NW 33 Gender and Education Archives

Empowering racialised women in European academia: Collaboration across borders

Across Europe, the persistent underrepresentation of racialised women in academia — understood as women positioned within racial categories through historical and social processes of racialisation that produce symbolic and material hierarchies shaping their experiences — reflects deep-seated structural inequalities rooted in colonial histories, racial hierarchies, and gendered exclusions. The project “Exploring Wellbeing and Progression Experiences among Racialised Women in Postgraduate Education” investigates how early-career researchers (ECRs) who identify as racialised women navigate these complexities within higher education institutions in England, France, Portugal, and Spain.

The project Exploring Wellbeing and Progression Experiences among Racialised Women in Postgraduate Education is supported by EERA Network 33: Gender and Education. It grew out of two related initiatives: the COST Action VOICES (CA20137, Making young researchers’ voices heard for gender equality), and the UCL-funded Global Engagement project examining the lived experiences of Black women in postgraduate education in England and France through an intersectional lens.

Building on these foundations, our project set out not only to analyse these racialised women’s experiences in academia, but also to build capacity among racialised women researchers by creating transnational spaces of exchange, reflection, and empowerment.

The project was carried out by a multidisciplinary and transnational research team, bringing together scholars with extensive expertise in gender, race, and higher education.

Professor Victoria Showunmi of University College London, UK (Team Lead)
Dr Anne-Sophie Godfroy of École Normale Supérieure – PSL, France
Dr Edna Falorca da Costa of University of Minho, Portugal
Dr Marian Blanco Ruiz of Rey Juan Carlos University, Spain.

Their collaboration exemplifies the project’s commitment to cross-border learning and to fostering inclusive research practices within European academia.

Politics, power, and post-colonial past

The project is situated within a critical political moment. Across Europe, right-wing populist movements continue to gain ground, often combining anti-gender rhetoric with nativist and xenophobic ideologies. Within this climate, racialised women scholars from former colonies face overlapping challenges – negotiating academic careers while contending with the residual power of colonial structures and the cultural expectations of “belonging” in European higher education.

“The transnational comparison across very different national contexts, more or less sensitive to reflexivity on racial inequalities, allows common patterns of exclusion and shared strategies of resistance to emerge”.

Anne-Sophie Godfroy

Researcher in France

By drawing comparisons across four post-imperial national contexts, the study explores how histories of empire continue to shape institutional cultures. Taking inspiration from Fradera’s (2018) work on the ongoing relationship between former empires and colonies, the project examines how racialised women ECRs relate to colonial/decolonial culture and how they interpret their academic identities through it.

Rethinking identity – Intersectionality as a starting point

Rather than treating race as an afterthought to gender, the study asks: how is gender itself constructed through the lived experiences of racialised women? Intersectionality — understood as an analytic framework that elucidates how multiple dimensions of identity, including but not limited to gender, race, social class, sexual orientation, and disability, intersect and mutually constitute one another — serves as the project’s principal analytical lens, drawing upon Black feminist and postcolonial theoretical traditions.

Women in higher education are not a single story; intersectionality ensures we see the full narrative. Only by acknowledging the complexity of their identities can we create truly inclusive and transformative academic spaces.

Victoria Showunmi

Lead Researcher of the project

This sentiment encapsulates the project’s central aim of linking personal experience with structural analysis.

The project’s theoretical foundation combines Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, hooks’ Black feminist critique of representation, and Mohanty’s decolonial analysis of feminism (2003), highlighting how race, gender, and history intersect in academic life. These ideas are placed in dialogue with European reflections on universalism and citizenship by Balibar (1997),Diagne (2013), and Fassa, Lepinard, and Roca Escoda (2016). This exchange exposes the gap between Europe’s universal ideals and institutional realities, where “sophisticated racism” (Showunmi & Tomlin, 2022) persists beneath claims of neutrality and meritocracy.

Voice as method – Listening, trust, and shared space

At the heart of the research were focus groups held in each country throughout 2025, bringing together 24 postgraduate participants. These sessions were designed to create safe, reflective spaces where participants could articulate their experiences and develop new ways of discussing race and discrimination. A carousel approach was adopted, where researchers travelled between the four countries and observed how national contexts shaped both academic life and the language of inclusion.

The focus groups encouraged participants to move beyond isolation and build a shared sense of solidarity. Common themes emerged: the burden of “representing diversity,” the invisibility of racialised women in leadership, and the emotional labour of navigating majority-white academic environments. Yet there was also a strong thread of resilience – participants described finding strength through community, mentorship, and shared purpose.

Collaboration as capacity building

One of the project’s most significant achievements lies in its collaborative methodology. The transnational partnership between universities in England, France, Portugal, and Spain created a dynamic platform for knowledge exchange. Each team brought distinct disciplinary perspectives and cultural insights, ensuring that the research was both locally grounded and globally relevant.

This collaborative design became a form of capacity building in itself, as the discussion sessions brought together racialised ECR women who shared a common feeling and space, highlighting their expertise and visibility within their institutions. The script had an iterative design, meaning that interesting findings from one discussion group were implemented in the next, thus developing a model that illustrates how inclusive research practices can foster personal development while promoting collective understanding.

By empowering racialised women ECRs and their allies, the project helped participants develop new tools for addressing racial and gender-based inequalities. These included:

Strategies for self-advocacy
Ways of confronting microaggressions
Approaches to mentoring that centre on empathy and inclusion.

Participants reported that these skills translated into stronger engagement in their academic and professional environments.

Strengthening the European research community

The project’s outcomes extend beyond its participants. By incorporating the lived experiences of racialised ECRs, it enriches the European research landscape with perspectives that have often been marginalised. It challenges established narratives about who “belongs” in academia and what counts as legitimate knowledge.

Moreover, the collaboration strengthens EERA’s Gender Network by expanding its focus to include racial and postcolonial dimensions of gender inequality. Through links with initiatives such as COST Action CA20137 VOICES, the project connects individual empowerment with institutional change. This alignment fosters greater coherence across European research networks committed to diversity and inclusion.

The project also offers valuable insights for policymakers and institutions. By understanding how exclusion operates differently across contexts, universities can design more effective equity measures—ensuring that diversity initiatives move beyond symbolic gestures to produce tangible outcomes.

From research to reflection

This project demonstrates how research can serve as both analysis and intervention. The collaborative process not only generated empirical findings but also built networks of trust, understanding, and shared purpose among scholars across Europe. In doing so, it illustrates how capacity building can begin with listening: by valuing the lived experiences of those at the margins, research becomes a means of collective empowerment.

The findings will continue to inform ongoing dialogue within EERA’s Gender Network and beyond. Plans are underway to develop future projects that build on this foundation, fostering intersectional and transnational approaches to inclusion in European academia.

Ultimately, this study reminds us that collaboration across borders –and across difference – is not just a research strategy, but a necessary step towards transforming academia itself.

Key Messages

– The project examines how racialised women in postgraduate education across England, France, Portugal, and Spain experience wellbeing, academic progression, and structural exclusion within higher education systems shaped by colonial legacies and intersecting inequalities. – Through a transnational comparative approach grounded in Black feminist and postcolonial theory, the study identifies common patterns of invisibility, emotional labour, and “diversity burden,” as well as shared strategies of resistance, solidarity, and identity formation. – By creating collaborative, safe spaces for dialogue, the project strengthens capacity building, amplifies marginalised voices, and provides practical tools for transforming European academic cultures toward greater inclusion and equity.

