Reconfiguring Higher Education:
A Symposium from the Centre for
Higher Education and Equity
Research (CHEER), University of
Sussex, UK
1. Fashioning Theory: Vintage Feminism’s ‘Personal as Political’ meets
Academic ‘Affects’
Professor Valerie Hey, CHEER, University of Sussex, UK
Lauren Berlant (2008) talks of a ‘sensual turn’, which Margie Wetherell (2012)
populates as encompassing: embodied domains of experience; what repels and what
attracts people and how emotions come to move people and societies. Feelings/affect
has certainly gained a new credibility in critical theory.
This can be contrasted with how passion literally moved many women to feminist
self-understandings and theory. My memory of second wave feminism and women’s
studies, was not so much that we ‘turned to affect’, as that an ontology of anger
turned into an epistemology – our rage turned (in) to theory. So what do some classic
feminist texts reveal (Daly, 1978; Dworkin, 1974; Mitchell, 1971; Rowbotham,
1973)? Could they extend or challenge the recent work on ‘affects’? Morley (2011)
argues that the Academy’ is deeply misogynistic. The claims to authorise the canon
structures the mis/recognition of feminist knowledge. The particular irony of this for
theorising affect is obvious.
References
Berlant, L. (2003) Affirmative Critique Critical Inquiry 30 (2) 445:451 available
at@http://ww.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-inq/typewriter.html
Daly, M. (1978) Gyn/Ecology; the metaethics of radical feminism Women’s Press,
London
Dworkin, A. (1974) Woman Hating E.P. Dutton, New York Mitchell, J. (1971)
Woman’s Estate Penguin Books, London
Morley, L (2011) Misogyny Posing as Measurement: Disrupting the Feminisation
Crisis Discourse in Special Issue: Challenge, change or crisis in global higher
education? Critical Social Science 6 (2) 223-237
Rowbotham, S. (1973) Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World Penguin Books,
London
Wetherell, M. (2012) Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding Los
Angeles and London, Sage
Biography
Valerie Hey is Professor of Education within the School of Social Work and
Education, University of Sussex. She has an interest in developing a cultural
sociology of higher education drawing on her earlier work analysing the production of
intersectional forms of gendered and classed identities and antagonisms. She has
published widely in the fields of gender and education, cultural studies, sociology,
feminist theory and methodology and been recently conferred an Academician of the
Academy of the Social Sciences.
2. Leaderism in Academia: Desiring, Dismissing or Disqualified Women ?
Professor Louise Morley, CHEER, University of Sussex, UK
A powerful cultural ideology has emerged in higher education reform globally that
suggests that the essential ingredient in successful organisational transformation is that of
leadership. There are questions about who self-identifies, and is identified and authorised
by existing power elites, as having leadership legitimacy, with women having achieved
surprisingly differing rates of success in entering senior academic leadership in different
national locations (Morley, 2012). Drawing on Archer’s theory of the internal conversation
(2003), Butler’s theories of identity formation and undoing gender (2004), Fricker’s
theories of epistemic justice (2007), and Ahmed’s theories (2010) of the affective
economy, this paper engages critically with the international literature and explanatory
frameworks that have analysed women’s absences from senior academic leadership. It will
highlight the lack of attention paid to the cultural climate that constructs or depresses
aspirations and agency. Much of the global literature assumes that counting more women
into existing systems, structures and cultures is an unquestioned good. There is scant
discussion of women’s resistance or the desirability of senior leadership for academic
women in today’s managerialised, post neo-liberal and often austerity-driven global
academy.
References
Ahmed, S. (2010) The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC Duke University Press.
Archer, M. (2003) Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge: CUP.
Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender. London & New York, Routledge.
Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford, OUP.
Morley, L. (2012). "The Rules of the Game: Women and the Leaderist Turn in Higher
Education " Gender and Education. 25(1).
Biography
Louise Morley is a Professor of Education and Director of the Centre for Higher
Education and Equity Research (CHEER)
(http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer/) at the University of Sussex, UK.
Louise has an international profile in the field of the sociology of gender in
higher education studies. Her research and publication interests focus on
international higher education policy, gender, equity, micropolitics, quality,
leadership and power. She is an Academician of the Academy of Social
Sciences, a Fellow of the Society for Research into Higher Education, and a
Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Gender Excellence, University of Örebro,
Sweden.
3. Validating and supporting non-traditional student experience: Insights
from a study of lone mother HE students
Dr Tamsin Hinton-Smith, CHEER, University of Sussex, UK
This paper addresses the future for widening participation (WP), arguing that despite
acknowledging shortcomings of WP principles and practice, and changes to higher
education (HE) financing affecting WP, we should not too hastily abandon the WP
project. Instead we should focus on using insights to steer the way forward in
strengthening the WP agenda, from highlighting inequalities of access and reasons for
these, through to supporting access, and participation experience for WP students
once in higher education. This is particularly important in the context of an
increasingly global HE market in which some countries are only beginning to address
WP issues. The paper draws on data from ESRC funded longitudinal qualitative
empirical research with 79 UK HE students who were lone mothers. Insights are
supported by teaching practice through participation in post-Aimhigher university
outreach work in the form of summer school provision for prospective students from
low-income, FGS (First Generation Scholar) families. Continuing to build the
robustness of WP work is rendered both ever more challenging and essential against
the backdrop of the contemporary fees landscape. This paper argues that supporting
WP students university experience from recruitment through to successful completion
and graduate life, is underpinned by a need for serious responsibility by both the HE
sector as a whole and individual higher education institutions, that frequently entails a
shift in institutional culture to one that validates less privileged experiences including
the diversity of life trajectories, knowledges, ambitions, competing commitments,
learning styles and support needs.
