelling and refusal, women created alternative spaces of sociality where suffering co-exists with pleasure, refusal and survival. Ultimately, the paper suggests refusal as a generative theoretical lens to surface the complexity of women academics. [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 reflects on teaching a postgraduate degree which aims to support students to understand and challenge gender violence and contribute to gender justice. It explores three dilemmas: (i) epistemological – how to create a curriculum which embraces diverse knowledges and decentres perspectives which can produce violence; (ii) pedagogical – how to create a learning space which generates intersectional gender justice; (iii) ethical – how to engage with violence suffered by others – and selves – without propagating further harm. Exploring how the author navigates these dilemmas, the paper argues that teaching this degree entails more than developing students' theoretical knowledge and critical analysis skills. It requires providing opportunities for students to contribute to the degree and supporting them to build skills in self-reflection, empathetic communication and collective witnessing. It means making space for students to work through precarious moments and process their own encounters with gender injustice and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops and applies the emergent concept of institutional transphobia to explore the barriers to transgender research in early years education. It argues that institutional processes embed and disguise the logic of transphobia by drawing on dominant, taken-for-granted claims of the inappropriateness or irrelevance of gender-focused education interventions that challenge cis-normativity and heteronormativity. Drawing on the barriers and difficulties experienced through a PhD journey, the paper explores how institutional transphobia was evident in the seemingly neutral reasons for denying site access and ethics approvals, divergent institutional ethics requirements, the tensions between individual support and institutional processes, and the expectations on research higher degree students. The paper concludes that current processes and priorities must be challenged and replaced with an institutional mandate that explicitly values and welcomes transgender research as a priority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a making, a cartography that maps gender equity policy in Australian education. I suggest that entrenched reductive sexist, racist, homo/transphobic and misogynistic practices have not significantly shifted materially since the implementation of inaugural gender equity programs in the 1970s, despite the investment of much money, research and purported policy changes. My cartography intentionally draws attention to how policy material impacts precarious bodies in education; those that remain firmly classified as girls and the intersecting disadvantages of students who identify as Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC), gender diverse, and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual, Queer, Intersex (LGBTQI+). I propose that gender in/equity that continues to flourish in our schools is a consequence of an ongoing patriarchal heteronormative education policy that has efficiently removed gender from the equity equation. At present gender, inequity is hidden in plain sight and gender and sex-based violence and harassment remain rife in schools, covertly entangled in practices and processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns physicality and the tendency to operate within bounds of familiar repertoires of embodiment. It questions the degree to which habitual ways in which we pose, repose, and action our bodies are authentic as opposed to constructed artifacts of our enculturation. With reference to notions of 'neutrality' as raised in Lecoq training and the Feldenkrais Method, this paper aims – though suggested autoethnographic exploratory practice – to bring awareness to habitual ways in which each of us embody gender. It highlights means by which educators can direct the focus of those with whom we work toward recognizing and deconstructing aspects of embodied gender behaviors that may be inherently, but not obviously, inequitable. Attending to these issues within spheres of education has the scope to safeguard the social and emotional well-being of those not inclined to embody in accordance with hegemonic gender norms and to broaden attitudes toward embodied expressive possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the perspectives of adolescents attending a private Christian single-sex secondary school. The research literature into the impact of single-sex schooling upon learners, while plentiful, is equivocal and few scholars have delved into the views of adolescents in such contexts. To demonstrate their perspectives of single-sex schooling, the findings are represented as poetry clusters, grouped together to highlight the ways in which the adolescents teetered amongst competing views. Better understanding the related formative presence of societal messages and gendered expectations shaping single-sex learning environments offers possibilities for teachers to disrupt these norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When I was contacted by the editors of Gender and Education to see whether I wanted to respond to this article, I was not particularly keen to do so. I generally believe that critique is a good thing, and that direct responses have a tendency to come over as precious, petulant, and petty. However, having read the article several times, and having re-read the paper to which Mary Lou Rasmussen refers, I feel that I have to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a research project designed to understand the work experiences and career opportunities of people working in higher education institutions (HEIs) across the UK, which received formal recognition