Prof. Victoria Showunmi

Institute of Education, University College London, UK

Prof. Victoria Showunmi is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies in Gender, Race and Identity at the Institute of Education (IOE), University College London (UCL). Her interests are gender, identity, and race through the lens of intersectionality, focusing on leadership and the lived experience of Black women and girls.

She develops fresh conceptual frameworks focusing on equity and social justice, especially the interplay between people and the sophistication of behaviours which lead to disengagement with the promotion of equality. Her work shows how culture and cultural background have the potential to disrupt power structures and lead to transformational change. She has an international profile based on the dissemination of her research through publication and teaching and was the recipient of BERA’s inaugural Academic Citizen of the Year award in 2023. This new award was created to honour a member of the wider academic community who has gone above and beyond in supporting colleagues and contributing to the wider discipline.

Prof. Showunmi is a member of the Gender and Education Executive, Past Chair of the British Educational Leadership Management and Administration Society, Chair of the International Studies Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Association and co-convenor of the Gender Network of the European Educational Research Association.

Dr. Anne-Sophie Godfroy

University of Paris-Est Créteil, France

Anne-Sophie Godfroy is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris-Est Créteil in France. Her research interests include knowledge production and circulation, the role of science in society, responsible research and innovation, the relationship between gender and science, international comparisons, and the epistemology and methodology of multidisciplinary contexts.

Over the past decade, she has participated in several European-funded research projects on science and society, including the HORIZON structural change projects GEnderTime and ACT.

From 2021 to 2025, she chaired the COST Action VOICES, ‘Making Young Researchers’ Voices Heard for Gender Equality’. She is currently chairing the COST Innovator Grant Next Gender, which aims to build the capacity of the next generation of researchers and evaluators to engage in inclusive sex and gender research.

Dr. Edna Costa

University of Minho, Portugal

Dr. Edna Costa is an Assistant Professor at the School of Economics, Management and Political Science at the University of Minho and an integrated researcher at the Research Centre in Political Science (CICP-UM). She holds a PhD in Political Science from NOVA-FCSH (2018), with a thesis on work-family capabilities in Portugal and Spain. Her research interests focus on gender and politics, as well as youth political participation and representation, topics on which she has published nationally and internationally. She has also participated in several projects, among which, the study on “The political participation of Portuguese youth” (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation), the COST Action “VOICES” on gender equality and early career researchers, and the SDSN-Portugal Work Group on “Meaningful Youth Engagement”.

Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2341-6482
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/edna-falorca-da-costa-b5457630

Dr. Marian Blanco-Ruiz

Rey Juan Carlos University, Spain

Dr. Marian Blanco-Ruiz is a Lecturer in Audiovisual Communication and Advertising at Rey Juan Carlos University (Spain). She holds a PhD in Media Research from Carlos III University of Madrid. Her research is grounded in feminist and gender-based approaches to media studies, with a focus on gender representations, digital and symbolic violence, and the impact of emerging technologies on youth, minors, and women’s mental health.

She has also participated in several projects, among which, is the leader of the project “The pressure of the ‘perfect mother’: the influence of digital media on women’s perception and mental health during motherhood and early childhood.” She is a member of the Core Group of the COST Action VOICES (2021–2025) and co-editor of the journal Communication and Gender.

Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7920-5978
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marianblancoruiz/

References and Further Reading

Balibar, É. (1997). Racisme et universalisme. Raison Présente, 122, 63–77. https://www.persee.fr/doc/raipr_0033-9075_1997_num_122_1_3401

Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241-1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039

Diagne, S. B. (2013). On the Postcolonial and the Universal? Rue Descartes, 78(2), 7–18. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275877851_On_the_Postcolonial_and_the_Universal

Fassa, F., Lepinard, E., & Roca Escoda, M. (2016). L’intersectionnalité: enjeux théoriques et politiques. La Dispute. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311577224_Intersectionnalite_enjeux_theoriques_et_politiques

Fradera, J. (2018). The Imperial Nation. Princeton University Press. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691167459/the-imperial-nation?srsltid=AfmBOopzeD1qDM_CvZu4YYz6yoii8HUGk1d4scxfn559XtdjxgBndK0K

hooks, b. (1981). Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315743264

Mohanty, C. T. (2003). Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smp7t

Showunmi, V. & Tomlin, C. (2022). Understanding and Managing Sophisticated and Everyday Racism. Rowman & Littlefield.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382720644_Understanding_and_Managing_Sophisticated_and_Everyday_Racism_Implications_for_Education_and_Work

We Are the Storytellers: Co-Creating Counternarratives with Black Caribbean Boys

by Keisha-Ann Stewart | NW 33 Gender and Education, NW 7 Social Justice and Intercultural Education

This blog previews the project I will present at ECER 2025, titled ‘Literature as Identity Work: Exploring Self-Discovery Through Texts’. It examines Black Caribbean male students’ experiences with the GCSE English literature curriculum in the UK, positioning literature as a space where identities are negotiated, challenged and reshaped. Through participants’ encounters with canonical texts, the study highlights literature’s dual role as a platform for personal growth, and a mechanism through which cultural exclusion is perpetuated. Rooted in Critical Race Theory (CRT) (Delgado, R. and Stefancic, J., 2023; Gillborn, 2024; Ladson-Billings, 2021) and narrative inquiry (Frank, 2012), the project uses storytelling – both textual and sonic – as a method for disseminating research, amplifying representation and showcasing resistance.

Image 1 - Infographic on Critical Race Theory

Representation, identity, and the limits of the literature curriculum

Although literature is often hailed as a window or door into other worlds and a mirror reflecting the self (Bishop, 1990), these metaphors take on new significance when curriculum texts fail to reflect the identities, cultures or lived experiences of its readers. For many Black Caribbean male students in England, the GCSE literature curriculum offers few mirrors since the reforms implemented by then Education Secretary, Michael Gove (Institute for Government, 2022; Chandler-Grevatt, 2021) have cemented a syllabus dominated by Eurocentric canonical texts, largely written by White men from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. Despite their historical and literary value, the stories and contexts frequently fail to reflect the identities, realities and voices of Black Caribbean male students, leaving many to experience the literature curriculum as something to be gazed at from the outside rather than lived from within (Elliott et al., 2021). As one participant observes, “There are other people as good as Shakespeare, with different skin colours but no one knows about them”. Such reflections reveal that, for the participants, literature transcends its status as an academic subject to become an opaque mirror, a battleground and a site for self-definition, resistance and critical identity work.

Heterotopic spaces enable open reflection on race, masculinity and belonging

Viewed through the lenses of CRT and narrative inquiry, the participants’ counter-narratives uncover the personal stakes of curriculum design suggesting that questions of literature and identity are inseparable from questions of method. In this light, my research explores how participants’ engagement with canonical works and selected twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts shapes their navigation of masculinity, race, emotion and belonging.

The study facilitates one-to-one participatory narrative interviews, situated within Foucault’s (1986) conceptualisation of heterotopic spaces — cultural, dialogic environments designed to foster open, identity-affirming reflection. In these spaces, participants are empowered to move beyond the constraints of school-based discussions to critically engage with both the texts and their evolving sense of self.

To support emotional processing and deepen participant engagement, I employ a range of multimodal activities including text rating, visual mapping and character reflection (Kress, 2010; Woolhouse, 2017).

One notable strategy involves employing emojis to enable students’ articulation of their emotional responses to texts and characters.

