Action research: A situated perspective

Rigoberta Menchú has become an icon for the struggles of oppressed peoples for justice and self-determination. For many academics and activists around the world, the accusations of lying made against Ms. Menchú by David Stoll brought into sharp focus the politics of "truthmaking" and the absolutist categories of fact and fiction. In this attempt to discredit Ms. Menchú, and through her, the Mayan experience of genocide by the Guatemalan military and its U.S. sponsors, important questions have been raised about how and when Third World women can speak, the conditions under which they will be heard, and the strategies used to silence them. In this paper, the author draws upon some of the lessons of the Rigoberta Menchú case to examine the politics of truth making in Canada in a recent controversy regarding a speech she made criticizing American foreign policy and urging the women's movement to mobilize against America's War on Terrorism. The highly personalized nature of the attacks on the author by political and media elites sought to accomplish a closing down of public space for informed debate about the realities of U.S. foreign policy and to silence dissent. Repeatedly emphasizing her status as an immigrant outsider, this controversy also contributed to the (ongoing) racialization of people of color as a treacherous "enemy" within the nation's geographical borders, against whom "Canadians" had to be mobilized.     

Our stories matter: storytelling and social justice in the Hollaback! movement

ABSTRACT

As feminist and anti-racist scholars and activists have long known, which stories predominate and which are marginalised is always a question of power and authority – about who is entitled to speak, and who has the authority to decide the meanings of words and actions. Storytelling can be used as a tool for social justice, as exemplified by the international feminist movement Hollaback! and its regional and worldwide struggle to end street harassment and make public spaces accessible for everyone. This article examines the practice of sharing stories within one specific Hollaback! group, highlighting the timeliness of the online storytelling technologies promoted by the movement and considering this work as an example of extra-academic feminist education. The article concludes by questioning to what extent feminists manage to formulate their own localised struggles through storytelling within the feminist movement as a whole.     

Theory in the flesh: Toward an endarkened epistemology

In her article "The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen: Examining an endarkened feminist epistemology in educational research and leadership," Professor Dillard delineates a set of proposals for the study of educational inequity. Professor Wright in his response, "An endarkened feminist epistemology? Identity, difference and the politics of representation in educational research," comments on Professor Dillard's proposals and furthers her analysis by an integration of the cultural studies literature. The author enjoins this conversation in this article by reviewing the proposals by feminists of Color to further social justice in solidarity with Professor Dillard's analysis. In particular, feminists of Color are examined, expanding the definition of "data" to include artistic production such as poetry, personal reflections, and autobiographical essays. The integration of spirituality as it relates to secular teaching is another innovation proposed by various writers. Feminists of Color have also chosen to construct theory and a political agenda for achieving social justice rather than only engaging in intellectual debates that deconstruct existing paradigms. Professor Dillard is part of a cadre of feminist writers who advocate radical changes in the academy to eradicate educational inequity.     

唐群英与近代女权运动

唐群英是中国近代史上杰出的女权运动领袖 ,她率先加入同盟会 ,影响了一大批妇女人才 ,在当时形成了一支重要的妇女革命力量 ;他领导组织了民初妇女参政运动 ,使中国近代女权运动出现了前所未有的高潮 ;她办女报 ,兴女学 ,唤醒了广大妇女的思想觉悟 ,亦为女权运动的发展 ,培养了一大批妇女人才     

贝尔·胡克斯女性主义理论创作特点浅析

贝尔·胡克斯是美国当代著名黑人女性主义理论家和实践家。受其家庭背景和学术生涯的影响,同时由于她个人作为女性和黑人,她将自己在理论创作上定位为作家、女性主义理论家和文化批评家,在政治实践中定位为活跃的左翼公共知识分子。这样的自我定位使其理论创作表现出五个特点：集精神、心智和政治使命于一体的创作原则;种族、性别、阶级相关联的批判视角;黑人自决;非暴力的文化革新;理论与实践的结合。     

Toward a collective rhetoric rooted in choice: Consciousness raising in the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Ourselves and Our Children

Contemporary feminists struggle over “choice.” A central demand of the second wave, some feminists insist on the continued significance of choice to their activism and theorizing; others are critical of the term, arguing that an emphasis on choice diverts attention from political issues and blames women for the oppressions they experience. The tension at the root of this debate is echoed in feminist theorizing about consciousness raising. In her germinal essay “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron,” Campbell argues that through consciousness raising, feminists illuminated the political underpinnings of women’s personal problems and prompted collective activism aimed at finding structural solutions to those problems, all the while affirming the centrality of choice to women’s lives. What Campbell left unstated, however, is how a process based in choice will promote a political, collective response. In this essay, I offer an analysis of the 1978 volume Ourselves and Our Children, arguing that the consciousness raising modeled therein illuminates broad patterns of political oppression, urges a collective response to those oppressions, and embraces choice. Based in a recognition of the synecdochic nature of the “personal is political” adage, this analysis offers insights into feminist debates over choice and resolves a lacuna in theorizing about consciousness raising.     

