Feminism Gender And Universities

Feminism, Gender and Universities demonstrates the positive and robust impacts that feminism has had on higher education, through the eyes and in the words of the participants in changing political and social processes. Drawing on the ’collective biography’ of leading feminist scholars from around the world and current evidence relating to gender equality in education, this book employs methods including biographies, life histories, and narratives to show how the feminist project to transform women’s lives in the direction of gender and social equality became an educational and pedagogical one. Through careful attention to the ways in which feminism has transformed feminist academic women’s lives, the author explores the importance of education in changing socio-political contexts, raising questions about further changes that are necessary. Delving into the deeper and more ’hidden’ echelons of education, the book examines the contested nature of current managerial or business approaches to university and education, revealing these to be incompatible with feminist thought. A plea for more careful attention to education and the ways in which the processes of knowledge-making influence (and are influenced by) gender and sexual relations, Feminism, Gender and Universities will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in gender, pedagogy and modern academic life.

Feminism, Gender and Universities demonstrates the positive and robust impacts that feminism has had on higher education, through the eyes and in the words of the participants in changing political and social processes. Drawing on the collective biography of leading feminist scholars from around the world and current evidence relating to gender equality in education, this book employs methods including biographies, life histories, and narratives to show how the feminist project to transform women s lives in the direction of gender and social equality became an educational and pedagogical one. Through careful attention to the ways in which feminism has transformed feminist academic women s lives, the author explores the importance of education in changing socio-political contexts, raising questions about further changes that are necessary. Delving into the deeper and more hidden echelons of education, the book examines the contested nature of current managerial or business approaches to university and education, revealing these to be incompatible with feminist thought. A plea for more careful attention to education and the ways in which the processes of knowledge-making influence (and are influenced by) gender and sexual relations, Feminism, Gender and Universities will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in gender, pedagogy and modern academic life."

First published in 1999, this volume centres on a case study which looks at the experiences of non-traditional adult women students in universities, from the perspective of the actors. The interaction of structure and agency and the significance of macro and micro levels in shaping the behaviour, attitudes and experiences of women adult students are examined by drawing on three perspectives: feminism, Marxism and interactionism. An underlying question is to what extent did studying change the way participants perceived themselves as women? It relates life histories to their student career as individuals and collectively as subcultural groups. It also breaks new ground by including a sample of male adult students in order to compare and clarify gender issues. It also uses macro and micro sociological theories as a tool for understanding the experiences of women at university and the relationship between their public and private lives. The book concludes that studying for a degree represented an active decision to take greater control, to break free from gender and class restraints, and to transform individual lives. The study aims to clarify and reassert the radical individual traditions within sociology, feminism and adult education.

In a provocative collection of essays, the authors...examine the disjuncture between academic feminism and feminism in the academy. An eminently readable, hard-hitting and much needed critique of the curricular, pedagogical and scholarly practices that legitimate the unequal social relations in the academy.--Chandra Talpade Mohanty

Acting Otherwise concerns the strategies of action that have been used by feminist scholars to attain the institutionalization of women's/gender studies in universities.

To do feminism and to be a feminist in higher education is to repeat oneself: to insist on gender equality as more than institutional incorporation and diversity auditing, to insert oneself into and against neoliberal measures, and to argue for nuanced intersectional feminist analysis and action. This book returns to established feminist strategies for taking up academic space, re-thinking how feminists inhabit the university and pushing back against institutional failures. The authors assert the academic career course as fundamental to understanding how feminist educational journeys, collaborations and cares and ways of knowing stretch across and reconstitute academic hierarchies, collectivising and politicising feminist career successes and failures. By prioritising interruptions, the book navigates through feminist methods of researcher reflexivity, autoethnography and collective biography: in doing so, moving from feminist identity to feminist practice and repeating the potential of queer feminist interruptions to the university and ourselves. ​

Drawing on the ‘collective biography’ of leading feminist scholars from around the world and current evidence relating to gender equality in education, this book employs methods including biographies, life histories, and narratives to show how the feminist project to transform women’s lives in the direction of gender and social equality became an educational and pedagogical one. Through careful attention to the ways in which feminism has transformed feminist academic women’s lives, the author explores the importance of education in changing socio-political contexts, raising questions about further changes that are necessary.

This book offers a contemporary account of what it means to inhabit academia as a privilege, risk, entitlement or a failure. Drawing on international perspectives from a range of academic disciplines, it asks whether feminist spaces can offer freedom or flight from the corporatized and commercialized neoliberal university. How are feminist voices felt, heard, received, silenced, and masked? What is it to be a feminist academic in the neoliberal university? How are expectations, entitlements and burdens felt in inhabiting feminist positions and what of 'bad feeling' or 'unhappiness' amongst feminists? The volume consider these issues from across the career course, including from 'early career' and senior established scholars, as these diverse categories are themselves entangled in academic structures, sentiments and subjectivities; they are solidified in, for example, entry and promotion schemes as well as funding calls, and they ask us to identify in particular stages of 'being' or 'becoming' academic, while arguably denying the possibility of ever arriving. It will be essential reading for students and researchers in the areas of Education, Sociology, and Gender Studies.