These methodological tools prove effective because they provide a familiar and accessible medium through which to explore affective interpretation.

Student's representations of reading journey

Sonic dissemination invites audiences to listen and engage with counter-narratives

Most significantly, the power of this study lies in the dissemination of research data. Rather than summarising student responses in researcher-authored prose, narratives are co-created using the boys’ own words as dialogue. Their speech — unpolished, reflective and often emotionally charged — remains intact. This approach allows for narrative framing without distorting the participants’ words, tone or rhythm. Also, by giving sonic life to the participants’ counter-narratives through AI voice simulation, audiences are invited not only to read the data but to listen – to hear counter-narratives in voices that echo their resonance and resistance.

Through this method of dissemination, audiences encounter young Black men speaking on their own terms, articulating nuanced understandings of masculinity, justice, diasporic belonging and the politics of hope (Freire, 2021). Sonic dissemination preserves the emotional texture of participants’ words, enacts the ethics of co-creation (Cohen, Manion and Morrison, 2017), and disrupts normative expectations of data sharing. It also reimagines dissemination as relational listening, a mode that centres empathy, embodiment and presence.

Serving as a commentary to remind us that voice is not only a methodological tool but also a political act — one that challenges the silences imposed by dominant narratives and affirms lived experience as legitimate knowledge — John, a participant, states: ‘I don’t mind people hearing what I said. I just want them to actually listen”. Consequently, my methodological choices do not merely generate data; they open space for new stories to emerge, stories that resonate within academia but also hold the potential to connect with wider audiences through accessible forms of storytelling and voice.

A co-created composite counter-narrative

In this co-created composite counter-narrative, ‘Unmasking Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, the boys reflect on themes of identity, duality and the pressures of navigating stereotypes, connecting The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to their social reality. Co-created using the participant’s direct quotes from interviews this voiced composite counter-narrative brings their perspectives and experiences to life.

Unmasking Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Students’ counter-narratives explore masculinity, identity and belonging

The composite counternarratives co-created through my research illustrate the students’ reflections on masculinity, identity, justice, racism and diasporic belonging, articulated through their negotiations with literature and wider society. The participants construct masculinity as a fluid, often contested identity, shaped by social context, cultural pressure and lived experience.

While several boys reject emotional vulnerability, critiquing characters such as Romeo (Shakespeare, 1993) as “simpish” and “unstable”, others value traits such as loyalty, self-awareness and quiet strength. Tybalt and Mercutio (Shakespeare, 1993) emerge as models of decisiveness and honour, even when their actions are rooted in violence. By contrast, texts such as Boys Don’t Cry (Blackman, 2024) enable a redefinition of masculinity grounded in emotional growth, caregiving and moral accountability.

Crucially, the students do not engage with masculinity in one uniform way; they actively interrogate what it means to be a man across diverse social and literary contexts (Connell, 1995). Through their counter-storytelling, the boys challenge hegemonic masculine norms (Connell, 1995) which positions certain performances of manhood — particularly those marked by dominance, emotional restraint and heterosexuality as ideal. Their counter-narratives (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002) therefore resist static, deficit-laden constructions of Black masculinity, providing instead complex and situated accounts of identity.

In a system that frequently frames Black Caribbean boys as disengaged or underachieving, this work foregrounds their criticality, emotional intelligence, cultural literacy and capacity for reflective resistance. The participants demonstrate cultural awareness, an understanding of their position in society as well as how they navigate and negotiate its demands. They are not disengaged; they are resisting performance of the self that feels untrue.

At its heart, this project asks educators and researchers to do something very simple but radical: listen. Because when we truly listen to marginalised students, they do more than answer our questions.

They tell us a story.

And sometimes, they rewrite it.

Key Messages

The GCSE English literature curriculum, shaped by Govian reforms, offers few mirrors for Black Caribbean boys as it prioritises Eurocentric canonical texts.
The participant’s counter-narratives reveal how literature becomes a site of struggle, identity work, and resistance against deficit views of Black masculinity.
Using multimodal and narrative methods, the study creates heterotopic spaces for boys to reflect on masculinity, race, belonging and justice.
Data is disseminated through AI-voiced sonic counter-narratives which preserve emotional texture and extend conventional research outputs by introducing new possibilities for sharing and experiencing participant voices. This approach offers a relational and participatory approach to dissemination.
The project foregrounds students’ voices as acts of resistance and hope, creating spaces where marginalised young people exercise their agency and transform narrative sites into spaces for reimagining justice, education, identity and belonging.

ECER 2025 –

As part of my ECER 2025 presentation, I will be sharing the composite counter-narrative “We Weren’t Just Reading: Reflection, Resistance, Becoming”, a co-created narrative built from the boys’ direct quotes voiced during interviews. The story explores how literature functions as a critical space for young Black men to reflect on masculinity, identity, representation and belonging whilst developing critical consciousness about the systems that shape their lives.

Through their reflections on texts such as Boys Don’t Cry, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and An Inspector Calls, the participants interrogate stereotypes, power and exclusion — questioning whose stories are centred and whose are silenced. Their voices challenge dominant narratives of disinterest and underachievement, foregrounding themes that are central to CRT. The composite counter-narrative ‘We Weren’t Just Reading: Reflection, Resistance, Becoming’ reveals that the Black Caribbean male students in my research are not merely analysing literature; they, instead, use it as a tool for self-discovery, resistance and critical reflection to create new understandings of identity, power and belonging.

Network: 07. Social Justice and Intercultural Education
Contribution ID: 1195
Title: Literature as Identity Work: Exploring Self-Discovery Through Texts
Session Title: 07 SES 02 A: Engaging Families and Alternative Educational Practices
Date & Time: 09 September 2025, 15:15 – 16:45 (CET)
Location: Room 001 | Eduka College | Ground Floor

Keisha-Ann Stewart

Edge Hill University

Keisha-Ann Stewart is a PhD researcher at Edge Hill University. Her doctoral research explores Black Caribbean male students’ experiences of literature texts studied at Key Stage 4, examining how these experiences shape their engagement, interpretation and academic responses within English classrooms in England. With a multidisciplinary background in applied linguistics, literature, publishing studies and education, Keisha-Ann’s academic interests include literacy development, anti-racist education, decolonising the curriculum, teacher education, the ethical use of artificial intelligence in education, and the integration of technology to enhance learning and pedagogy. Her work is grounded in a strong commitment to equity, inclusion and culturally responsive teaching.

ECER Belgrade 2025

Since the first ECER in 1992, the conference has grown into one of the largest annual educational research conferences in Europe. In 2025, the EERA family heads to Serbia for ECER and ERC.

08 - 09 September 2025 - Emerging Researchers' Conference
09 - 12 September 2025 - European Conference on Educational Research

Find out about fees and registration here.

Since the first ECER in 1992, the conference has grown into one of the largest annual educational research conferences in Europe. In 2025, the EERA family heads to Serbia for ECER and ERC.

In Belgrade, the conference theme is Charting the Way Forward: Education, Research, Potentials and Perspectives

No doubt that education has a central role in society, but what it is destined to do is contested politically as well as scientifically. Yet more debate is had concerning the question of the way in which educational research should shape the future of educational practice. The important, but sensitive role educational research occupies in that regard should be the promotion of a better understanding of the contemporary and future world of education, as is expressed in EERA’s aim.