for supporting gender equity between 2015 and 2020. The findings reveal multiple intersecting barriers to women's full engagement, inclusion, support and career success in higher education, despite the implementation of organization-based gender equity plans, and institutional inter/national recognition for advancing equity. Most axes of de/privilege that are based along lines of gender, race, ethnicity and religion are enacted as everyday sexism that resist gender equality policy. Moreover, our findings suggest that 'place' is a constitutive element of intersectional dis/advantage, not merely a context within which compounded barriers to inclusion and advancement may exist. In addition, the findings demonstrate that whilst inter-categorical intersectionality is based on the notion that all social categories (such as age, race and gender) are equally salient, the degree of importance of any category will likely depend on location or context of the phenomena being examined. Our findings therefore invite further, iterative and translocational research into the impacts of the intersections of gender, ethnicity, race and religion in spaces of higher education, particularly those with colonial legacies and presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conferences are key sites for the development of academic careers; however multiple studies have shown that conferences are exclusionary on the basis of gender and other axes of social disadvantage. This study focuses on India and as such also incorporates caste as an axis of privilege and disadvantage in relation to access to conferences. Conferences in this paper are framed within a broader professional development agenda, which is the way in which conferences are located in Indian higher education policy discourses, and a social exclusion perspective is taken as the analytical lens. The paper is based on data from a large-scale national study of social inequalities in higher education, which included quantitative analysis of administrative records and qualitative analysis of interviews with academics on their participation in conferences and professional development activities. Key findings include that participation in conferences is proportionally lower for women and scheduled caste academics than for men and upper-caste academics, and that access to conferences is embroiled in relational processes of social exclusion which operate in the academy, despite formal policies being in place. The article recommends further scrutiny of policy implementation and replication of this analysis across different country contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few decades important work has been undertaken to unsettle essentialist conceptualisations of gender/sex in the early years workforce. Through an auto/ethnographic diffractive engagement that thinks with feminist 'new' materialist and postcolonial scholarships, this paper uncovers the need to move beyond an exclusive focus on diversifying the workforce by simply increasing the number of men. Moving beyond the narrow focus enables a richer and more expansive understanding of gender/sex that exposes colonialism and reveals everyday practices of early childhood educators to be shaped by place, space and matter. By attending to how matter matters in early years, child-sized chairs are used as a point of entry into this research inquiry to explore how gender/sex is produced through pastpresent, material-discursive-affective and more-than-human entanglements. The paper proposes that complicating understandings of gender/sex is important to decolonise early childhood spaces, and so hold space for the emergence of difference that is unmodulated by whiteness. Recognising the agentic potential of matter further opens up possibilities for that which is not yet, but available to us, to make life more thinkable in cis-white heteropatriarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite ongoing attempts to disrupt the white cis-hetero-masculine nature of the literary canon the secondary school English curriculum remains tethered to its lineage. In conversation with feminist new materialist scholars who argue that the stories we read and write have material affects on who we are becoming, this paper argues that in order to mobilise change in the secondary years of schooling, interventions into the canon must move beyond (re)forming text lists or providing teachers with readymade pedagogical resources. Drawing on the Australian context, the authors outline some of the contemporary challenges teachers face in diversifying and decolonising the curriculum. Drawing on their Literary Linking Methodology the authors discuss a pilot project that seeks to unsettle the canon by supporting teachers to undertake extended immersion with both contemporary literary texts and archival research. Accordingly, this paper contributes to understandings of the tensions and challenges teachers face in introducing contemporary Australian texts into the curriculum and offers insights into the ways in which professional learning might be (re)imagined so that English teachers might draw on available cultural resources as researchers and literary knowledge producers in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines four interviews with student survivors about their experiences of reporting sexual harassment and violence to universities in the United States and England, and their experiences of how their universities protected the perpetrators. Interview participants revealed that their assailants were not held accountable because the university determined they were more valuable than the survivor, whether in terms of the role the assailant occupied or their potential to make an impact in their field. I analyse these instances by combining three theories to show both how power/value relations in the neoliberal university make certain people (in)dispensable, and how these power/value relations are enacted through power