Matters of gender and sexuality have already made headlines in 2013 and it seems hope is on the horizon for understanding and re-framing gender and sexuality as implicating all,  whereby the phrasing of its ‘socially constructed’ categorisation can  break out of academic sociology and enjoy a more public airing. From the continuation of last year’s backlash against ‘gendered’ products, to parliamentary time and space finally being given to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill, from the mainstreaming of distaste for Page 3 to the recent outrage at the Sun’s depiction of the deceased law graduate and successful model Reeva Steenkamp, we see expansions of, in, beyond ‘the feminist classroom’. 

Recently, Yvette Taylor gave a talk at the Guildhall as part of the Brave New World, LGBT conference, collectively inspired to feel an ‘arrival’ in place as delegates remarked on entering the corridors of power. At last…Shifting cultural (mis)representations, legal (im)possibilities and movements between margins and mainstreams, force questions about the place of feminisms, its ‘publics’, policies and practices: in other words, who is feminism for and where does it reside? Who might be excluded still from those corridors and classrooms? Read the full story

Given the huge furore when David Willetts, the UK Government Minister for Universities and Science, stated in a public speech in April 2011 that ‘feminism had trumped egalitarianism’ and university-educated women were to blame for taking working class men’s jobs in January 2012, I went in search of his book The Pinch. Read the full story

The labels swot, ear ’ole, boffin, keeno, geek and nerd resonate meaningfully across generations of school-goers and echo through the terrains of popular culture. Our Gender and Education viewpoint started life as a conversation about our own research into how such identities are imagined and lived. We wondered: Has ‘the rise of the nerd’ meant that being a ‘boffin’ at school has lost its stigma? Read the full story

As a researcher, there are situations when some discussions with interviewees or colleagues start to tickle our brains and cry out for getting analysed and reanalysed. Read the full story

This article in Gender and Education 27.3 was born out of a commitment to contribute to the United Nations Millennium Goals related to gender equality. The commitment was not only mine as author, but also that of the organisations which sponsored and supported the research. The South African President of the Commonwealth Council for Educational Administration, the Commonwealth Foundation, the Matthew Goniwe School of Leadership and Governance in Johannesburg, the international network, Women Leading Education, and the University of Southampton all offered support. The number and range of organisations that helped evidences a fund of willingness to try to improve gender equality. I led the team from South Africa and the UK which undertook research in South Africa into how women became headteachers and how they lead their schools when appointed. The aim was to pilot a method of comparative research into women headteachers’ experience that could be used in other locations across the world. Read the full story

For my PhD research on the Catholic mother-daughter relationship I decided to  turn the analytical lens on myself.  I discussed the idea with a friend, who suggested examining the mother-daughter relationship. I phoned my mother and asked her what she thought. Her reply was, “Wouldn’t you rather get married instead?”  This reply cemented the idea as it said so much about the life trajectory my mother wanted for me. Read the full story

Following the intense scrutiny to which Islamic societies and cultures have been subjected in the recent past, I was intrigued by the excessive emphasis on the nexus between terrorism and Islam. In particular, I noticed the suggestion in the media on Islamic schools or madrasas as breeding grounds for terrorism, terrorist thought and ideology. What I found disturbing was the insinuation that Muslim children were indoctrinated with hatred for others, and consequently grew up to become terrorists. Two things piqued my curiosity— do Muslim girls not frequent these schools? and why haven’t there been as many cases of Muslim female terrorists if they, too, were being indoctrinated with hatred in these schools? I always suspected that something was amiss and it led me to wonder if these schools were open only to boys—was there any place for girls in Islamic education? Furthermore, why weren’t regions that don’t typically fall under the radar of scholarship or media attention vis-à- vis Islam such as Africa being examined to provide a holistic view of Islamic culture and practice? Read the full story

This article developed from collaboration between the authors in late 2008 when Kate was a visiting researcher at the University of Limerick, funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. At the same time the authors were collaborating in an eight-country study of the Women in Higher Education Management (WHEM) Network that was published in the UK and US in 2011 as Gender, Power and Management: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Higher Education (eds. Barbara Bagilhole and Kate White). Building on those collaborations, we have continued to analyse the Irish and Australian data and presented papers at conferences in Gothenburg (2010) and at Amsterdam, Ottawa and Melbourne (2011). The Irish/Australian comparison is particularly apposite in view of the use of Australian higher educational policy and practice as an exemplar by the Irish government. Read the full story

The co-authors of this article have been working together in Sweden (Elisabet Öhrn & Gaby Weiner) and in Scotland (Gaby Weiner & Joan Forbes) for a number of years. The idea for this policy study piece grew from involvement in a project on social and other capitals in independent schooling in Scotland. Gender was found to be significant in/through which capitals resources worked. One school exhibited a ‘traditional’ gender regime, exemplified in its privileging of boys’ sport, boys’ overall confidence and apparent lack of gender awareness among staff; another had an explicit discourse of girls’ high academic achievement and aspiration; a third school encouraged newer, more urbane and ‘sensitive’ forms of middle class masculinities alongside traditional forms of masculinity. We were interested in knowing more about the Scottish gender policy context for that study and how it compared to that of Sweden – another relatively small country on the periphery of Europe. Read the full story

I started the historical research that is the basis for my article in the upcoming Gender and Education issue (23:6) in 2007. At this time, New Labour’s policy emphasis on ‘empowerment’ through community cohesion, regeneration and community-oriented schools, had attracted significant critique within research literature. Examining New Labour’s policy paradigm, and the schooling practices promoted by their policy ensemble, many had demonstrated the tendency to privilege middle-class modes of educational agency. Concurrently, despite being the specific target of a proliferation of policies, working-class children and parents have been routinely constructed as perpetually lacking. Spurred on by this, when starting my research, my primary interest lay in uncovering – and better understanding – the history of working-class educational agency that had appeared to be lost in dominant policy discourse. Interestingly, whilst completing my research, New Labour came to the end of its 13-year rule, and in swept the Conservative/Liberal Democratic Coalition, bringing with it a new (though perhaps not radically reformulated) reiteration of community ‘empowerment’. With David Cameron’s heralding of the ‘Big Society’ and Michael Gove’s ‘free schools’, community participation appears to continue to have significant rhetorical utility in contemporary education policy. Read the full story