This manuscript draws from a 4-year feminist ethnographic study of eight young girls and their caretakers in a high-poverty, predominantly White, urban community in the USA. Themes of mothers, mothering, and motherhood were dominant across 4 years of data generation and in this article I focus on the girls' and mothers' narratives to explore…

In their predominantly theoretical turn to the material, post-humanist feminists often focus on "nature", arguing that the nature/culture binary has collapsed and that fixed distinctions between human and non-human spheres no longer hold. Conversely, outdoor learning sees nature as a space where humans act and has been more concerned…

Forty-five years have passed since Kenya gained independence and almost 30 years since the feminist revolution ushered in a global gender and development agenda. While Kenya's development agenda had a functionalist orientation aimed at modernisation, the outcome of efforts to promote education development cannot be understood without an…

This paper furthers a discussion about the ways in which idealised versions of gender permeate the aesthetic presentation and impression management strategies of elite private schools. Specifically, we consider how the written text, layout and images used in 12 Australian private girls school prospectuses function in constructing discourses of…

This paper revisits the question of "voice" in the context of neo-liberal social and educational reform. "Voice" has been one of the key concepts of feminist and critical pedagogies in the theory and practice of producing social transformation. I argue in this paper, that the political effectiveness of this concept needs to be…

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…

In this article, the research findings of a deconstructive visual ethnography focused on the production of immigrant girls' identities will be analysed. This collaborative research project involved experimentation with a dialogic curriculum aimed at creating diverse identity narratives with immigrant girls at an urban primary school in Barcelona.…

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…

In a recent paper, members from the London Feminist Salon Collective reflected on the vexed problem of agency in poststructuralist theory and asked, "as feminist educational researchers, where do we go from here?" The issue remains pressing as agency, both individual and collective, is at the heart of the feminist, and indeed, all radical…

In this article, prevailing professional, business and managerial discourses of team leadership are "troubled" by some feminist critiques and analyses of collectivity and gendered discursive relations of power. I draw on a study of primary school co-principalships to describe and reflect on Karen's (a pseudonym) accounts of her personal and shared…

This paper reports on the discussion at a recent 'salon' on feminist agency. The views of the two invited speakers, who raised concerns about the impact of post-modernism on political projects, are reported. The content of the general discussion around subjectivity, agency and structure are then set out. The group struggled with the possibilities…

In this paper, I analyze the theorization of adolescent femininity within three popular cultural texts about girls and schooling written by women and published in the United States during the 1990s. The books, referred to as "Ophelia narratives," include Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan's (1992) "Meeting at the Crossroads," Mary Pipher's (1994)…

Discusses the gendered experiences and lifelong learning opportunities of people with learning difficulties (LD). Notes theories of late modernity, their use by feminist and disability studies theorists, and their relationship to a learning society. Using case studies, argues that the identities of people with LD are not chosen freely from many…