dynamics of speech and hearing to protect the more 'valuable' party in university sexual violence cases. The article concludes with possible recommendations for structural change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the experiences and perspectives of military wives as students and potential students of Access to Higher Education Diplomas, a qualification for widening participation in HE for 'non-traditional' students in the UK – an under-researched topic. Contributing to both Marxist and feminist theory, we argue that the combined practices of the state apparatuses, the military and education system, constrain these women's access to, and progress in, HE, and that the patriarchal gender regime is reproduced through institutional structures and practices. The study found that military wives' own education plays a secondary role to their serving partners' military careers; that the military promotes their roles as wives and mothers above adult educational opportunities; and that despite the widening participation agenda, an inflexible HE system further blocks educational opportunities for this group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a larger doctoral study about Critical Sexuality Education with children in Delhi, India. It puts forth alternate research and pedagogic interventions, inspired by the 'real' world, to engage children on ideas about sexuality beyond the biological. After presenting a brief overview of political debates and state programmes about sex/uality education in recent years in India, I go on to detail two examples of Participatory Research with girls at a Shelter Home for street children. These involve spatial mapping of their neighbourhood and interviewing a woman E-rickshaw driver. The children-researchers collaborated with the researcher-facilitator to pose questions about gender, violence, equity, access, social justice and so on, vis-à-vis their own lived experiences and social realities. [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 article explores gendered processes in preschool science through Barad's agential realism [2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics of the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. London: Duke Universal Press], and as such, the study makes both theoretical and empirical contributions in how it combines perspectives from emergent science [Siraj-Blatchford, J. 2001. Emergent Science and Technology in the Early Years." Paper presented at the XXIII World Congress of OMEP. Santiago, Chile, August 3], new materialism, and gender theory. Empirically, the study makes use of data constructed during a field study in a Swedish preschool with five-year-old children. The focus of the field study was the children's play and explorations together with the preschool environment, during activities not specifically guided by teachers. The analysis highlights how the children's identities and scientific explorations are made possible as well as constrained together with the preschool's material-discursive environment. As such, the study demonstrates how teachers cannot rely on any environment, activity, choice or subject content to be (gender) neutral. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organization of spaces in schools often revolves around gender and sexuality. For example, it has been reported that restrooms and locker rooms are the most heteronormative and heterosexist spaces within schools. Particularly within these spaces, hegemonic heterosexual masculinity/femininity is institutionalized, not only in the practices and individual performances, but also in the organization of these spaces. In that sense, the space of the restroom and the locker room is regulated and constructed on the basis of gender binaries, and as such, inscribes disciplinary power on those gendered bodies that do not conform to the hegemonic gender regime. For trans/transgender students and other gender-nonconforming students, these spaces have been experienced as hostile and problematic. The paper draws on ethnographic data from two Icelandic high schools and has the aim of moving the discussion about gender divided spaces (restrooms and locker/changing rooms) outside the sole emphasis on gender binaries by incorporating into the analysis identity categories based on sexuality and trans/transgender/gender-queer embodiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While academic governance does not produce teaching and research, it provides the conditions that enable them to take place. The principal academic governance body within universities, the academic board (also known as the academic senate or faculty senate), therefore plays a key role in enabling universities to conduct their core business. However, at the same time as doing things that are necessary, the role of academic boards has come to be seen as unimportant. This development is considered in light of empirical data from universities in the US, UK and Australia. The paper argues that university governance represents gendered relations and that the role of academic boards is now largely procedural – the equivalent of housework – invisible unless not done well. Moreover, 'done well' is defined not by academic boards themselves but by university executives, whose masculine, managerial roles both replicate and control traditional academic board functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, 3% of the early year's education workforce is male, a figure that has remained stubbornly resistant to change over the last four decades. Research has shown that support is key to increasing the number of male employees in this sector. In recent years, there has been an increase in the demand for male-only support activities, such as men-only training courses, or support groups. Whilst these methods are popular in order to establish gender-diverse workforces, an inherent danger is that single-sex support can exacerbate binary thinking and entrench