This article takes on some of care theorist Joan Tronto's ideas on care and responsibility and asks what implications they have for critical pedagogies in higher education. The authors argue that Tronto's political ethics of care framework enriches the transformative potential of critical pedagogies, because it helps expose how power and…

The ninth international Gender and Education Association Conference "Compelling Diversities, Educational Intersections" hosted by the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, London South Bank University engages with key debates surrounding the interplay between dynamics of education, work, employment and society in the context of…

This viewpoint draws on discussions at two seminars to consider ambivalent attitudes amongst a group of Black women towards considering themselves and/or other Black people as "middle class". The first seminar highlighted the experiences of a group of Black "middle-class" parents and the second, which was organised as a result of the reaction the…

The task of re-evaluating the legacy of Susan Isaacs is a complex one. Of course there is the need to acknowledge the role and work of a key woman thinker and (in some senses) activist, clearly unconventional and forward-thinking, whose specific contribution seems to have been largely overlooked by malestream history. As a contemporary to some of…

A central principle of 1970s feminism was a concern with making women visible and the historical creation of women's public voices is an important methodological premise of feminist research. When written, biographies of female actors "recovered" from the condescension of posterity, can illuminate the telling of individual and collective pasts, of…

This essay comments on the emotional difficulties psychoanalytic discussion introduces to conceptualising the poesis of gender through its reconsideration of the valence of aggression and its development in psychical reality. It returns to the 1936 lectures on the emotional life of gender given by Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere to a public about…

The present article attempts to pay attention to the ways in which a group of young Cypriot students engage in the construction of conventional notions of masculinities through the negation and the fear of homosexual desire. Drawing on interviews with 12 male and female university students, I argue that many young men go through complicated…

Deborah Ellis's "The Breadwinner" is a popular young adult novel about Muslim girls. In this paper, we offer an analysis of the representation of Muslim girls and women in the book as well as responses from undergraduate students enrolled in a children's literature course to these constructions. Building on the work of postcolonial feminism…

This viewpoint explores and shares our experience of "doing" feminism in the context of its apparent "demise". We were recently invited to attend an event at the Cabinet Office, to "discuss the impact aspirations and expectations within the community have on the educational achievement of young people in deprived areas". The seminar was entitled,…

Following the invitation issued by the London Feminist Salon Collective in the pages of "Gender and Education", this paper offers further theoretical suggestions for understanding agency. Based on an ethnographic study with young people engaged in activist politics, I offer a conception of agency that is at its core "relational". I build this…

The aim of this article is to start a debate about the inclusiveness/exclusiveness of the field of gender and education, and what change might be possible. While we focus on the field of gender and education as a whole (including its journals and academic practices), our main sources of evidence are our own experiences as gender researchers on…

When I was contacted by the editors of "Gender and Education" to see whether I wanted to respond to this article, I was not particularly keen to do so. I generally believe that critique is a good thing, and that direct responses have a tendency to come over as precious, petulant, and petty. However, having read the article several times, and…

This article presents the author's response to Mary Lou Rasmussen's critical analysis of a piece the author completed in its original form more than a decade ago. She opens this response with the words which Shakespeare gives to Hamlet. There were many reasons why she settled on Hamlet's soliloquy. First, his words stand as a fitting response…

In this paper I argue that the "balancing two lives" approach to motherhood and work has particular limitations for academic mothers. I interrogate the perceived oppositionalities in being mother, traditionally associated with nurturing, love and emotion, and being academic, traditionally associated with reason and logic. My purpose is to show…

This paper analyses how historical narratives of the 1930s conflict between child-centred and social reconstructionist factions of US progressive education reinforce gendered constructions of education. The split between these two groups has been drawn along lines of gender with child-centred education associated with female educators focused on…