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. Read the full story

Reporting back from the 2013 Young Sexualities Postgraduate Conference at Cardiff University Read the full story

Resources for teachers and parents about children’s books that challenge gender stereotypes Read the full story

Why are girl things so despised? Consider the derisive response to music girls like, movies and television shows girls watch, social networking sites girls inhabit, activities in which girls engage, and the clothes girls wear. The criticism is always snide and condescending: girl things—which appeal to, attract, star, and represent girls—are considered, at best, vacuous and, at worst, distasteful. In a 1999 article, gender and cultural studies scholar Catharine Driscoll argues anything perceived as a “girl thing” is instantly dismissed without consideration of the importance it might have in the lives of real girls. While the Spice Girls and their fans offer an infamous example of this girl-targeted derision, there are no comparable examples of bashing boy-things; no ubiquitous hatred for boys and their things. Read the full story

GEA Policy Report, March 2013

International women’s week was inaugurated in the media this year in a quiet way and yet it has spawned a tremendous amount of footage in the press and other media, culminating in the UK with a weekend festival of arts called Women of the World organized by Jude Kelly, indomitable director of the Southbank Centre in London. What is particular music to GEA is the welcome focus on Education as the main path to equality as can be seen in a myriad of articles, letters and comments and the launch of the new British Library website. Read the full story

If I had been shown this poem, ‘If you don’t come…’ by Christa Bell at age 17, I think it would have blown my mind.  (If you haven’t seen it, I guarantee it will be the best four minutes of your day if you watch it now).  I was aiming for a high shock value when I showed it to a group of sixth form students at Hills Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge, the top state sixth form in the country.  I had been asked to do a lunchtime talk on feminism for students by their sociology teacher, who told me that his students were sceptical about feminism and didn’t see the need for it – a red rag to a bull!  After consulting the glorious feminist twittersphere, I decided to talk about the equal right to sexual pleasure. Read the full story

GEA Policy Report, March 2013 Read the full story

Golden lads and girls all must/As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. –Cymbeline Read the full story

On Friday the 2^nd of November, in an event entitled Young Masculinities: Challenges, Changes and Transitions the British Sociological Association’s Youth Study Group turned their attention to masculinities, an area receiving ever increasing academic attention in light of both the concerns of ‘the problem with boys’ as well as shifts within contemporary theories of masculinity. These shifting theories of masculinity have been usefully brought together in relation to education in particular in a recent article in Gender and Education by Chris Haywood and Máirtín Mac an Ghaill (October 2012), who suggest that “studies of masculinity in education are reconsidering how masculinity is being constituted” (2012: 580). Thus, while researchers within the field of gender and education have had masculinity as a central site of analysis for some time, in the case of the BSA’s Youth Study Group, masculinity has been noticeably absent as Steve Roberts, the group’s co-organiser remarked when opening the seminar. Although education acted as an investigatory location for some of the papers (Cann, Ingram, Kehler, Schalet), education as a specific avenue of investigation for young masculinities was interestingly not at the forefront of the papers being given. Forms of education could nonetheless be observed in the papers offered, with young men learning about acceptable forms of cultural consumption, learning about codes of conduct within particular subcultural contexts, learning to regulate themselves, and applying what it means to be a ‘man’ in transition(s) to the work place. The relationship between education and young men was therefore located, in most of the papers, at the level of social and cultural practice rather than at a formal or institutional level. Read the full story

Series Editors: William F. Pinar, Nelson M. Rodriguez, and Ugena Whitlock Read the full story