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Hélène Cixous is perhaps best known for her paper, 'The Laugh of the Medusa' (1976) and her literary contributions outside academia. In this paper, we pick up a lesser known Cixous text, 'Le Sexe ou la tête?' that offers an interesting and provocative perspective on the traps associated with being feminine in a masculine environment. As we converse with Cixous, weaving our own words and experiences with hers, we link her work more closely with the feminine in modern-day academia. We suggest that Cixous's remarks on decapitation and voice offer a way forward for academic women to be; to speak; to recognise the double jeopardy of decapitation in the university; and to use laughter as a strategic, powerful, political act of resistance and subversion against oppressive masculine power structures. We draw on and seek to enact Cixous's notion of "écriture feminine"--a disruptive style of writing that provides a mode of being, speaking, and writing that subverts the power of masculine norms in order to be heard and to bring possibilities for change.

We offer here a metaphor of the university as an "infinite game" in which we bring to life insight, imagination, and radical inclusion; and resist the "finite games" that can lead us astray. We suggest that keeping the infinite game alive within universities is a much-needed form of academic activism. We offer four vignettes that explore this further: our responsibility to be "critic and conscience of society" and how that responsibility must also turn inwards onto our own institution, the dilemmas of being a woman with leadership responsibilities in an institution that proudly shows off its "top girls," the opportunities we have as teachers to "teach the university" and be taught by our students, and the contradictions we face as activist scholars in our relentlessly audited research personas. We draw on the infinite/finite game metaphor, our own affective experiences as tenured academics, and feminist critiques.

Video ethics in educational research involving children is a recent topic that has arisen since the increase in the use of visual mediums in research (such as photovoice and video) especially with the development of new and ubiquitous internet technologies and social media. This paper emerged as an expressed concerned by a group of scholars associated with the new Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy (Brill) that was established in 2016. The paper is the result of a collective writing process over a period of a few months that discusses visual studies in education and visual ethics in relation to qualitative research in education, and as it applies to children. The article also uses the newly established convention of open review, publishing the results with the paper.

Peer review is central to academic publishing. Yet for many it is a mysterious and contentious practice, which can cause distress for both reviewers, and those whose work is reviewed. This paper, produced by the Editors' Collective, examines the past and future of peer review in academic publishing. The first sections consider how peer review has been defined and practised in changing academic contexts, and its educational significance in the development of scholarship. The paper then explores major historical and contemporary issues around identity, diversity, anonymity, and the review process, and the related power of editors versus reviewers in academic publishing. Finally, the paper discusses the case of new scholars as reviewers engaging in neoliberal labour, before concluding with some brief recommendations based on our analysis.

This article results from a collaborative investigation into Antipodean theory in education by members of the Editors' Collective (www.editorscollective.org.nz). The Prologue contains a brief personal account of the South Project (www.southernperspectives.net), as an example of the contemporary projects and activities falling under the banner of "Antipodean" ways of working and thinking. The Introduction briefly reviews the history of (mainly Western) ideas about the Antipodes, from classical Greek philosophy through to the contemporary globalised era. This is followed by a synopsis of the motivations, purposes and benefits of Antipodean theory, with more detailed examinations of equality, indigeneity, replication and creation as some of its central elements. We consider the role of Antipodean thinking as a located critical theory for education, and a way to defend our aspirations for equality and social justice against the incursions of neoliberalism, today and in the future.