gender differences. This paper explores the role of single-sex support in gender diversifying the early year's workforce and asks when, and for whom, such spaces may be effective or valuable. The discussion is based on data collected during the GenderEYE project, which aimed to look at strategies for, and understandings about, the recruitment and support of male early childhood education professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the critical issues deliberated amongst researchers on gender and education is that of choosing and decision-making. Often, the focus of analysis is framed through the concept of agency. In this paper, the analytical focus is on educational advancement and agency. The paper is based on narratives of 10 highly educated Tanzanian women. Employing the human development and capabilities approach, the paper aims to elaborate to what extent the women had the freedom to exercise educational agency, in what ways their beings and doings were in accordance with ‘the idea of Tanzanian woman’, including the hegemonic idea of adequate and appropriate education for girls and women, and how they aimed to become something else. By listening to the women's narratives and analysing their choices and decision-making processes, four kinds of agency freedoms were identified. In the paper, these agency notions are re-presented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Physics- and computer-related disciplines are strongly male dominated in Western higher education. Feminist research has demonstrated how this can be understood as reflecting a strong privileging of mind and rationality (over body/nature/emotions) in these disciplines, which harmonises with broader notions of masculinity as transcendental and disembodied. However, as we demonstrate in this paper, being recognised as legitimate in these fields is also tightly connected to embodiment. Drawing on post-structural gender theory, we explore how notions of corporeality, style and aesthetics are articulated within computer engineering and physics settings at two higher education institutions, one in Canada, one in Sweden. Using empirical data from two case studies, we demonstrate that these disciplines are usually understood as 'gender neutral' by students but that interest and competence in these fields are simultaneously understood as embodied through neglect for style and corporeal aesthetics, in ways that contribute to the masculinisation of these fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the perceptions and experiences of women academics in the UK, participating in a small-scale qualitative study exploring career progression and encountered institutional obstacles. The accounts are considered in terms of both disadvantageous institutional strategies and interpersonal ones governing day-to-day working relationships. The findings contribute to a growing body of international research on gender constructions in the academy, where both inhibiting and exclusionary barriers are examined in focus group discussions (FGDs) in terms of gendered constructions that are perceived to impact upon the career opportunities of women academics. Analysis of data encouraged the employment of a ludic construction in this critical exploration of games playing and 'gamesmanship' (a masculinised term); these being themes raised in the FGDs as representing blocks and challenges to women's academic careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In foregrounding how girls use their bodies when negotiating subjectivities as adolescents, this paper explores possible ways of doing, being and becoming an adolescent girl in urban, multicultural school contexts. Drawing on interview material generated through a longitudinal qualitative study of children's social transitions between childhood and adolescence, the paper more specifically examines how girls constitute subjectivities through bodily practices which position them according to dominant discourses of hetero-femininity. The paper goes on to argue that the way in which girls negotiate these discourses through practices on and with their bodies has a significant impact on how they subsequently experience their social transition between childhood and adolescence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on recent ethnographic research in one single-sex, private primary school, this paper will explore what it meant for the girls in this setting to embody the discourse of the 'lady'. The paper will propose that classed and gendered discourses of respectability featured strongly in the girls' lives, as they were expected to behave like 'proper' upper-middle-class ladies. However, the paper will also suggest that these discourses were being reworked through post-feminist, neo-liberal notions of modern girlhood, meaning that the girls also felt compelled to make themselves as heterofeminine 'girly' girls; as sassy, sexy and successful, as well as respectable and upper-middle-class(y) enough. By exploring the clash between these two sets of discourse, the paper will specifically seek to examine the lived embodiment of intersections of class, gender and sexuality and to explore the relevance of Judith Butler's heterosexual matrix for these upper-middle-class girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationships between sex, gender and sexuality through a series of close readings of data generated through an ethnography undertaken in a south London secondary school. The paper takes as its focus girls aged 15 to 16 and considers how particular sexed, gendered and sexualized selves are constituted. Drawing on Foucault's understanding of subjectivation and the subsequent work of Judith Butler, in particular her theorization of the inseparability of gender and sexuality in the contemporary discursive frame, these analyses demonstrate how students' mundane and day-to-day practices—including bodily deportment, physical games, linguistic accounts, and uses of