Emerging Researchers' Conference - Belgrade 2025

The Emerging Researchers' Conference (ERC) precedes ECER and is organised by EERA's Emerging Researchers' Group. Emerging researchers are uniquely supported to discuss and debate topical and thought-provoking research projects in relation to the ECER themes, trends and current practices in educational research year after year. The high-quality academic presentations during the ERC are evidence of the significant participation and contributions of emerging researchers to the European educational research community.

By participating in the ERC, emerging researchers have the opportunity to engage with world class educational research and to learn the priorities and developments from notable regional and international researchers and academics. The ERC is purposefully organised to include special activities and workshops that provide emerging researchers varied opportunities for networking, creating global connections and knowledge exchange, sharing the latest groundbreaking insights on topics of their interest. Submissions to the ERC are handed in via the standard submission procedure.

Prepare yourself to be challenged, excited and inspired.

References

Bishop, R.S. 1990. ‘Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors’, Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, 6(3), pp. ix–xi.
Available at: https://scenicregional.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Mirrors-Windows-and-Sliding-Glass-Doors.pdf (Accessed: 20 August 2025).

Blackman, M. 2024. Boys don’t cry. London: Penguin

Chandler-Grevatt, A. 2021. ‘The wilderness years: An analysis of Gove’s education reforms on teacher assessment literacy’, The Buckingham Journal of Education, 2(2), pp. 149–164.
Available at: https://doi.org/10.5750/tbje.v2i1.1935 (Accessed: 18 August 2025).

Cohen, L., Manion, L. and Morrison, K. 2017. Research methods in education. 8th edn. Abingdon: Routledge.

Connell, R.W. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Delgado, R. and Stefancic, J. 2023. Critical race theory: An introduction. 4th edn. New York: New York University Press.

Elliott, V., Nelson-Addy, L., Chantiluke, R. and Courtney, M. 2021. Lit in Colour: Diversity in Literature in English Schools. London: Penguin Books UK and The Runnymede Trust.
Available at: https://litincolour.penguin.co.uk/assets/Lit-in-Colour-research-report.pdf (Accessed: 20 August 2025).

Foucault, M. 1986. ‘Of other spaces’, Diacritics, 16(1), pp. 22–27.

Freire, P. 2021. Pedagogy of hope: Reliving pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury Academic.

Frank, A. 2012. “Practicing Dialogical Narrative Analysis,” in Varieties of Narrative Analysis, pp. 33–52. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781506335117.n3 (Accessed: 20 August 2025).

Gillborn, D. 2024. White lies: Racism, education and critical race theory. London: Routledge.

Institute for Government. 2022. The Gove reforms a decade on. London: Institute for Government. Available at: https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/gove-reforms-decade-on.pdf (Accessed: 18 August 2025).

Kress, G. 2010. Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. London: Routledge.

Ladson-Billings, G. 2021. A scholar’s journey: Critical race theory and education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Shakespeare, W. 1993. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Champaign, Ill.: Project Gutenberg. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1777

(Accessed: August 20, 2025).

Solórzano, D.G. and Yosso, T.J. 2002. ‘Critical race methodology: Counter-storytelling as an analytical framework for education research’, Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), pp. 23–44.
Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/107780040200800103 (Accessed: 20 August 2025).

Stewart, K. 2025. Beyond the page: Literature as a catalyst for identity and resistance. Edge Hill University. Poster.
Available at: https://doi.org/10.25416/edgehill.29616704.v1.

Woolhouse, C. 2017. ‘Multimodal life history narrative: Embodied identity, discursive transitions and uncomfortable silences’, Narrative Inquiry, 27(1), pp. 109–131.
Available at: https://research.edgehill.ac.uk/en/publications/multimodal-life-history-narrative-embodied-identity-discursive-tr (Accessed: 20 August 2025).

How theory matters in feminist posthumanist new materialist research

by Taylor, Fairchild, Zarabadi and Moxnes | NW 13 Philosophy of Education, NW 33 Gender and Education

We are four researchers at various career stages who share an interest in how feminist posthumanist new materialisms (FPNM) matters in our research, pedagogy and lives. This blog explores what FPNM theory offers educational researchers and gives examples how we have employed this in our research.

I came to theory desperate … to comprehend- to grasp what was happening around and within me

bell hooks

Teaching to Transgress - Education as the Practice of Freedom

Feminist posthumanist new materialist theory

Educational researchers and doctoral students are expected to have and/or use a conceptual or theoretical framework. From a FPNM perspective, this presumption presents some concerns: one, concepts and theories are not pre-existing things, ‘out there’, waiting for us to ‘apply’ them to a pre-existing question or problem; and two, it tends to hide how frameworks shape, define and mould research and researchers in particular ways. However, some researchers have worked with theory as a means to disrupt and defamiliarize dominant practices and categories (Ball, 1995; Lather & Smithies, 1997; Cannella, 1997; Butler, 1990/2006). In FPNM research, theory is an emergent material, practical, political, and relational practice entailing a socially engaged and situated mode of producing knowledge (Coole & Frost, 2010). Taking inspiration from the philosophy of immanence in which concepts are ‘invented’ and continually ‘created anew’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), from posthumanist work which emphasizes the pluralization of ontology beyond the human (Braidotti, 2019; Bennett, 2016), from post-species work (Haraway, 2016), and from reconceptualizations of theory as a material-discursive practice (Barad, 2007; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), FPNM puts theory to work as a move against human-centric objective mastery. In FPNM, theory is an emergent, embodied, processual practice of knowledge-ing (Taylor, 2021) where theory always materializes in entangled acts of living-researching-becoming.

Working with theory; Living theory

Ahmed (2017) sees theory as doing more the closer it gets to the skin. FPNM theories have the potential to intersect with work in Black Studies (Sharpe 2016, McKittrick 2021), feminist Latina studies (Morega & Anzaldúa, 2021) and Indigenous and decolonising methodologies (Tuhiwai Smith, 2021). In these intersections, theory and practice intertwine with stories of land, body, pain and hope, where the materiality of theory lives in the flesh connecting past, present, futures. Thinking with Multiverse and Pluriverse suggests a range of possible realities exist simultaneously rejecting the notions of fixity and universality (Fairchild, 2023). Therefore, FPNM enhances our capacities to theory’s intimate entanglement with materiality; living FPNM theory highlights the multiplicities of the here-and-now, the past-present and the yet-to-come, encouraging researchers to consider how power and boundaries are constituted and how we may re-imagine different ways of mattering. Living theory is an ethico-onto-epistemological commitment in FPNM research, it informs and is immanent to everything we do, prompting us to question: ‘Who has the power to bring/use/talk about theory’, ‘What theory might become and do after white western humanism?’ ‘How might theory move to attend to new modes of living, doing and knowing?’

Shiva: Materialising the lived experiences of racial harassment

Lived theory in my forthcoming article emerged with hair/her stories of British-Bangladeshi Muslim schoolgirls of my research (Zarabadi, forthcoming 2024). In this article, I focus on the assemblages that hair affectively enables or constrains and the new and different relations that hair produces. I explore material moments when boundaries between human and more-than-human bodies, stories and experiences fade and ‘hairy assemblages’ of pain, injustice, resistance and hope emerged. With posthumanising hair and hair/her stories, I think with hair as lived theory and method, not only to matter with what matters for Muslim schoolgirls, but also to relocate the analytical frame of thinking and researching educational environments and practices towards multiple and untracked material experiences (Zarabadi 2022). Hair as affective agential actants in life stories of Muslim schoolgirls can enable or constrain their bodies and everyday educational embodied and embedded lived experiences into different ‘racialising assemblages’ (Weheliye, 2014). Entangling with hair/her stories as lived theory is a response to Hartman’s call “to tell a story capable of engaging and countering the violence of abstraction” (2008, p. 7).

