Vice-Chancellor's Gender Equality Fund Final Report 2021: Equity, Policy and Practice: Disruptions to Candidature and Barriers to Career Progression for Women HDR Candidates

Whilst prior research has established barriers to career progression for women academics, the experiences of women HDR candidates and the barriers to candidature progression, including movement to on-going, academic labour, or careers outside of academia, has not received the same level of attention. This project therefore aims to generate a better understanding of equity considerations for research disruption, with particular reference to the COVID-19 pandemic, for women HDR candidates. There are two key research questions for this project: 1. What are the barriers to HDR progression for WSU women candidates? 2. How might WSU support the progression of women HDR candidates through targeted strategies? This report provides recommendations for best practice for supporting the progression of women HDR candidates at Western

Vice-Chancellor's Gender Equality Fund Final Report 2019: Redressing the Promotion Gap: Practices and Processes to Minimise Gender Disparities in Academic Advancement

Like many universities in Australia and internationally, women at Western Sydney University (WSU) remain under-represented in senior academic positions. In addition, there is a persistent gender pay gap for female academic staff across the institution. Despite the robust literature, researchers and higher education institutions have struggled to understand how vertical gender segregation might be alleviated in academia, and to establish effective gender equity programs which target gender differences in promotion. In addition, little research has evaluated the impact of existing programs beyond the individual level and in comparison to other institutional initiatives. The degree to which gender initiatives are effective in making change is one of the most important and challenging questions in striving for gender equity in contemporary universities, yet this has been inadequately addressed by researchers. There are two key research questions for this project: how does WSU’s promotion policy and process compare with other Australian institutions, and; how might WSU alter current policy and practice to reduce the gender promotion gap? Data was collected through interviews with women academics who had progressed to Professor or Associate Professor whilst at Western Sydney, and both internal and external members of the Western Sydney University Academic Promotions Committee. The research also included an assessment of the WSU promotions policy and relevant promotions and gender equality process documents, and a comparison was carried out between WSU and two other institutions. We find that women are at a disadvantage in achieving measures of excellence in academic competitions for promotion. What is more, gender bias also works around these measures, so that even when women do successfully compete in terms of the metrics, they are blocked by institutional gatekeepers or marginalized and stigmatized for attempting to play a game for which they are seen to be corporeally mismatched. These processes were recognized by the women who bid for promotion but also by several of the promotions committee members. Although there is some useful policy and processes in place in our institutions in relation to promotion, gender bias continues to work through cultural practices. There is also evidence of a reticence to see the metrics of excellence, that serve academic capitalism very well, as anything but neutral or to see gender inequities as systemic. In order to redress the promotion gap, we therefore need to challenge these perceptions and look to cultural and educative solutions. This project provides recommendations for increasing women’s promotion rates, which will also assist in reducing the gender pay gap

Reanimating adulthood / Animated becoming

In 'Reanimating Adulthood' there is play between Crawford and Halberstam's address to animation: as a cinematic genre with revolutionary potential (Halberstam); and as the inspiration to direct this revolutionary potential towards the articulation of evolving imaginaries of adulthood in late modernity (Crawford). I am animated by Crawford's invitation to think about how we might re-imagine the human and the subject in a time and space marked by neoliberal capital and ecological threat. Crawford takes up, from Halberstam's work on 'Pixarvolt' animated features, the theme of revolution as powerfully transformed worlds. I, in turn, work with an iteration of revolution as turning, as a circular movement rather than a linear trajectory. This is a circular movement that animates possibilities for becoming, for queering becoming, and becoming queer, in a queer(ed) time and space

The subject of policy

I work selectively with poststructuralist theories in order to give an account of the subject of policy as a constitutive relationship between social policy and the embodied human subject. Drawing on theories of subjectivity, narrative and governmentality, I articulate possibilities for analysing narrated accounts of experience as a mode of address to policy and its analysis. I argue that the multiple and often contradictory discourses, narratives, practices and experiences through which the subject of policy is governed, are embodied in ways that exceed the rationalities and ambitions of policy. I propose that an address to the experience of the embodied subject is crucial to an understanding of how policy is lived, and to the limits of the realisation or materialisation of policy ambitions. Finally, I explore possibilities for an approach to policy analysis that takes as its starting point a single narrative of experience. In re-telling the narrative of a nineteen-year-old university student ‘Emily’, I highlight the extent to which her ambitions are simultaneously formed by particular ambitions of Higher Education policy and in tension with them