clothing, hairstyles and accessories—are implicated in the discursive constitution of student subjectivities. The paper argues for an understanding of sex–gender–sexuality joined together in discursive chains and intersecting with further identity categories. As such, the paper suggests that subjectivities might helpfully be thought in terms of constituting constellations that create both possibilities and constraints for ‘who’ students can be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our research responds to a limited understanding of the agency of female leaders in a context of Islamic politics and society, in post-war and post-tsunami Aceh province in Indonesia. Drawing on empirical ethnographic data, we aim to provide a more nuanced perspective on the 'strategic space for manouevre' of women's agency in Islamic boarding schools in Aceh. Our paper focuses on female educational leaders and teachers at female dayah, or Islamic boarding schools [for girls] in Aceh. The study explores the grassroots roles and motivations of female education leaders, and analyses how a range of contextual (political, economic, socio-cultural and religious) factors play a role in their sense of agency and engagement in (re)producing or challenging societal inequalities and tensions. These factors include women's own experiences of the conflict and post-conflict period, the influences from their direct networks and kinship, and their opportunities to participate in 'outside' trainings and public life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Canadian federal and cross-provincial higher education policy from 1960 to 1990, a critical time when provisions for vocational and adult training came under the auspices of governmental concern, justified under both an economic rationale and as a way to address persistent forms of inequality. The problematisation of skill during this period had particular gendered implications, as addressing inequality through education subsidies intersected with the perceived training needs of employers and the market. Employing Nancy Fraser's theory of a ‘triple movement’, the following paper ‘takes stock’ of how the three political forces of social movements, marketisation, and social protection have shaped gendered discourses of education and training, the implications for which are of continued relevance to those trying to understand the education and training within the contemporary neo-liberal state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the construction of dominant models of gender among students in the Vocational–Technical. In the backdrop of dominant narratives that structure gender policies and practices in schooling in Zimbabwe, the paper elaborates upon how students’ daily experiences in workrooms perpetuate the feminisation and masculinisation of fields of study such as DT and HESs in ways that inhibit the learning and achievement of boys and girls in these subjects. The argument in this paper is that in order to understand gender inequality in the Voc-Tech curriculum, educators need to understand how sociocultural perceptions of gender are constructed and embodied at the level of classroom interaction among students and teachers. Such insights provide a deeper understanding for addressing gender inequality in Voc-Tech subjects that moves beyond current structural and institutional barriers within a rural African context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite the rapid growth of digital learning, the relationship between the body and new information technologies has been underexamined in education research literature. This study presents a feminist conceptual framework in order to situate the body as an issue central to the academic discussion of online education. This paper extends feminist technoscience scholars' notion of co-constructing gender-technology by critiquing the disembodied approach to emerging education technologies. By integrating the philosophical approaches to the body of Butler and several phenomenologists, the author suggests alternative ways of understanding online learning environments based on a literature review. This new feminist phenomenological concept, digital flesh, prompts a greater awareness of the gendered materiality of cyberspace that challenges the dominant discourse of learning technology, as evidenced by recent artificial intelligence experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideas about gender are changing. The UK and other countries are moving towards altering laws about gender recognition. Intersex people can be recognised as such in some countries. In the global North, nonbinary identities are becoming more common, and this is reflected in changes to recording systems. Referrals to child gender identity clinics are rising, and increasingly we have children in our schools who are socially transitioning, delaying puberty with hormone blockers, or starting hormonal gender transition. In this paper I consider how gender and education researchers should respond to these changes. I focus in particular on: the relationship between bodies and identity; artificially delayed puberty and how this affects ideas about childhood innocence; and the greater prevalence of nonbinary identifications. I argue that gender and education researchers will need to make significant changes to our underpinning theoretical frameworks and research practices in order to take these changes into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes research exploring discursive constructions of gender and discursive/material intra-actions in two PreK classrooms in the United States, specifically through documentation of children's play. Using a feminist poststructuralist lens, the research illustrates ways in which children are subjected through performative iterations of heterosexual gender norms. Extending these insights, we consider the effect of non-human agentic matter, such as spaces and objects in intra-action with