The 'research system' in Aotearoa New Zealand is rife with obstacles for entry and retention of diversity. The research system's complexity and longevity gives the impression of stability and fixity, but we argue it is characterised by a lack of imagination around leadership that generates change. In this article, we examine the embodied experiences of research leadership, as encountered by participants at Aotearoa New Zealand's universities and a nationally funded Centre of Research Excellence. It is within such institutions and organisations, built on colonial and patriarchal values, that experiences of marginalisation, oppression and harassment have been documented. We destabilise the apparently static nature of this 'research system monolith' by taking up MacLeavy, Fannin and Larner's (2021) provocation of a feminist approach to boldly do leadership differently. Drawing from interviews with researchers, we argue that resistance to, and reworking of, the research system can be found in feminist modes of practice: in the everyday, mundane practices of care‐full research leadership that do leadership differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines the personal transformation that occurred when three university educators from very different fields (education, midwifery, and oral health) and world views, established a common understanding of their research topic and subsequent development of a research question to improve health educators' capability when teaching interprofessional practice. Most health educators entering higher education are specialists in their clinical practice foremost, and therefore, the health researchers engaged with an education specialist to develop a project scope. Through an eight-month process of challenging, learning, reflecting, and actively testing the meaning of ideas and statements, a consensus was achieved on a research aim and proposal that would guide the research process. This paper presents the collaborative journey to achieve this consensus. The individual stories of two of the researchers' journeys were analysed, identifying that a shift in the understanding of ontology and pedagogy takes time and effort, and change is reliant on a collective working together towards a positive outcome where consensus is arrived at through challenge and dialogue. There was an action learning phase that pre-empted the researchers' capacity to collectively envision the research aim when working across professions, providing a practical knowing that is explored in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seven authors reflect on Sue's contribution to developing the 'Anthropology of Policy' and its growth as a new sub-field of political anthropology since the 1990s. They show how her focus on policy brought together her earlier concerns with organisations, power and processes of social transformation with critical and reflexive perspectives on language, higher education reform and regimes of audit and accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with developing a philosophical approach to a number of significant changes to academic publishing, and specifically the global journal knowledge system wrought by a range of new digital technologies that herald the third age of the journal as an electronic, interactive and mixed-media form of scientific communication. The paper emerges from an Editors' Collective, a small New Zealand-based organisation comprised of editors and reviewers of academic journals mostly in the fields of education and philosophy. The paper is the result of a collective writing process.

This paper utilises the conceptual lens of intersectionality to explore gendered academic career trajectory in the context of one participant's challenge to a normative reading of the link between her private life and its relation to a "successful" academic career. The paper then charts the recalibrations that needed to take place to ensure certain sociocultural categories and intersections were not privileged over others. Finally, the paper then utilises the concept of intersectionality as a metaphor with which to view the intersecting and reflexive relationship between the interviewer, the interviewee and the performative event of the interview process.

In his book "Democracy and Music Education: Liberalism, Ethics, and the Politics of Practice," Paul Woodford issues an invitation for shared dialogue and debate regarding the state of music education in developed countries. Through an appropriation of John Dewey's thoughts regarding a democratic society, Woodford sees great hope for the position and function of a democratic type of music education, with wider implications for a more democratic society. This essay explores what democracy in music education means for Woodford via Dewey, and the extent to which music education is democratic in contemporary societies. The author seeks to bring clarity to the question of "complexity, diversity and confusion" in the postmodern world as advanced by Woodford. She builds her discussion around the notions of the "postmodern condition," "performativity," and "ethical judgment" drawing on the work of the French theorist J. F. Lyotard. As the crisis of grand narratives extends to the postmodern condition of music education, she argues that narratives such as the maintenance of "serious music" as the legitimate field in music education are in crisis mode--they can no longer sustain the "absolute certainty" on which they were promulgated. She also asserts that a more insidious grand narrative--performativity--draws together notions of efficiency, reason and instrumentality and helps explain the predominance of technical rationalism in contemporary education. Since music is both open-ended and indeterminate, the author suggests, music teaching methods and approaches need to be ethically indeterminate in as much as they are critically responsive to changing musical/political circumstances and actions.