Same but different : space, time and narrative

In this paper, I give an account of the ways in which narratives and identities change over space and time. I give an account of a mobile and changing human subject, one who does not simply express or represent her- or himself through narrative, but is constructed and reconstructed through narrative. I draw on Paul Ricoeur’s concepts of ‘narrative identity’, which refers to the role of narrative in the formation and expression of identities, and ‘refiguration’, which refers to the ways in which both narratives and identities change over time. I work with extracts from narrative interviews in order to demonstrate the ways in which this might help us understand how narratives and identities change across space and time and also consider what this might mean for pedagogy and the practice of literacy/ies

Losing oneself and finding the other : a response to Jonathan Silin

In responding to Jonathan Silin's article 'At a Loss: Scared and Excited', the author takes up his invitation to articulate a relationship between the personal and the professional, and contemplates the autobiographical as more than a mode of recounting one's own experience. In so doing he foregrounds possibilities for working with an autobiographical account of experience as both a self-reflexive research method and a site for learning about oneself and others. The author situates autobiography as a generative space in and from which one might theorise the self, with the express purpose of simultaneously understanding something of the other. He uses a personal experience of loss as an intellectual resource in order to theorise: the formation of the self in and over time and space; the normative practices through which selves and their experience are made intelligible and recognisable; the relational character of recognition; and the possibilities of narrative for developing an ethic of solicitude and care. In thinking what this theorising might mean for early childhood education he gives an account of the ontological, epistemological and pedagogical implications of loss

A narrative approach to policy analysis

Whilst recognising that there are multiple and competing accounts of what narrative might be or mean (Jones and Macbeth, 2010), my specific purpose in this chapter is to articulate some of the theoretical and methodological possibilities for working with narrative as an approach to policy and its analysis

Becoming academic : a reflection on doctoral candidacy

Higher education policy studies over the last decade have addressed the detrimental effects of neoliberalism, new public managerialism and audit cultures on the nature, organisation, form and meanings of higher education at a macro level. This article addresses the micro-practices through which the author, as doctoral candidate and knowledge worker, understands his academic subjectivity to have been constituted and lived. It foregrounds the practices through which the academy and academic knowledge, academic work and standards, and academic subjectivities are constituted, regulated, embodied and performed. It argues for resistance to the reduction of the outcomes of candidature to metrics and economic indicators, and recognises that this resistance produces a necessary ambivalence about academic labour in the enterprise university

Resisting and re/counting the power of number : the one in the many and the many in the one

In this chapter I turn the themes 'power,' 'discourse' and 'resistance' to contemplation of the place of qualitative accounts of experience within contemporary managerialist audit cultures and their preoccupation with quantity, number and counting. I specifically critique and resist the power and status of number and quantity as key indicators of what matters and what counts. I do this through play with and on vocabularies of 'number' and 'counting,' and through laying out an account of my thinking about discourse, narrative, subjectivity and experience. In contesting the privileged status of numerical counting, I elaborate a theoretical, philosophical and epistemological approach to subjectivity and narrated biographical accounts of experience. In so doing, I write-over one form of accounting (numerical) with another (narrative). I also resist recourse to validation by a vocabulary of number - where quantity is a proxy for significance, validity and quality- and emphasise the extent to which qualitative accounts of any 'one' are understood as simultaneously those of 'many

Assembling Oscar, assembling South Africa, assembling affects

The cover feature of Time, “Oscar Pistorius and South Africa's Culture of Violence” (Perry 2013), assembles the shooting body of Oscar Pistorius and the dead body of Reeva Steenkamp in and as the body of post-apartheid South Africa. In analyzing this cover feature, mobilizing Deleuzian concepts, we consider how the bodily presence or absence of Oscars' prostheses at the time of the shooting – critical to the juridical establishment of his vulnerability and fear, and hence his innocence or guilt – is figured in relation to the history of race relations through which the author, Alex Perry, builds the moral compass that points toward South Africa's future. We also speculate about the relations through which the extra-textual material body of the reader is co-implicated in the event that is being assembled in this text. This is not to give a stable or final account of the text, the shooting, or the reader, but rather to contemplate the ways in which textual assemblages might become assembled for, by, in and as the collective body of a nation state or a reader