children in constituting gender and identity. The research shows how children's performances of gender, and especially their enactments of the heterosexual matrix, were often in relation to the material play items and the adult-deemed acceptable discursive topics for four-year-olds. The heterosexual matrix was both (re)inscribed and resisted in relationality to open and subversive spaces as children brought 'difficult knowledge' into their play. It is proposed that gender fluidity be supported in open and subversive spaces and that gender binaries can be challenged and renarrativized to incite more gender fluid knowings and becomings in early childhood education and care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on memory stories told in a collective biography workshop about children's encounters with schooling, this paper experiments with re-imagining the child-student-subject as an 'emergent intracorporeal multiplicity' [Fritsch, K. 2015. "Desiring Disability Differently: Neoliberalism, Heterotopic Imagination and Intra-Corporeal Configurations." Foucault Studies 19: 43-66, 51]. From the feminist new materialist perspective that the authors work with, the child is configured not as an entity prior to, or separate from, encounters with education systems, but emergent with-in them. This paper focuses on difference in human relations, and in particular on the intersections of disability and gender. It does so not in terms of essential characteristics of individuals, but as emergent, in-the-moment, with others. In focussing on the detail of lives-in-their-making, the authors ask, with Barad [2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press], if we are interested in justice, how we are to 'understand our role in helping constitute who and what come to matter?' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use the Deleuzian notion of assemblage as an analytico-methodological framework to examine different types of 'labour' that teachers are called upon to perform when they implement a programme that teaches about gender-based violence. Drawing on interview data gathered from 129 teachers from primary and secondary schools in the Australian context, we trace the affective forces which interact to both drive and constrain teacher action. We examine the forms of emotional, political and pedagogical labour that teachers exert when required to open silenced topics in the face of resistance to gender equity initiatives, and concerns about evoking distress among affected parties. Our analysis highlights the importance of a providing an assemblage of institutional and relational support that can help create the conditions of possibility needed for teachers to open classroom conversations on sensitive matters relating to gender-based violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a global climate increasingly shaped by neoliberal agendas that privilege meritocratic individualism, it is apparent that society as a whole and educational policy-makers and practitioners in particular expect students to take more 'responsibility' for their own learning and behaviour at school. In the Australian context, as elsewhere, schools are seen as sites in which students should develop and practise responsibility for self and others in ways that are enterprising, productive, civic-minded, and in accordance with social norms. Yet, few studies have critically examined how the concept of responsibility features in the everyday, taken-forgranted, discursive practices of policy-makers, teachers and students. This paper discusses findings from an ethnographic study concerned with how the discursive constructions of responsibility in three regional Australian primary schools shape upper-primary students' understandings and experiences of responsibility for self and others. Using the theoretical insights of Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler to interpret data, I argue that gendered discourses of biological determinism and peer pressure work to reinforce the misconception that violence and irresponsibility are 'naturally' masculine traits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that in order to begin loosening the ties that bind care and gender in primary education, we need to re-examine the knowledge sought and found by educational research about teachers. The focus is primarily on how we understand men who teach. Through an examination of two scholarly texts – Ashley, M., and J. Lee [2003. Women Teaching Boys: Caring and Working in the Primary School. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham] and King, J. [1998. Uncommon Caring: Learning from Men Who Teach Young Children. New York: TCP] – I argue that we must be mindful that our research can effectively produce and reiterate common-sense understandings of men that binds them to the hegemonic masculine ideal. It is argued that mixed-method qualitative research that untangles the layers of context influencing the lives of men who teach is important. The paper also suggests that the study of male teachers' emotions, as at once individual and social, and private and public, can disrupt the rational–emotional binary that cements care to gender and reveal new configurations of the gender order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last 20 years, a reversal of the gender gap in higher education (HE) has been observed both in developed and developing countries. Nowadays, more women than men are studying HE. Nevertheless, averages tend to high disparities and gender gaps are still observed when indicators take poverty and ethnicity into account. This paper uses qualitative longitudinal data from the Young Lives study in Peru in order to analyse the role of gender in shaping young women's educational trajectories beyond secondary school. We find HE is indeed highly valued by young women who persist in their efforts to continue studying beyond secondary school, even in the face of gender norms that hinder their educational advancement. Having more access to HE is giving young women the possibility to construct new female identities, but it is not necessarily empowering them to challenge gender norms deeply rooted in their social context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I discuss how professional identities in early childhood education in Chile are performatively constituted within the interplay between a religious discourse of vocation and gender. 