Anna: Reading, thinking, doing, articulating theory

“Overwhelmingly, theory is bodily, and theory is literal. Theory is not about matters distant from the lived body; quite the opposite”, writes Haraway (2004, p. 68). A particular day in my teaching career awakened awareness for how bodily theories can be. When doing theories in teaching, we, student-teachers and myself, were reading and discussing materiality. Nyhus (2013) writes about how much time young children spend tied up in chairs, waiting. To challenge the student teachers’ relations to theories about materiality, I fastened the bodies of the student-teachers loosely to their chairs with ropes. Before fastening each one, I asked for permission. Those who were not attached volunteered to help untangle their fellow students, if needed. With the student-teachers consent to remain sitting tied in this way, unable to touch each other and their things, I continued with a short lecture. Our bodily affects and reactions created many discussions about ethics and professional practice, and became something the student-teachers referred to when discussing other theoretical aspects regarding practices with young children later on. Both bodies and language is “the effect of articulation” (Haraway, 2004, p. 105), and through the session theory became articulated bodily.

Nikki: The spaces of theory

Space as living theory requires an attention to materiality and time; space is created and modified by techniques, material objects, historical happenings, and social production (Santos, 2021). Living theories call for educators to be aware of their role in the constant transformation of space and how techniques materialise the political nature of learning. Pedagogies of mattering in higher education open up spaces of possibility for students to co-construct reading lists and lecture content and support the redesign of curriculum and assessment. Paying attention to classroom environments considers how power materialises in/as inclusion or exclusion (Gravett et al., 2021; Fairchild et al., 2024). Taking students on field trips can help them understand the challenges of accessing outdoor environments and support them to connect this to their developing education practices (Fairchild, 2021). These examples focus on the power of spaces and how attention to materiality produces new possibilities for thinking otherwise. Space, place and time are contingent and pedagogical, opening up opportunities for students/educators to create their own praxis.

Carol: Living theory with objects-bodies-spaces

Thing theory (Bennett, 2010) enacts the ontological presumption that things are not inert, dead and passive but are ‘vibrant matter’ with agentic capacities. Things’ liveliness produces actions, affects and interventions, and things also act in congregation with other objects, humans, animals, atmospheres, the weather etc. Focusing on things in classrooms brings to the fore the material agency of mundane, everyday objects’ and how their entanglement in educational practices produces inequalities, exclusions and differential matterings. For example, I analysed gender and power via the liveliness of a chair, a pen, a whiteboard and a T-shirt (Taylor, 2013), classroom exclusions and tables (Taylor, 2017), and bags and string to reconceptualize participation and feminist praxis in research (Taylor et al., 2019; Taylor 2022a). Recently, I have developed ‘posthuman object pedagogies’ as a research practice of ‘thinking with things as a means of thinking with theory’ (Taylor et al., 2022b, p. 206), and used arts-based approaches to consider what doors do as barriers and enablers in educational spaces (Taylor et al., 2023).

Living theory for better futures

A passionate question animates how we four work with, and embody, the living theory of FPNM: ‘What sorts of knowledges and knowledge-making practices in educational research do we need to produce different modes of being-knowing-doing so we can resist anthropocentric modes of research based in extractivism and exploitation?’ Living FPNM theory is concerned with ways to live, think, research, work, and care in relation with other human-nonhuman bodies, things, environments, and planetary systems. Living FPNM theory is a research praxis aimed at producing more curiosity, more attentiveness, more relationality, more kindness: it entangles us materially in human-nonhuman lifeworlds that affects us making us feel something. It changes the way we think, creating a more capacious, inclusive and affirmative sense of what educational research can be and what education can become.

Notes: The figures in this blog have been composed of from images we have used in our work, apart from one of these images which was taken from Vogue Mexico: The Climbing Cholitas, 2019, Directed by Yumna Al-Arashi, https://vimeo.com/367077642 Accessed 1 May 2024.

Key Messages

• To conceptualize theory as an emergent material, practical, political, and relational practice entailing a socially engaged and situated mode of producing knowledge.

• To re-think our ethico-onto-epistemological practices as an embodied mode of living theory emergent in and through response-able acts of living-researching-becoming.

• To consider about how feminist posthumanist new materialist (FPNM) theory enables us to move and attend to new modes of living, doing, teaching, researching and knowing.

• We suggest that working with theory/ living theory changes not only the way we think, but creates a more capacious, inclusive and affirmative sense of what educational research can be and what education can become.

Professor Carol A. Taylor

Professor of Higher Education and Gender in the Department of Education, University of Bath

Professor Carol A. Taylor is Professor of Higher Education and Gender in the Department of Education at the University of Bath where she leads the Reimagining Education for Better Futures research group. Carol’s research focuses on the entangled relations of knowledge, power, gender, space and ethics in higher education and utilizes trans- and interdisciplinary posthumanist and feminist materialist theories and methodologies. Carol co-edited the journal Gender and Education for 7 years (2016-2023), and currently serves on the Editorial Boards of Teaching in Higher Education, Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning and Journal of Posthumanism. Her latest books are J. B. Ulmer, C. Hughes, M. Salazar Pérez & C. A. Taylor (Eds.). (2024) The Routledge International Handbook of Transdisciplinary Feminist Research and Methodological Praxis; Fairchild, N., Taylor, C.A., Benozzo, A., Carey, N., Koro, M., & Elmenhorst, C. (2022). Knowledge Production in Material Spaces: Disturbing Conferences and Composing Events. London: Routledge; and Taylor, C. A. and Bayley, A. (Eds.) (2019) Posthumanism and Higher Education: Reimagining Pedagogy, Practice and Research. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Dr Nikki Fairchild

Associate Professor in Creative Methodologies and Education at the School of Education, Languages and Linguistics, University of Portsmouth.

Dr Nikki Fairchild is an Associate Professor in Creative Methodologies and Education at the School of Education, Languages and Linguistics, University of Portsmouth. Her research is theoretically informed by critical feminist materialist, posthumanist, and agential realist theory. She employs creative methodologies to disturb knowledge production and relationality by entangling materiality, gender, place-spaces, time, temporality and (early) childhoods. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Posthumanism and on the Editorial Boards of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Norland Educate Research Journal, and Gender and Education. Her latest book is Fairchild, N., Taylor, C.A., Benozzo, A., Carey, N., Koro, M., & Elmenhorst, C. (2022). Knowledge Production in Material Spaces: Disturbing Conferences and Composing Events. Routledge.

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Dr Anna Moxnes

Associate Professor, Department of Early Childhood Teacher Education (ECTE), University of South-Eastern Norway

Anna Rigmor Moxnes, PhD, is Associate Professor at the department of Early Childhood Teacher Education (ECTE), University of South-Eastern Norway and works as educator in pedagogy and mentoring. Her recent research-projects are ‘Children and animals relationships’, ‘Mentoring’ and ‘Teaching slowly’. She is inspired of feminist new materialism and post-human theories.

Her latest book is Moxnes, A.R., Wilhemsen, T., Øvreås, S.,Santan, M.O. & Aslanian T.K. (2022).

Barnehagelærerutdanning i endring – å forske på egen praksis i høyere utdanning.