Biography
Tamsin Hinton-Smith is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Sussex. Her key
research interests include issues around gender; social inclusion of marginalised
groups; equalities; and qualitative research methods. She has particular interests in
lone and teenage parents and participation in learning, training and work; and
participates actively in institutional teaching and learning development work and
widening participation outreach. Tamsin has provided research support at policy level
on issues around gender, education and equalities. Her most recent publications
include Lone parents’ experiences as higher education students: Learning to juggle
(Niace, 2012) and Issues in widening participation: Casting the net wide? (Palgrave,
2012).
4. Formations of Masculinity and Higher Education Pedagogies
Professor Penny Jane Burke, CHEER, University of Sussex, UK
Recent attention to men’s decreasing participation in higher education (HE) has
produced overly simplistic analyses that men are the new disadvantaged sex and the
‘feminization thesis’ (Leathwood and Read, 2009: 20). Men are often homogenized as
a group, posing them in a battle of the sexes and ignoring the complex ways that
masculinity intersects with other social differences, including age, class, ethnicity,
race and sexuality. Despite the moral panic that has emerged in many countries about
men’s HE participation rates compared to women’s, there has been a dearth of
research that explores the relationship between formations of masculinity and HE
pedagogies. However, some research has drawn attention to the important
interconnections between formations of masculinity and other social, generational and
cultural differences and inequalities, which profoundly shape men’s dispositions to
and experiences of learning and teaching (Archer, 2003; Burke, 2007; HEA, 2008).
This paper explores the complex formations of masculinity at play in students’ and
academics’ accounts of pedagogical experiences, relations and practices, drawing on a
major qualitative research project of gender and higher education pedagogies, funded
by the Higher Education Academy. Pedagogies are conceptualised in this paper as
constitutive of gendered formations through the discursive practices and regimes of
truth at play in particular pedagogic and disciplinary spaces (Burke, 2012). The paper
will show that pedagogies do not simply reflect the gendered identities of academics
and students but pedagogies themselves are gendered, intimately bound up with
historical and masculinized ways of being and doing within higher education.
References
Archer, L. (2003) Higher Education and Social Class: Issues of exclusion and
inclusion. RoutledgeFalmer
Burke, PJ (2012) The Right to Higher Education: Beyond widening participation.
Oxon: Routledge.
Burke, PJ (2007) ‘Men Accessing Education: Masculinities, Identifications and
Widening Participation’. British Journal of Sociology of Education. 28 (4):411 - 424.
HEA (2008) Ethnicity, Gender and Degree Attainment Project Final Report. York,
The Higher Education Academy.
Leathwood, C. and Read, B. (2009) A Feminised Future? Gender and the Changing
Face of Higher Education. London: SRHE & Open University Press
Biography
Professor Penny Jane Burke is a Professor in the School of Education and Social
Work at the University of Sussex. Penny is the founder and Director of the Paulo
Freire Institute-United Kingdom, which sits in the Centre for Higher Education and
Equity Research (CHEER). Her research focus is on access to and widening
participation in lifelong learning and higher education. Her research focuses on
identity formation and subjectivity in processes of accessing higher education and in
relation to experience, pedagogy and participation. Her new book The Right to Higher
Education: Beyond widening participation (2012) presents an overview and critique
of policy and literature on widening participation. Her other books include Accessing
Education: Effectively widening participation (2002) and Reconceptualising Lifelong
Learning:
Feminist
interventions
(with
Sue
Jackson,
2007).
5. Feminist Passions and Pedagogies: what is the future in the global
academy?
Professor Miriam David, Visiting Professor, CHEER, University of Sussex, K
In this paper, based on the interviews that I have conducted for my book (tentatively
entitled) Feminism, Gender and Universities: Passion, Pedagogies & Politics where I
have had over 100 responses from international but mainly Anglophone academics, I
will draw on some of the reflections on the second wave feminists' past involvements
in academia. In this I will look at the interweaving of the initial feminist academic
project of developing women's studies and feminist pedagogies in higher education
with their passionate engagement with a political critique of higher education. I will
also look at their reflections on their past passionate political engagement with the
questioning of the future of academia: what will their influence and academic
engagement be in the neo-liberal and global university? This is a story of academic
despondency or perhaps even despair with socio-political transformations and leads to
a questioning of where all the energies for gender equality in academia have
disappeared to. Yet is there a re-awakening though of new energies with new feminist
forms, given the changing forms of gender equality, together with diversity, in the
global academy?
References
David, M.E. (2003) Personal and Political: Feminism, Sociology & Family Lives.
Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books.
Evans M and K. Davis (2011) Transatlantic Conversations. London: Sage.
Biography
Miriam David was a professor of sociology and education at London South Bank,
Keele and the Institute of Education, London University between 1988 and 2010. She
is now a Professor Emerita of Education at IOE, and a visiting professor at CHEER in
Sussex. Her expertise has ranged over gender, families and education, including
home-school relations; to gender equity and diversity in access to and participation in
HE. She now concentrates on feminist studies of global HE.