Whatever happened to the F word in higher education?

As a women’s studies academic who has taught health and social care students for four years in the UK, it strikes me that much of what and how I teach is incompatible with my own pedagogic position. At a time of government cuts and economic austerity there are ever shrinking opportunities to work in women’s studies environments within the higher education academy, and I often find there is a mismatch between what I am offering as an academic and what an employer is looking for. Occupying the most junior teaching post on a fixed-term contract, and coming from the discipline of women’s studies - constructed often as irrelevant and/or too political and controversial, rather than a necessary philosophical foundation to critical thinking - I have diminutive curriculum influence and find myself more often than not delivering hegemonic groups of theories and practice. Drawing largely on level 5 health and social care interprofessional learning module course materials, this paper will analyse the discourses inscribed within them, and consequently expose the very essence of the learning and teaching that takes place within the classroom. This paper will also act as a catalyst to explore whether it is possible to find, or construct, a feminist space in my learning and teaching practice

Supporting social justice in art therapy

Posters to support an exercise promoting social justice in art therapy practice. Posters available for printing in A3 & A2 sizes

On ‘sisterhood’: What Iraqi Kurdish women migrants have to say about women and the commonalities they share

Based on a research study this paper is concerned with the migration experiences of Iraqi Kurdish Muslim women. Commonalities among women was one of the main themes emerging from the research data, with much of that data related to what some of the Kurdish women conceptualise as a ‘sisterhood’ of women, suggesting that for at least half of the Kurdish women, experiences of inequality, domestic abuse, and patriarchal oppression provide a significant point of commonality among women. More complete approaches to women’s experiences of relationships of power do not negate the relationships of power, inequality, and experiences of domestic abuse existing between men and women; such approaches also do not prioritise over these relationships the relationships of oppression that exist between culturally and/or socioeconomically different women. Taking account of commonalities among women through sameness experiences of gender inequalities and patriarchal abuse, and how those commonalities are constructed, offers insight into the potential evolution of transnational feminism