'Having the vocation' has become a regime of truth that regulates and governs educators' behaviours, motivations and relationships in their workplace. By deconstructing the concept of vocation through a poststructuralist and feminist theory, I show the arising tensions in this discourse, emphasising that it positions female early childhood educators as a subject of both exploitation and admiration. Vocation shapes early years practitioners not only as nurturing and caring, but deeply altruist, devoted and self-sacrificed women seeking (eternal) salvation. Exposing the contradictory nature of this discourse, the article highlights its tensions with the professionalization of the early years workforce. Whilst vocation situates practitioners as good educators and morally good women, it allows for workforce exploitation, trapping them in hazardous working conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst it is known that Caribbean girls academically outperform boys, much less is known about their experiences of school. This paper, based on qualitative research in Antiguan secondary schools, is concerned with who girls can ‘be’ in their school contexts and the consequences of positioning oneself (or being positioned) within different discourses. Drawing on interview narratives and classroom observations, this paper discusses the stories of six girls to illuminate three broad types of gender performances that were observed: ‘beauties’, ‘geeks’ and ‘men-john’. Using Francis' concepts of gender ‘monoglossia’ and ‘heteroglossia’, the extent to which these girls were able to resist the normative gender–sexual order and the consequences of conformity/non-conformity are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, I posit a hybrid conceptualisation of women teachers' identities in the globalising and localising negotiation of gender. Drawing on Homi Bhabha's theory of hybridities, this paper argues for a fluid, hybrid and multifaceted reality of women teachers' lives in the areas of family, the husband and wife relationship, and the place of the child in the family as they engage in workplaces. The analysis draws on in-depth interviews with 20 Chinese women primary school teachers first individually and then in groups of four or five in Hong Kong where globalisation meets with the indigenous Chinese culture. Implications for teacher education are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to address the reproduction of inequalities vis a vis gender and education as a multi-dimensional problem. Its objective is to show that the intersection between gender, social position of origin and asymmetric university spaces, attests to the inequalities in Higher Education System. Based on intersectionality perspective constructed on those three dimensions of analysis, gender inequalities are observed at the global, regional and national levels, based on comparable databases. Also, it centres on the results of an empirical investigation in Mexico that highlights the perspective of intersectionality in relation to the roles played by asymmetric university spaces in the reproduction and continuity of social and gender inequalities. The paper introduces and tests the category asymmetric university spaces as mechanism for the reproduction of inequalities, and concludes with his significance, emphasizing interlaced inequalities in Mexico City's university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates sexual harassment and violence in the neoliberal university. Using data from a 'composite ethnography' representing twelve years of research, I argue that institutional inaction on these issues reflects how they are 'reckoned up' in the context of gender and other structures. The impact of disclosure is projected in market terms: this produces institutional airbrushing which protects both the institution and those (usually privileged men) whose welfare is bound up with its success. Staff and students are differentiated by power/value relations, which interact with gender and intersecting categories. Survivors are often left with few alternatives to speaking out in the 'outrage economy' of the corporate media: however, this can support institutional airbrushing and bolster punitive technologies. I propose the method of Grounded Action Inquiry, implemented with attention to Lorde's work on anger, as a parrhesiastic practice of 'speaking in' to the neoliberal institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within studies of education-related identities, the connections between gendered identities, place, and teachers' bodies and dress have been under-examined. This ethnographic interview study begins discussing these connections by examining the experiences of three women who travelled to South Korea as English language teachers and their initial gendered experiences within this 'new place' and its figured worlds of bodies and dress. In these initial encounters with Korean figured worlds, these women experienced unexpected and unfamiliar meanings being given to women's dress and bodies, and unexpected and unfamiliar spoken interactions regarding women's dress and bodies. These two distinct phenomena challenged and disrupted long-held feelings and understandings of bodies, dress, and gender, with implications for these teachers' classes and careers. This study highlights the importance of bodies and dress on teacher identities, and how challenges to gendered identities may contribute to the marginalization of some women within English language