[Early Childhood Teacher Education in Change - research on own practice in higher education].

Universitetsforlaget.

Dr Shiva Zarabadi

Dr Shiva Zarabadi holds a Ph.D. in Education, Gender, Feminist New Materialism and Posthumanism from UCL Institute of Education. Her research interests include feminist new materialism, posthumanism and intra-actions of matter, time, affect, space, humans and more-than-humans. She uses walking and photo-diary methodologies to map relational materialities in ordinary practices. She is the co-editor of the book Towards Posthumanism in Education: Theoretical Entanglements and Pedagogical Mappings (Routledge) and the author of ‘Bodies of Walking: Trans-Materializing the Experiences of Racial Harassment’ in Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies and ‘Watery assemblages: the affective and material swimming-becomings of a Muslim girl’s queer body with nature’ in Australian Journal of Environmental Education.

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References and Further Reading

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press.

Ball. S. J. (1995). Intellectuals or Technicians? The Urgent Role of Theory in Educational Studies. British Journal of Educational Studies, 43(3), 255-271. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3121983

Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. London: Duke University Press.

Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman Knowledge. Polity Press.

Butler, J. (1990/2006). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge.

Cannella, G. S. (1997). Deconstructing Early Childhood Education: Social Justice and Revolution. Peter Lang Publishing.

Coole, D., & Frost, S. (2010). New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? Verso Books.

Fairchild, N. (2021) Pedagogies of place-spaces: walking-with the post-professional, PRACTICE [online first]. https://doi.org/10.1080/25783858.2021.1968279

Fairchild, N. (2023). Multiverse, Feminist Materialist Relational Time, and Multiple Future(s): (Re)configuring Possibilities for Qualitative Inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry [online first]. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004231176753

Fairchild, N., Gravett, K., & Taylor, C. A. (2024). Pedagogies of Mattering in Higher Education: thinking-with posthumanist and feminist materialist theory-praxis. In J. Bustillos Morales & S. Zarabadi (Eds.), Towards Posthumanism in Education: Theoretical Entanglements and Pedagogical Tracings (pp. 123-136). Routledge.

Gravett, K., Taylor, C. A., & Fairchild, N. (2021). Pedagogies of mattering: re-conceptualising relational pedagogies in higher education. Teaching in Higher Education [online first]. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.1989580

Haraway, D. J. (2004). The Haraway reader. Routledge.

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 12(2), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching To Transgress (1st ed.). Routledge.

Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. (2012). Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data Across Multiple Perspectives. Routledge.

Lather P.A., & Smithies, C. S. (1997). Troubling The Angels: Women Living With HIV/aids. Routledge.

McKittrick, K. (2021). Dear Science and Other Stories. Duke University Press.

Morega, C., & Anzaldúa, G. (2021). This bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color. 40^th anniversary edition. SUNY Press.

Nyhus, M. R. (2013). Ventebølger. Venting og de yngste barnas rom for medvirkning i barnehagen. [Waiting-waves. Waiting and the youngest childrens room for participating in Kindergarten.] Fagbokforlaget.

Santos, M. (2021). The nature of space. Duke University Press.

Sharpe, C. (2016) In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press.

Taylor, C. A. (2013). Objects, bodies and space: Gender and embodied practices of mattering in the classroom, Gender and Education, 25(6), 688–703. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2013.834864

Taylor, C. A. (2017). Rethinking the empirical in higher education. International Journal of Research and Method in Education, 40(3), 311–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2016.1256984

Taylor, C. A. (2018). Edu-crafting posthumanist adventures in/for higher education: A speculative musing, Parallax, 24(3), 371-381. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2018.1496585

Taylor, C., Fairchild, N., Elmenhorst, C., Koro-Ljungberg, M., Benozzo, A., & Carey, N. (2019). Improvising Bags Choreographies: Disturbing Normative Ways of Doing Research. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(1), 17-25. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418767210

Taylor, C. A. (2021). Knowledge matters: Five propositions concerning the reconceptualisation of knowledge in feminist new materialist, posthumanist and postqualitative approaches. In K. Murris (Ed.) Navigating the Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Terrain Across Disciplines: An Introductory Guide. Routledge.

Taylor, C. A., Tobias-Green, K., Sexton, J., & Healey, J. (2022a). Regarding string: A theory-method-praxis of/for co-compos(t)ing feminist hope. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology. 13(2), 47-73. https://doi.org/10.7577/rerm.4910

Taylor, C. A., Hogarth, H., Barratt Hacking, E., & Bastos, E. (2022b). Posthuman Object Pedagogies: Thinking with Things to Think with Theory for Innovative Educational Research, Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry. 14(1), 206–221. https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/cpi/index.php/cpi/article/view/29662/21668

Taylor, C. A., Albin-Clarke, J., Broadhurst Healey, K., Hogarth, H., Lewis, Z., Pihkala, S., Smith, S., Cranham, J., Latto, L. (2023). What do doors do? Door storyings, matterings, adventurings and commonings. Qualitative Inquiry[online first]. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004231196184

Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2nd Ed). Zed Books Ltd.

Weheliye, A. G. (2014). Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke University Press.

Zarabadi, S. (2022). Watery assemblages: The affective and material swimming-becomings of a Muslim girl’s queer body with nature. Australian Journal of Environmental Education 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1017/aee.2022.39

Zarabadi, S. (Forthcoming 2024). ‘Hair-ing and haring: Post (auto) theoretical more-than-human entanglement with hair/her/stories of Muslim schoolgirls’, Gender and Education SI: Gender, Feminisms and the ‘Posts’: Contemporary Contestations, New Educational Imaginaries & Hope-full Renewals.

Gender and attainment in Northern Ireland: How can we understand the division?

by Erin Early | NW 33 Gender and Education

Post-primary attainment is commonly measured through GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) examinations which are completed in the final year of compulsory schooling in the UK at age 16. The GCSE attainment outcomes of pupils are annually reported in Northern Ireland by the Department of Education. They are presented according to school type (grammar schools which select pupils based on their academic ability on an entrance test (also known as the transfer test) or non-grammar schools which are not academically selective in their intake of pupils), socio-economic status (Free School Meal Eligibility) and gender. The gendered division in educational attainment in Northern Ireland continually receives policy attention, most recently from the Expert Panel on Educational Underachievement in Northern Ireland. This leaves the questions: what is the gender attainment divide, and how can we understand it?

What is the gender attainment divide?

Gender is an important determinant of attainment differences across the compulsory education system in the UK. Studies report the consistently higher performance of female pupils compared to males (Adcock et al., 2016; Department for Education, 2020; Cavaglia et al., 2020; Francis and Skelton, 2005; Gorard et al., 2001; Melhuish et al., 2013; Tinklin et al., 2001).

Northern Ireland reflects a similar trend to the rest of the UK, with females achieving higher GCSE attainment than males (Borooah and Knox, 2017; Department of Education, 2019; Gallagher and Smith, 2000; Shuttleworth, 1995). Most recently, in a newly published study we used a dataset in Northern Ireland that linked the 2011 Census with the School Leavers Survey and School Census for the first time.

The study explored how a pupil’s gender, religious affiliation, socio-economic status (measured by mothers’ and fathers’ education qualifications and occupational status, Free School Meal Eligibility, home ownership, property value, and the 2010 Northern Ireland Multiple Deprivation Measure for income) and attended school (grammar or non-grammar) influenced their GCSE attainment.

