The ninth international Gender and Education Association conference, Compelling Diversities, Educational Intersections, will take place in London this week. Hosted by the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, papers, keynotes and symposia are set to consider ‘diversity’ in education, exploring the relationship between new equality regimes and continued educational inequalities, and the role of feminist research at a time when education wrestles with the commitments and contentions in doing diversity and being diverse. Continue Reading

Series Editors: William F. Pinar, Nelson M. Rodriguez, and Ugena Whitlock Continue Reading

The UK Women’s Budget Group responds to the Chancellor’s Autumn Financial Statement:

“Today’s announcement offers nothing for women striving and working hard to take care of children, disabled and frail elderly relatives. The Chancellor spoke of investment in infrastructure, but failed to mention investment in social infrastructure, such as education and healthcare, which underpins women’s paid and unpaid participation in the economy.

Some of the measures announced today will have a disproportionate adverse impact on women’s income. For instance, ending national pay bargaining for teachers will have a greater impact on women who make up the majority of the teaching workforce. Furthermore, the below inflation uprating of benefits is particularly unfair to women because benefits make up a bigger proportion of women’s income than men’s. Continue Reading

Dar es Salaam, 14 – 16 November 2012

GEA Policy Report Continue Reading

As a practicing middle school English Language Arts teacher and researcher in the Northeastern US, I am interested in the stories adolescents tell about their lives. To this end, my research in classrooms is ethnographic and privileges the stories girls tell about their experiences of being marginalized, silenced, and punished, often by other girls. One story in particular has resonated with me, and I have come to refer to this story as “The Story of the Sluts” – thus named, however crudely, because that is how the story was presented to me by the girls who told it. It all came about when Lily (a pseudonym), an eighth grade student, was meeting with me during a writing conference about revisions for a short story she was writing in my class. During this writing conference, it came out that a party had taken place the previous weekend. Lily explained that two of my other students, Melanie and Kelly, had gone ‘into the woods’ with two boys who also attended our school. Continue Reading

Eva Figes, the author of Patriarchal Attitudes, died aged 80 in August 2012. Her book was published to popular British acclaim alongside several other signature books of women’s liberation, including The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer and The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone. These publications signalled a new and critical mood amongst a growing number of women becoming involved in the international women’s liberation movement. Continue Reading

This is to report on what is happening to The Women’s Library, a resource that was set up over 75 years ago as the Fawcett Library in central London. It moved to premises in the East End of London in the 1990s, and became part of what was then the London Guildhall University. The latter then amalgamated with North London University to become London Metropolitan University. There was a contest between the London School of Economics, amongst others, and the Guildhall for housing the library as a resource for feminist historians, social scientists and arts people, back in the 1990s which Guildhall won. At the turn of the 21st century there was a bid for lottery funds to rehouse the library in a converted women’s bathhouse nearby. This bid was successful and the library was housed in an architect-designed building that opened in 2003. Continue Reading

GEA Policy Report Autumn 2012

UK Feminista is a relatively new organization of ‘ordinary women and men campaigning for gender equality’. Founded just over 2 years ago, it has wide and international aims, namely a ‘vision of a world where women enjoy all the rights enshrined in CEDAW – the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women – otherwise known as the ‘women’s bill of rights’. Continue Reading

A Conference Report for GEA

At the end of last month I started my week with a colleague from Sussex University, a few of our new masters students and a trip to the CLF theatre in Peckham Rye. We were there to watch The Girls – a play based on the lives of the four young people who performed in the play. The play was set at a group counselling session in South London. Four young people turned up and waited for the counsellor who never arrived. And as they waited, London started rioting and as the news of the looting and violence poured in via their mobile phones, the on-stage drama followed each young person’s story – the mistakes they had made, the anger and pain they had experienced and the hopeless, stuck position in which they found themselves. This was a harrowing welcome to child hood and youth studies for the new students. As a youth practitioner and researcher I think I am pretty hardened to harrowing tales of young peoples’ sexual exploitation, domestic violence, neglect, hunger, gang violence, anger, loss and pain, but the raw emotion and hopelessness of this play still hit me hard.

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A Conference Report for GEA

The working title for my research is: ‘Learning to Serve Time: troubling Spaces of Working Class Masculinity in the U.K’. It aims to explore, through the in-depth study of a group of young adult prisoners, the ways in which the construction of a particular version(s) of masculinity operate as a factor in the academic (under)achievement, economic marginalisation, subsequent incarceration and later disadvantage of this particular group of young adult men. This research area links to some of the main themes presented at the conference including gender, youth and education. The day was packed with interesting and stimulating presentations, and thought provoking panel discussions. I was encouraged that the conference organisers gave space to community organisations, postgraduate students and established academics. Continue Reading