The feminist civics lesson of 19: The Musical

ABSTRACT

This essay examines 19: The Musical—a memorial project that marks the suffrage centennial. The author employs an intersectional lens to examine the arguments this memorialization makes about a suffrage past as well as a feminist present and future. This intersectional emphasis is especially important given the prevalent present-day assumption of the suffrage movement as an entirely white women's endeavor—one that especially forgets the racism and exclusivity that riddled the suffrage movement.     

Negotiating contradictions in developing teacher identity during the EAL practicum in Australia

This paper reports on how Maria (pseudonym), a non-native English speaker (NNES) and preservice teacher (PST) of English as an additional language (EAL), developed her professional identity during the practicum in an Australian secondary school. Drawing on activity theory, the study identified contradictions in Maria’s practicum activity and examined how Maria’s professional identity developed through her negotiation of the contradictions. Data included interviews with Maria before, during and after the practicum, her reflections, an interview with her school mentor (Ms Davies, pseudonym), and relevant documents. The findings reveal that Maria experienced contradictions between her multiple identities of NNES, student, becoming teacher, and classroom teacher, between her mentor’s teaching approach and that of her own, and between her practice and rules. The findings provide implications for researching teacher identity and supporting preservice EAL teachers in developing productive teacher identities during the practicum.     

19世纪英国中产阶级妇女维权与参政活动的背景和影响

19世纪的英国,在女权主义思想感染下,面对妇女无权的社会现实,中产阶级妇女自我意识逐步觉醒,并广泛参与到当时的女权运动中。她们的维权和参政活动改善了妇女自身的生活和精神面貌,重塑了妇女在资本主义公共领域中的角色定位,建构了妇女自我意识觉醒发展的新内涵,并由此推动了英国民主化进程。     

Knowing feminism: the significance of higher education to women’s narratives of ‘becoming feminist’

ABSTRACT

Educational spaces have long provided opportunities for politicisation and activism. However, research into the processes through which students become politicised can often focus on participation in recognised forms of political action, thereby ignoring the multiple factors active in developing a political consciousness. This paper draws on narrative interviews with feminist women to consider the importance of education to their experience of becoming feminist. It considers how, for a particular group of women who were all students or recent graduates of non-STEM disciplines, academic feminism formed an important part of their narrative of becoming feminist. Each of the women referred to having a long-standing feminist inclination, instinct or feeling and indicated that studying academic feminism offered them the tools for reflecting on and articulating this.     

Finding feminism,finding voice? Mobilising community education to build women's participation in Myanmar's political transition

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the role played by women activists and educators in mobilising community education to support new opportunities for women's activism in the context of Myanmar's political transition. Recent political reorientations in Myanmar which have resulted in a civilian-led democracy emerging from a repressive military regime, have facilitated increased international contact. Myanmar women activist-educators are rejecting hierarchical relationships and the sterile reproductions of idealised female citizenship evident in some training practices and are promoting a conceptualisation of feminist education. I reflect on the dynamics of this feminist activism, including the adaptation of feminist concepts and terminology, as articulated by activists, and I explore responses to the new avenues for women's engagement which are opening up in the first inter-election cycle.     

“I was my war; my war was I”: Vera Brittain,autobiography and university fiction during the Great War

Abstract

Applying the critical lenses of feminism, autographical theory and literary analysis, this essay performs a triple reading of Vera Brittain’s multi-genre writings about gender, war,and university education. Focusing specifically on The Dark Tide (1923), Testament of Youth (1933) and The Women of Oxford (1960), the essay argues that Brittain (de)constructs competing views of academic work and war work in order to reveal and critique competing definitions of women’s duty in wartime. Over the course of her life and writings, Brittain’s attitudes toward academe changed from euphoric feminist possibility to anti-spinsterish paranoia. Ultimately, Brittain was unable to reconcile these conflicting perspectives and instead chose a new, modern path in pacifism. Looking at a diverse body of her work reveals how much gender, education and the war impacted on Brittain’s perceptions of her self, her work and her writing.     

Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960), suffragette,political activist,artist and writer

In this article, a biographical overview is offered of the life of [Estelle] Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960), suffragette, political activist, artist and writer, in order to provide a context for her 1959 proposal for an Ethiopian women’s college, which is published for the first time in this journal. Sylvia, one of five children born in Manchester, England, grew up in a radical household where she not only attended political meetings but was exhorted to work for a more equal society. As a young woman, she trained as an artist but was soon drawn into the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) founded by her mother in 1903 to campaign for the parliamentary vote for women. Sylvia, a socialist feminist, often found herself at odds with the radical feminist, women‐centred views of her mother and her elder sister, Christabel, the Chief Organiser of the WSPU and their mother’s acknowledged favourite. The tensions between Sylvia and her relatives intensified during the First World War which they supported and she opposed. During the 1920s she became more revolutionary in her politics and in the 1930s increasingly involved in campaigning against fascism, especially in Ethiopia. After Ethiopia was liberated, she went to live there permanently with her son, Richard, in 1956. A crusader all her life, as well as a prolific writer, the publication of her proposal for an Ethiopian women’s college reveals yet another aspect of her diverse interests.     