We found that females had higher educational attainment as they achieved higher GCSE scores than males. The gendered effect on GCSE attainment was the joint second greatest effect (with mothers’ education) in our study. Although the gendered division of attainment outcomes is likely to emerge at an earlier stage of the compulsory education system in Northern Ireland, this is not possible to explore as there are no available individual-level attainment data prior to GCSE. Despite this limitation in the Northern Ireland context, an attainment difference according to gender is clear, which leaves the question: how can we understand this gendered divide?

How can we understand the gendered attainment divide?

An interdisciplinary framework consisting of Bourdieu’s theory of practice and Tajfel and Turner’s social identity theorycan help our understanding of the gendered attainment divide.

Bourdieu’s (1986, 1984) writings predominantly focus on social status and how position affects an individual’s ability within the education system. His work on habitus, which can also be described as an individual’s dispositions or character, is relevant to understanding the gendered attainment division. Social identity theory developed by Tajfel and Turner (1979) can also aid our understanding of the gendered division in attainment as it outlines the process an individual is exposed to when forming an identity based on characteristics such as gender.

Habitus refers to an individual’s dispositions or character which organise and affect how they perceive the social world. Habitus reflects a degree of fluidity as it can change according to context, time and the social identity of an individual based on characteristics such as their gender. Habitus is therefore connected to social identity theory in a cyclical process where an individual’s identity influences their habitus, and vice versa.

Tajfel (1972) suggested that social identity was a result of the socialisation process, which provides an individual with the ability to identify with social groups they have a common characteristic with (for example, gender). The social identity process can result in individuals internalising behaviours associated with their gender, which can alter their habitus. This process, coupled with potential gendered socialisation experiences, could heighten habitus differences between males and females in settings such as schools. For example, an individual’s gendered identity and habitus may influence academic attitudes and expectations based on the norms and values of the affiliated social group, all of which can influence educational attainment and lead to a gendered division.

We must acknowledge that the cyclical process between habitus and social identity is not straightforward as more than one male and female social identity exists. For example, studies have reported multiple male social identities (also termed as masculinity) in educational settings (Connolly, 2006, 2004; Lyng, 2009; Travers, 2017). Lyng (2009)identified various masculinity types in schools, such as macho, geek, golden boy, and nerd. It could be argued that each of these identities has a varying influence on an individual’s habitus, which ultimately affects their educational attainment. For example, the identity of macho may have a greater negative influence on educational attainment compared to the identity of geek, which reflects a greater attachment to school. Femininity identities are also important to consider but are under-researched (Lyng, 2009).

Key Messages

A gendered attainment divide remains in Northern Ireland (and the wider UK).
Gender remains a key factor driving educational attainment differences between pupils (Early et al., 2022).
A dual framework of Bourdieu’s theory of practice, more specifically the concept of habitus, and Tajfel and Turner’s social identity theory can help our understanding of why a gendered attainment divide persists.
The social identity process can lead to individuals internalising behaviours associated with their gender, which can alter their habitus and affect their educational attainment outcomes.

References and Further Reading

Adcock, A., Bolton, P. and Abreu, L. (2016). Educational performance of boys. London: House of Commons. Available at: https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/27199/1/CDP-2016-0151.pdf

Borooah, V.K. and Knox, C. (2017). Inequality, segregation and poor performance: the education system in Northern Ireland. Educational Review, 69(3), pp.318-336. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2016.1213225

Bourdieu, P. (1986). ‘The forms of capital’, in Richardson, J. (ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Westport: Greenwood, pp. 241-258.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste (translated by Richard Nice). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Calvaglia, C., Machin, S., McNally, S. and Ruiz-Valenzuela, J. (2020). Gender, achievement, and subject choice in English education. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 36(4), pp.816-835. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/graa050

Connolly, P. (2004). Boys and Schooling in the Early Years. London: Routledge Falmer.

Connolly, P. (2006). The effects of social class and ethnicity on gender differences in GCSE attainment: a secondary analysis of the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales 1997-2001. British Educational Research Journal, 32(1), pp.3-21. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920500401963

Department for Education (2020). Key stage 4 performance, 2019 (revised). Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/863815/2019_KS4_revised_text.pdf

Department of Education (2019). Year 12 and Year 14 Examination Performance at Post-Primary Schools in Northern Ireland 2018-19. Available at: https://www.education-ni.gov.uk/sites/default/files/publications/education/Revised%20-%20Year%2012%20and%20Year%2014%20Examination%20Performance%20at%20Post%20Primary%20schools%20in%20Northern%20Ireland%202018_19%20_%20Revised.pdf

Early, E., Miller, S., Dunne, L. and Moriarty, J. (2022). The Influence of Socio-Demographics and School Factors on GCSE Attainment: Results from the First Record Linkage Data in Northern Ireland. Oxford Review of Education (forthcoming). doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2022.2035340

Francis, B. and Skelton, C. (2005). Reassessing Gender and Achievement: Questioning contemporary key debates. London: Routledge.

Gallagher, T. and Smith, A. (2000). The effects of the selective system of secondary education in Northern Ireland. Bangor: Department of Education. Available at: https://www.ulster.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/223409/2000_The_Effects_Of_The_Selective_System_Of_Secondary_Education_In_Northern_Ireland_Main_Report.pdf

Gorard, S., Rees, G., and Salisbury, J. (2001). Investigating patterns of differential attainment of boys and girls at school. British Educational Research Journal, 27(2), pp.125-139. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920120037090

Islam, G. (2014). Social Identity Theory, in Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology, (ed. Teo, T.), pp. 1781-1783. New York: Springer. doi: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gazi-Islam-2/publication/281208338_Social_Identity_Theory/links/55db57ec08ae9d6594935f59/Social-Identity-Theory.pdf

Lyng, S.T. (2009). Is there more to “antischoolishness” than masculinity? On multiple student styles, gender and educational self-exclusion in secondary school. Men and Masculinities. 11(4), pp.462-487. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X06298780

Melhuish, E., Quinn. L., Sylva, K., Sammons, P., Siraj-Blatchford, I. and Taggart, B.(2013). Preschool affects longer term literacy and numeracy: results from a general population longitudinal study in Northern Ireland. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 24(2), pp.234-250. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/09243453.2012.749796

Power, E.M. (1999). An introduction to Pierre Bourdieu’s Key Theoretical Concepts. Journal for the Study of Food and Society. 3(1), pp.48-52. doi: https://doi.org/10.2752/152897999786690753

Shuttleworth, I. (1995) The Relationship between Social Deprivation, as Measured by Individual Free School Meal Eligibility, and Educational Attainment at GCSE in Northern Ireland: a preliminary investigation. British Educational Research Journal, 21(4), pp.487–504. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1501372

Tajfel, H. (1972). ‘Social categorization (English manuscript of ‘La categorisation Sociale’)’, in Moscovici, S. (ed). Introduction à la psychologie sociale (vol. 1). Paris: Larousse, pp. 272-302.

Tajfel, H. and Turner, J.C. (1979). ‘An integrative theory of inter-group conflict’, in Austin, W.G. and Worchel, S. (eds.) The social psychology of inter-group relations. Belmont: Wadsworth, pp.33-47.

Tinklin, T., Croxford, L., Ducklin, A. and Frame, B. (2001). Gender and Pupil Performance in Scotland’s Schools. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh. Available at: https://www.ces.ed.ac.uk/old_site/PDF%20Files/Gender_Report.pdf

Travers, M.C. (2017). White working-class boys: teachers matter. London: UCL Institute of Education Press.

