‘Being yourself’: everyday ways of doing and being gender in a ‘rights-respecting’ primary school

This paper engages with some everyday ways of doing and being gender which proceed from a dominant liberal rights policy and practice discourse within one English ‘rights-respecting’ primary school in England. Drawing on three ethnographic vignettes of data from different spaces within the school, it utilises a Butlerian analytic to interrogate the kinds of subjects that children are entitled and obliged to be as they take up different subject positions proposed to them in the school. The paper engages with this empirical data, to foster and ignite critical sensibilities, especially as these relate to ‘taken-for-granted’ discourses of children’s rights which presume the participation of all children regardless of their differently gendered subjectivities. This analysis puts in question the universal, normative and essentialising effects of the category of the rights-respecting child as always unproblematic and forever productive.     

中国古代神话中的悲剧美和崇高美

我国上古神话体现了悲剧美和崇高美的美学特征。这种美学特征主要体现在创世神话、始祖神话和英雄神话中。它的不少故事,带有悲剧色彩,甚至是悲剧性的。鲧禹治水、精卫填海、夸父逐日、刑天起舞、女娲补天等故事,都在不同程度上体现了先民的悲剧命运与英雄的崇高情怀。因为这样的牺牲是出于崇高的目的,所以悲剧故事并不使人感到哀伤,而只是使人产生悲壮的感情,引起对牺牲者的崇敬,同时展示出光明和希望。因此,这类神话形象不仅是悲剧性的,同时又是乐观主义的。而这种乐观精神,正是悲剧美的灵魂。     

Girls’ active identities: navigating othering discourses of femininity,bodies and physical education

Within physical education and sport, girls must navigate discourses of valued athletic and gendered bodies that marginalise or ‘other’ non-normative performances through systems of surveillance and punishment. The purpose of this paper is to share girls’ perspectives on how these discourses affected their gender performances and activity engagement. Students aged 13–14 in one ethnically diverse UK secondary school were invited to create a photo diary of the physical activities they engaged in. Photo-elicitation interviews in small groups followed. The girls positioned themselves as physically active but had to carefully manage their activity choices and gender performances in a single-sex physical education environment that regulated deviation from the fit, slender, girly-girl. Although the girls demonstrate the difficulty of resisting, they indicate moments of positioning themselves against norms that suggest the possibilities of shifting gendering processes. The paper points out the importance of listening to ‘other’ girls’ narratives in building positive physical education engagements.     

‘Not everything that the bourgeois world created is bad’: aesthetics and politics in women workers' education

In this paper, I look into the papers of Fannia Cohn, an immigrant labour organizer, who served the Education Department of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) between 1918 and 1962 and became one of its few women vice-presidents. As an internationally recognized figure in the history of workers' education, Cohn left a rich body of labour literature, wherein art is central in the ways she conceptualized, designed and organized women workers' educational programmes and curricula, as well as cultural activities for more than 50 years. For Cohn, however, art and politics were tightly interwoven in what I have called the artpolitics assemblage of women garment workers' life and work. It is entanglements between ethics, aesthetics and politics, considered in the light of the Rancièrian notion of ‘the distribution of the sensible’, that I discuss in this paper.     

Gendered inequalities in competitive grant funding: an overlooked dimension of gendered power relations in academia

ABSTRACT

Research grant funding influences the organisation of academic work and academic careers. We problematise general approaches to gender bias in research grant funding and argue that it fails to include the wider structures of inequality and the unequal gendered power relations in academia. Approaching the subject with gender budgeting we challenge assumed gender-neutral practices. The objective is to illuminate how the gendered funding system and (the previous and subsequent) gendered structures of academia are maintained. The whole grants scheme is assessed, drawing on statistical data collected on the whole population of a medium-size, comprehensive research and educational institution in Iceland, and two types of competitive grants. The data is measured against the pool of applicants and comparisons within and between fields and ranks are made. By including the structures of inequality and the gendered power relations, the results show how the funding system is biased not only in favour of men, but towards the male-dominated and culturally masculine positions and fields. This approach illustrates the need to address the whole academic system in order to challenge the norms that maintain and reproduce gender inequalities.     

Gendered barriers to educational opportunities: resettlement of Sudanese refugees in Australia

This paper argues that whilst equitable educational pathways are integrated into educational policy discourses in Australia, there are significant gendered barriers to educational participation among members of the Sudanese refugee groups. The specific conditions of forced migration reinforce disadvantage and further limit opportunities. Cultural factors play a key role in this, as the data from this study demonstrate. Participants in this study are Sudanese refugees who arrived in Australia as part of the humanitarian programme. The paper draws upon interviews and focus group data that were collected for a larger study on the broader issue of resettlement of Sudanese refugees in Australia. This paper argues that women from refugee backgrounds are particularly at risk and face cultural and linguistic barriers in accessing educational opportunities.     

(Re)Configuring masculinities in an ethno-centric Australian community school: complexity and contradictions

This article draws on a case study of 15 boys aged between 13 and 14 years who attend an urban ethno-centric community school located in Melbourne, Australia. The study investigated how the boys' constructions of masculinity were mediated by a strong connectedness to their Greek cultural traditions and ideals. Data generated from focus group discussions provided insights into the complex ways in which the boys individually and collectively constructed their understandings of what it means to be a man. For most boys, maleness constituted cultural traditions and behaviours that must be learnt: a code of conduct which a boy acquires from his elders that is talked into existence and transmitted through a hegemonic discourse. Yet the findings also revealed the agency boys can exercise and the fluidity of their configurations: contradictions and inconsistencies being an inherent part of the recursive process of their gendered identity formation.     

Girls' and boys' reasoning on cultural and religious practices: a human rights education perspective

Human rights play a vital role in citizens' political, religious and cultural life (Wang 2002, 171). Due to the prominence of human rights in the everyday life of citizens, including those of South Africa, human rights education has been included in many school curricula. Human rights education aims to develop responsible citizens who inter alia foster an understanding of gender, ethnical, religious and cultural diversities. This, it is hoped will encourage and maintain peace, as outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Departing from a human rights position, a qualitative study commenced in 2009 to explore how girls and boys reason about the cultural and religious practices of girls in their communities and families. Narratives by girls and boys highlighted their views on girls' positioning in their specific communities. From the findings it became evident that the participants were aware of conforming to particular cultural and religious practices. However, some participants also challenged how they perceived these practices and the roles of girls in their communities. The article highlights the necessity of embarking on a gendered perspective towards human rights education.     

Bricoleurs in preschool: girls poaching horror media and gendered discourses

Children's experiences and understandings are often marginalised in discussions of their own television viewing. Moreover, rarely is attention paid to the meaning children make from and with the ideas and images in media, much less in horror movies. This inquiry examines the horror media talk of a preschool girl in a poor and working-class preschool programme in a conservative Christian area in the Southern United States. One extended story by Jakaysha, a five-year-old African-American girl, is the focus of this paper. Using multiple post-structural theories including Davies' fluidity and Bakhtinian text mapping, we examine the contrasting gendered discourses in her narrative. Combining characters ‘poached’ from various media with discourses from her local community, she creates new horror media. In one reading of her tale, she uses horror to justify a departure from feminised subjectivities, while in another feminised expectations prevail, speaking to the multiple gendered subjectivities for girls.