This article traces the framing and positioning of gender in the Tertiary Education Commission's (TEC) rethinking of the Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) under the aegis of equity, diversity and inclusion. The article begins with the position that gender equity in academia in Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond is well known yet little engaged with. The recent Sector Reference Group (SRG) set up to engage with the TEC and the academic community about the PBRF Quality Evaluation 2025 has articulated the most progressive agenda yet for women and Māori and Pacific scholars specifically. The article takes a forensic approach, inspired by Sara Ahmed, to follow gender around in the discursive environment within which the PBRF is placed. The article first provides a brief contextual setting for gender representation in the university. The article then explores the sustained critique of the PBRF, paying particular attention to the work of Brower and James (2019) and Walker et al. (2020) and their examination of the gender disparities evident in academia. The article continues by exploring recent SRG reports of the PBRF and the subsequently announced changes to the PBRF. It is argued that these changes move to realign the PBRF so that it accommodates a series of demands made of it in recent years that coalesce around a thicker social justice agenda. Finally, the extent to which women's inequality in academia will ever be a significant issue, despite the changes to the PBRF, that drives equity change is questioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a new way to engage with gender, race, and class relations in academic leadership and organizations. Viewing our research materials through different images helps us to ask new questions, open up new kinds of answers and ultimately other ways of knowing gender and leadership in academia. Our approach has three connected steps. Firstly, we engage with the ruins of the three main promises upon which the contemporary university has been built: enlightenment, liberalism, and feminism, drawing on Anna Tsing's mushrooms at the end of the world and Gibson‐Graham's notion of a post‐capitalist economy. Secondly, we use intersectionality as a methodological lens, combining it with Karen Barad's ideas about how "matter comes to matter." We explore the intersections between four themes arising from the accounts of our participants: Reshaping the disciplinary field; gender, class, and race; traveling and mobility; and Institutional structures and policies. The third and final step engages with how some women successfully coordinate these intersecting themes to navigate their careers and achieve leadership positions within the contaminated and ruinous university environment. In doing so, we draw on the musical form of the fugue with its four themes that at different moments diverge, clash and, if successful, achieve resolution, to provide us with a way for analyzing the women's stories as "polyphony‐in‐action." By using this musical approach to retool intersectionality, we are able to show how some women managed to bring all four themes of their lives into symbiosis and achieve value in the ruinous academic landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current trends suggest that significant gender disparities exist within Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education at university, with female students being underrepresented in physics, but more equally represented in life sciences (e.g., biology, medicine). To understand these trends, it is important to consider the context in which students make decisions about which university courses to enrol in. The current study seeks to investigate gender differences in STEM through a unique approach that combines network analysis of student enrollment data with an interpretive lens based on the sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu. We generate a network of courses taken by around 9000 undergraduate physics students (from 2009 to 2014) to quantify Bourdieu’s concept of field. We identify the fields in which physics students participate by constructing a weighted co-enrollment network and finding communities within it. We then use odds ratios to report gender differences in transverse movements between different academic fields, and non-parametric tests to assess gender differences in vertical movements (changes in students’ achievement rankings within a field). Odds ratios comparing the likelihood of progression from one field to another indicate that female students were more likely to make transverse movements into life science fields. We also found that university physics did a poor job in attracting high achieving students, and especially high achieving female students. Of the students who did choose to study physics at university, low and middle achieving female high school students were more likely to decrease their relative rank in their first year compared to their male counterparts. Low achieving female students were also less likely to continue with physics after their first year compared to their male counterparts. Results and implications are discussed in the context of Bourdieu’s theory, and previous research. We argue that in order to remove constraints on female students’ study choices, the field of physics needs to provide a culture in which all students feel like they belong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue including feminist entanglements with capitalism and patriarchy, gender-based violence and rape culture.

Peer review is central to academic publishing. Yet for many it is a mysterious and contentious practice, which can cause distress for both reviewers, and those whose work is reviewed. This paper, produced by the Editors' Collective, examines the past and future of peer review in academic publishing. The first sections consider how peer review has been defined and practised in changing academic contexts, and its educational significance in the development of scholarship. The paper then explores major historical and contemporary issues around identity, diversity, anonymity, and the review process, and the related power of editors versus reviewers in academic publishing. Finally, the paper discusses the case of new scholars as reviewers engaging in neoliberal labour, before concluding with some brief recommendations based on our analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the transcript of the Sixth Annual Peter Fraser Memorial Lecture that was held in Wellington, New Zealand on October 4, 2016. The lecture comprised of five invited speakers broadly drawn from the education, media and union sectors with an interest in the legacy of Prime Minister Peter Fraser to New Zealand's public education system. Using the documentary of the introduction of arts education in post-war New Zealand entitled The heART of the Matter, the speakers were asked to respond to the democratic ethos of education as a fundamental pillar to the first New Zealand Labour Party agenda of educational reform and its implications for New Zealand education today. Figures such as the American educational philosopher John Dewey and the influential New Zealand Director of Education Clarence Beeby occupy shared space alongside Peter Fraser in the following transcript. While there is a strong sense of the importance of educational and political history there is also a shared stance that laments much of what has been lost in the context of contemporary New Zealand education. The intention of this transcript is to provide the reader a collection of educational excerpts that traverse many fields and perspectives, but which can be gathered to form a clarion call for the reassessment of educational focus and aims in ways that honour and reinvigorate the importance of education to the democratic project in New Zealand and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]