Criticality's affective entanglements: rethinking emotion and critical thinking in higher education

ABSTRACT

Critical thinking is often understood as a set of tangible, transferrable and measurable skills and competencies. Yet, it is also an intensely affective experience that is complex, contingent and contextualised. Using interview, focus group and observation data conducted with 15 first-year undergraduate social science students at a UK research-intensive university, this paper explores how students negotiate the complex knowledge practices that constitute critical thinking, particularly the affects of being and becoming critical. The theoretical tools offered by Karen Barad and Sara Ahmed allow a conceptualisation of critical thinking as a complex phenomenon of socio-material and affective practices. This paper turns to Barad and Ahmed to explore the potential of their clashing theorisations for thinking through the affective territories of critical thinking. It will argue that acknowledging the way(s) critical thinking feels (as well as what it is and what it is for) opens up new imaginaries for feminist scholarship about criticality.     

Learning about social movements through news media: deconstructing New York Times and Fox News representations of Standing Rock

ABSTRACT

This article critically examines how news media, as a form of public pedagogy, functioned to ‘educate’ the public about the Standing Rock pipeline protests in North Dakota, USA. Drawing on literature in public pedagogy, social movement learning and communication studies, we employed ethnographic content analysis to identify emergent patterns, emphases and themes in all online media coverage by the New York Times and Fox News of the Standing Rock protests from April 2016 to March 2017. We analysed representations of Standing Rock in 164 NYT articles, and 96 Fox News articles, respectively. This ethnographic methodology allowed us to understand how the Standing Rock movement, its actors and meaning were constructed through the use of imagery, metaphors and emphasis on particular voices, narratives and perspectives. Our findings showed how both Fox and NYT were able to effectively frame the protest as a fundamentally human story focusing on Indigenous people, celebrities and US war veterans, and address broad-based public concerns about global climate change, water pollution and land rights. These results point to the importance of mainstream media as public pedagogue shaping social movement learning, and to the need for further research on this topic in adult education.     

Disabilities Awareness and the Pre-service Teacher: A blueprint of a mentoring intervention

A method of mentoring pre-service teachers in a US setting aimed at enhancing their understanding of and sensitivity towards disabled learners is described and discussed. The study assumes that pre-service teachers need the opportunity to process and overcome their fears and assumptions about difference. The contemporary value of inclusiveness in education was made explicit through a teaching intervention that engaged pre-service students in learning about severely disabled persons and their issues. Student awareness of the disability literature was expanded through an encounter with a congenital amputee, a disabilities specialist who communicated how she wants teachers to relate to her. The data for this study were based on these reflective teaching methods, including class discussion, essay writing, and a survey, and on interviews conducted with the guest speaker.     

Calling for change: A feminist approach to women in art,politics, philosophy and education

Abstract

Michel Foucault showed by his genealogical method that history is random. It comprises sites of disarray and dispersal. In those sites, Simone de Beauvoir wrote philosophy through lived experience of woman as Other in relation to man as the Absolute. Here lies a fecund site for revisionist analysis of female cultural production and its relevance to a philosophy of education. The paper works with a feminist approach to the politics of knowledge, examining textual and political strategies in the recording of history and the ‘othering’ of women through dominant cultural discourses. Infusing this discussion is a feminist politics of interrogation on cultural change for women. The paper investigates contributions of women to fields of art, politics, education and philosophy, and to the ways their contributions have been considered, received, positioned. Different approaches to feminism become apparent in the different conditions of knowledge under discussion. This leads to a final consideration of feminist challenges in context of the politics of neoliberalism as it seeks to identify a feminist potential for ‘a cleansing fire’. The interventions in this paper trace political strategies and challenges for a philosophy of education to keep the momentum of feminist histories and issues to the forefront of scholarly enquiry and political/social action.     

The Awakening,One of the Pioneer Works in Feminist Movement

Kate Chopin's The Awakening,is a portrayal of the life of the well-to-do but unhappy married woman Edna Pontellier.Edna enjoys all the advantaged provided by her husband and ahs two lovely children.She is unhappy because she is confined to her house and expected to be a dutiful wife and a loving mother.When she begins to change her way of living,to live for herself instead of her husband and children,she is opposed by her family,her friends and others.To finds her freedom,she drowns herself in the sea.The tragedy of Edna is the tragedy of most women in a patriarchal society,and the novel which caused a storm of criticism at its publication has been considered to be a pioneer work in feminist movement.     

Stakeholder influences on the writing skills debate: A reflective evaluation in the context of vocational business education

This paper attempts to contextualise the issue of skills and particularly writing for public relations as a business discipline within a broader debate about the key graduate skills. The paper raises themes for discussion on professionalisation and professionalism, which link to course structure and curriculum content. The paper considers writing skills as a key graduate (and public relations vocational) skill, debates surrounding theory and practice within the curriculum and aligning the curriculum to the work setting as proposed by Dearing. The paper analyses literature and reports from three stakeholder perspectives to evaluate their contribution to the skills debate, with particular focus on communication and writing as a core skill within public relations education and practise. The paper focuses on ideological and political issues that influence the skills debate in the post-Dearing era and assesses the impact of stakeholders on the presentation of evidence, argument and recommendations for higher education.