teaching in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the gendered experiences of accompanying women partners in the context of conference travel. While the phenomenon of partners at conferences is not new, their voices remain largely unheard. To explore partners' subjective experiences of conference travel, this study adopts Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), drawing from in-depth interviews with 12 accompanying partners. Our findings reveal that accompanying partners generally enjoyed their involvement in, but at the same time felt 'on the margins' of, the conference experience. More specifically, we explore these findings in the specific context of gender and power relations, noting themes such as a sense of liberation, relational intimacy, and feelings of social inclusion and exclusion. There is currently very little literature on the role of accompanying partners in conference attendance, and virtually none viewed from a gendered lens, thus our primary aim is to further critical thought on this nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, the academic discipline of higher education has emerged as a site in which transgender scholars have begun to engage. Transgender scholars have begun to disrupt the normative logics of epistemological trans oppression, forcing those in higher education to contend with us, our work, and the possibilities therein. And yet, the ways some of us have been accepted into the field and scholarly sites (e.g., academic conferences), and have had our work published, has caused us to wonder: are we disruptors or docile subjects? In our paper, we explore the machinations of institutional power as they relate to our developing community within the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE). Situating our manuscript in a public dialogue that occurred at the 2017 ASHE Annual Meeting in the United States, we discuss the limitations and possibilities of leveraging academic conferences as potent(ial) sites of disruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through selected theories of melancholia, this paper seeks to shed some fresh interpretive light on the reproduction and disruption of gender, violence and family turmoil across generations of mothers and daughters. The originality of the paper lies in its exploratory deployment of theories of melancholia to consider issues of women, violence and generation. It addresses these matters through a discussion of the intergenerational emotional archives accumulated by two mother-daughter pairs in relation to their different experiences of sexual and other violence. It shares the mothers' experiences of violence in their childhood and shows how these help to shape the ways in which they raise their daughters and address the troubles that their daughters experience. Different theories of melancholia assist us to explain the dissimilar emotional dynamics between these mother and daughter pairs. But equally their stories suggest the analytical potential of different theories of melancholia for understanding women's and girls' diverse responses to violence. Freud's, Irigaray's and Silverman's constructions of melancholia, which are to some extent based on notions of emptiness, lack and insufficiency, are deployed alongside Eng and Kazanjian's interpretation of a melancholic state of being which focuses on the creative potential of animating the remains of loss; an interpretation that invokes an agential relationship to the losses that violence provokes. The former help to explain what Eng and Kazanjian might see as the 'hopeless politics' associated with certain melancholic responses to violence and the latter help to explain what they might consider more 'hopeful politics' associated with responses that mobilise a more agential relationship to loss. Although not subscribing to such a stark binary interpretation, we nonetheless argue for an analysis that acknowledges the different ways that the remains of loss are animated. The paper arises from a wider cross-generational study in Australia of the lives of educationally, economically and culturally marginalised young women and their mothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how girls take up, disrupt, and disavow interest in ICTs in their lives. It examines questions of access and of social risk in relation to computers in the home and how these are nuanced by gender. The paper draws on samples of text from advertisements, government websites and focus group interviews with high-school girls in Australia in order to explore some of the risks and pleasures computers offer to young people. It considers how hierarchies of use and access in the home, and notions of appropriate female subjectivity and of 'social risk' - particularly in relation to chat and internet messaging - thread through their accounts. The implications of these factors for schools are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fewer than 15% of primary school teachers in both Germany and the UK are male. With the on-going international debate about educational performance highlighting the widening gender achievement gap between girl and boy pupils, the demand for more male teachers has become prevalent in educational discourse. Concerns have frequently been raised about the underachievement of boys, with claims that the lack of male 'role models' in schools has an adverse effect on boys' academic motivation and engagement. Although previous research has examined 'teaching' as institutional talk, men's linguistic behaviour in the classroom remains largely ignored, especially in regard to enacting discipline. Using empirical spoken data collected from four primary school classrooms in both the UK and in Germany, this paper examines the linguistic discipline strategies of eight male and eight female teachers using Interactional Sociolinguistics to address the question, does teacher gender matter? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]