Within/against: feminist theory as praxis in higher education research

This chapter will explore how different feminist theories and theorists have informed what counts as research, what is defined as a research issue, and methodological approaches to research in higher education. It will consider the theoretical and methodological tools feminist academics have mobilized in order to develop more powerful explanations of how gender and other forms of difference work in the relation to the positioning of the individual, higher education and the nation state within globalized economies. It pays particular regard to the feminist political project of social justice

Student Dis/satisfaction and Academic Dis/enchantment with Edu-capitalism

Over three decades there has been a shift from ideologies of idealism and educationalism towards instrumentalism in higher education due to the global circulation of neoliberal ideologies. Facilitated by digital technologies and encouraged by international ranking systems, there is a paradoxical trend towards homogenisation rather than heterogeneity in terms of what counts as valued knowledge, producing tensions in national policies, institutional responses and academic work in Australia as elsewhere. The paper identifies the implications of trends driving universities towards entrepreneurialism, hyper-instrumentalism, continual rebranding in their search for distinctiveness in global markets, restructuring towards specialisation, focusing on immediate use-value of research, vocationalising teaching, demand driven curriculum that makes students happy, and the disaggregation of curriculum underpinning new multimodal forms of online learning / management technologies

Anticipating policy and logics of practice : Australian institutional and academic responses to the globalising "quality research" agenda

Research assessment is now an international trend. This article mobilises a critical policy sociology informed by Bourdieu to unpack the differential effects of research policy shifts in Australia on universities, academics and the field of educational research. It argues in anticipating policy moves - from surveying the logics of practice that have emerged elsewhere from research assessment - that institutional, individual and field responses, while specific to the Australian policy context and mix, have assumed a logic of practice counter productive to &quot;quality&quot; research, education as a field, and equity.<br /

Transnational feminism, globalisation, human rights and education

The article demonstrates how neo-liberal ideologies and market forces ofglobalisation have produced new discourses in education, which have created new sites of political action and require a radical rethinking about feminist theorizing concerning gender equity in education. The article, in analysing the transformation of the social relations of gender and social stratification, draws from feminist, poststructuralist and postcolonial theories. The author concludes that there is need for redefiningfeminist paradigms in global pedagogies. Such a new paradigm in feminist pedagogy, based on discourses of power, human rights and social justice should provide a foundation for improving the equity for girls and women in education and society globally.<br /

Educational organizations and gender in times of uncertainty

In this chapter I identify and elaborate, from a feminist perspective, upon the theoretical shifts and key concepts that inform sociological analyses of gender and educational organizations. Gender inequalities are embedded in the multi-dimensional structure of relationships between women and men, which, as the modern sociology of gender shows, operates at every level of experience, from economic arrangements, culture and the state to interpersonal relationships and individual emotions. (Connell, 2005: 1801) Even naming this a sociology of gender and organizations is problematic. Many sociologists consider gender as a key sociological concept, but not necessarily from a feminist perspective. Feminism is a multidisciplinary, transnational movement that \u27focuses on the relationship between social movements, political action and social inequalities\u27 (Arnot, 2002: 3) and on the everyday experiences of women and girls and how they translate into social and structural \u27ruling relations\u27 (Smith, 1988). Feminism takes on multiple trajectories and imperatives in different cultural contexts, although with familial resemblances, most particularly the shared objective of equality for women and girls. Education as a primary institution of individual and collective mobility and social change, but also social and economic reproduction, has long been a focus of feminist theory and activism. So a feminist sociology needs to address this complexity of feminist sociological \u27encounters\u27 with gender and organizations.<br /