Feminist Academics

This text brings together leading feminists who explore questions of feminist interventions in organisations of knowledge production, covering both the structure and culture of academic institutions and the social divisions between women. Feminism is located as a force for change, empowering women to gain a political understanding and providing a methodology for new approaches to teaching, learning, research and writing in the academy. Contributions demonstrate how an analysis of the micropolitics of the academy in terms of power, policies, discourses, pedagogy and interpersonal relationships provides a framework for de- privatising women's experience and influencing change. Using theoretical constructs and their own biographies and experience, the contributors present predicaments, inequalities and strategies. Power and influence are considered in conjunction with gender, 'race', social class and sexuality.

This text brings together leading feminists who explore questions of feminist interventions in organisations of knowledge production, covering both the structure and culture of academic institutions and the social divisions between women. Feminism is located as a force for change, empowering women to gain a political understanding and providing a methodology for new approaches to teaching, learning, research and writing in the academy. Contributions demonstrate how an analysis of the micropolitics of the academy in terms of power, policies, discourses, pedagogy and interpersonal relationships provides a framework for de- privatising women's experience and influencing change. Using theoretical constructs and their own biographies and experience, the contributors present predicaments, inequalities and strategies. Power and influence are considered in conjunction with gender, 'race', social class and sexuality.

Feminist scholarship is sometimes dismissed as not quite ‘proper’ knowledge – it’s too political or subjective, many argue. But what are the boundaries of ‘proper’ knowledge? Who defines them, and how are they changing? How do feminists negotiate them? And how does this boundary-work affect women’s and gender studies, and its scholars’ and students’ lives? These are the questions tackled by this ground-breaking ethnography of academia inspired by feminist epistemology, Foucault, and science and technology studies. Drawing on data collected over a decade in Portugal and the UK, US and Scandinavia, this title explores different spaces of academic work and sociability, considering both official discourse and ‘corridor talk’. It links epistemic negotiations to the shifting political economy of academic labour, and situates the smallest (but fiercest) departmental negotiations within global relations of unequal academic exchange. Through these links, this timely volume also raises urgent questions about the current state and status of gender studies and the mood of contemporary academia. Indeed, its sobering, yet uplifting, discussion of that mood offers fresh insight into what it means to produce feminist work within neoliberal cultures of academic performativity, demanding increasing productivity. As the first book to analyse how academics talk (publicly or in off-the-record humour) about feminist scholarship, Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship is essential reading for scholars and students in gender studies, LGBTQ studies, post-colonial studies, STS, sociology and education. Winner of the FWSA 2018 Book Prize competition The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315692623, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book highlights the experiences of feminist early career researchers and teachers from an international perspective in an increasingly neoliberal academy. It offers a new angle on a significant and increasingly important discussion on the ethos of higher education and the sector's place in society. Higher education is fast-changing, increasingly market-driven, and precarious. In this context entering the academy as an early career academic presents both challenges and opportunities. Early career academics frequently face the prospect of working on fixed term contracts, with little security and no certain prospect of advancement, while constantly looking for the next role. Being a feminist academic adds a further layer of complexity: the ethos of the marketising university where students are increasingly viewed as ‘customers’ may sit uneasily with a politics of equality for all. Feminist values and practice can provide a means of working through the challenges, but may also bring complications.

This book of personal essays by over forty women and men who founded women’s studies in Canada and Québec explores feminist activism on campus in the pivotal decade of 1966-76. The essays document the emergence of women’s studies as a new way of understanding women, men, and society, and they challenge some current preconceptions about “second wave” feminist academics. The contributors explain how the intellectual and political revolution begun by small groups of academics—often young, untenured women—at universities across Canada contributed to social progress and profoundly affected the way we think, speak, behave, understand equality, and conceptualize the academy and an academic career. A contextualizing essay documents the social, economic, political, and educational climate of the time, and a concluding chapter highlights the essays’ recurring themes and assesses the intellectual and social transformation that their authors helped set in motion. The essays document the appalling sexism and racism some women encounter in seeking admission to doctoral studies, in hiring, in pay, and in establishing the legitimacy of feminist perspectives in the academy. They reveal sources of resistance, too, not only from colleagues and administrators but from family members and from within the self. In so doing they provide inspiring examples of sisterly support and lifelong friendship.

This edited collection contends that if women are to enter into leadership positions at equal levels with their male colleagues, then sexism in all its forms must be acknowledged, attended to, and actively addressed. This interdisciplinary collection—Surviving Sexism in Academia: Strategies for Feminist Leadership—is part storytelling, part autoethnography, part action plan. The chapters document and analyze everyday sexism in the academy and offer up strategies for survival, ultimately 'lifting the veil" from the good old boys/business-as-usual culture that continues to pervade academia in both visible and less-visible forms, forms that can stifle even the most ambitious women in their careers.

This study of feminism, equity and change in the academy is based on interviews with 40 feminist academics and students in Britain, Sweden and Greece. The research attempts to decode and disentangle gendered message systems and the matrix of power relations in the academy. It consists of feminist readings of the micro-processes of everyday practices. Change is interrogated in relation to feminist pedagogy, equity, organizational culture, policies and discourses of New Right reform, mass expansion and new managerialism.

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.