The Promise of Donna Haraway’s Philosophy: Knotting Together Better Educational Futures

by Taylor, Fairchild, Zarabadi and Moxnes | Emerging Researchers' Group, NW 13 Philosophy of Education, NW 33 Gender and Education

As we have grappled with critical questions in our research and teaching, all of us contributing to this blog have been energised by Donna Haraway’s work. This blog explores the promise of Haraway’s philosophy for knowledge, learning and education. Donna Haraway’s philosophy offers conceptual and practical resources for navigating the complexities of contemporary educational problems.

Reconceptualising knowledge, learning and education with Donna Haraway

Haraway’s major early intervention was to challenge traditional notions of objectivity – which she called ‘the God trick’ (Haraway, 1988). She argued that objectivity was a Western masculinist, patriarchal tradition, which presumed researchers could be impartial, observe and produce ‘Truth’. This damaging fallacy has conferred epistemological status on science delegitimizing many other ways of knowing. Haraway opposes ‘the God trick’ with the concept and practice of ‘situated knowledges’ which pose a feminist critique demonstrating that knowledge practices are ‘political’ and that some knowledges have been (illegitimately) disqualified by dominant science. Recognising that all knowledge is located and relies on partial perspectives allows for the inclusion of lived material realities and feelings that shape our educational experiences.

The concept and practice of learning is central to Haraway’s oeuvre. Learning happens in the world, attending to our being-in-relation with the world and other species. Learning is an enactment: she calls it a ‘corporeal cognitive practice’ (Haraway, 2016a: 277), a material semiotic co-composition of relational acts of thinking and doing. Learning comes about through specific, mundane, embodied acts of communication that forge partial connections across the differences (of race, class, geography or species) that divide us.

Haraway’s philosophy, and its promise for education, demonstrates the need to move beyond human exceptionalism. It is an urgent call for us to take responsibility for how humans have produced alarming natural-cultural conditions, and to take action to address these. The task of shaping better human/planetary futures has been recognised as core to education as an ethical-political project (Strand, 2020). Haraway’s philosophy offers an affirmative biopolitics that can be useful in extending curricula on global education (Barratt Hacking and Taylor, 2020). Her transdisciplinary thinking, feminist situated ethics, and situated politics of knowledge might be the basis for renewing educational approaches for composing more relational futures.

How has Haraway’s philosophy been influential in our research?

Carol has taken up Haraway’s philosophy outlined in When Species Meet (2008) to rethink what comes to matter in educational relations. Her work addresses the question: How can multispecies knowings and matterings give us hope to build a better world for the future? Haraway (2008: 134) uses multispecies thinking to argue for ‘compassionate action’ to promote well-being for individuals, species and communities. Carol has considered how such thinking can be the foundation for different forms of educative flourishing by fashioning education as a form of posthuman Bildung that bring new possibilities for knowledge/praxis (Taylor, 2016). Carol has also considered how nonhuman-human relations can centre around play and pleasure in ways which make consequential differences in our lives as academics (Taylor, 2017).

Nikki (Fairchild, 2017) has drawn on The Cyborg Manifesto (1991) to reconceptualise young children’s gender identities. Haraway uses the cyborg both as figuration and ontological position to explore the breakdown and fluidity of technological, natural and cultural bodily boundaries. Nikki’s research shows how the cyborg figuration ‘moves beyond traditional notions of the feminine body’ (Benozzo et al., 2019: 89). Her doctoral thesis considered how girls are expected to perform and act in certain ways (Fairchild, 2017) and how the cyborg can ‘produce[s] new articulations of gender at the same time as making traditional gendered societal roles ‘available’’ (Taylor & Fairchild, 2020: 520). The cyborg subverts gender and provides new political possibilities for women.

In Staying with the Trouble, Haraway posits ‘lived storying’ (2016b: 150) as ‘the most powerful practice for… becoming-with each other’. Shiva has written of co-storytelling as a way of making-together, co-theorizing and co-enduring (Niccolini, Zarabadi & Ringrose, 2018). Lived storying foregrounds the care-full response-ability required when researching participants’ experiences. Towards the end of her PhD thesis writing, the COVID pandemic put the world into multiple lockdowns and made racism intelligible in new ways. Shiva’s PhD participants are from British Bangladeshi backgrounds, they live in overcrowded households and, like other BAME populations, suffer disproportionate social and educational inequalities (Booth, 2020). Their COVID storyings speak of histories of exclusion, troubled times and uncertain futures.

‘No adventurer should leave home without a sack’ writes Haraway (2016b: 40) in Staying with the Trouble. Haraway learned about the carrier bag theory of storytelling from Ursula Le Guin (1989). During her PhD, Anna experimented with a Bag-lady positionality (Moxnes, 2019), figuring herself as an (elderly) woman collecting whatever she found carrying everything with her in bags. For Anna, the carrier bag theory became a story of research, a methodological and methodic concept, a feminist force enabling her to do research differently. Carrier bag research provides a compass ‘to think otherwise’ – it changes our understandings of the world we live in and how we make meaning about it.

In our work together, Haraway’s philosophy gives us the courage to find philosophical and practical ways of troubling dominant educational thinking, research and writing (Zarabadi et al., 2019). Haraway’s philosophy informs our collaborative research experiments in theory, method and practice enabling us to continue to think of new ways to produce academic knowledge differently.

Some Final Thoughts

Haraway’s books are not easy, but they repay the focus, immersion and concentration needed. Haraway makes you think about how you can do research and teaching differently and in more creative ways. Her writing is an encouragement to slow down, ponder, not rush to action too quickly, and to focus on details and specificities. She offers intellectual resources to contest neoliberal imperatives of competitive individualism, performativity and measurement. Haraway’s philosophy provides a stimulus to new, creative, experimental ways of producing knowledge; her generative, ecological, life-affirming thinking offers important insights for reshaping educational thinking to contest the damages of the Anthropocene.

Citations and Further Reading

Biography of Donna Haraway

Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective – Haraway, 1988

Situated Knowledges – Monika Rogowska-Stangret

Manifestly Haraway – Haraway, 2016

Rethinking Ethical-Political Education – Strand, Torill

Reconceptualizing international mindedness in and for a posthuman world – Barratt Hacking and Taylor, 2020

When Species Meet – Haraway, 2008

Is a posthumanist Bildung possible? Reclaiming the promise of Bildung for contemporary higher education – Taylor, 2016

Producing Pleasure in the Contemporary University – Taylor, 2017

Earthworm disturbances: the reimagining of relations in Early Childhood Education and Care – Fairchild, 2017

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (The Cyborg Manifesto) – Haraway, 1991

Disturbing the AcademicConferenceMachine: Post‐qualitative re‐turnings – Benozzo et al., 2019: 89

Towards a posthumanist institutional ethnography: viscous matterings and gendered bodies – Taylor and Fairchild, 2020

Staying with the Trouble – Haraway, 2016

Spinning Yarns: Affective Kinshipping as Posthuman Pedagogy – Niccolini, Zarabadi & Ringrose, 2018

BAME groups hit harder by Covid-19 than white people, UK study suggests

Dancing at the Edge of the World – Ursula Le Guin

Working Across/Within/Through Academic Conventions of Writing a Ph.D.: Stories About Writing a Feminist Thesis – Moxnes, 2019

Feeling Medusa: Tentacular Troubling of Academic Positionality, Recognition and Respectability – Zarabadi et al., 2019