This paper critically engages with the social and cultural remaking of Northern Irish Protestant boys within education, challenging their pervasive media image as a regressive, homogenous group. It argues against the epistemological assumption that their behaviour is exclusively shaped by a religiously-inflected ethno-nationalism. Utilizing a critical men's studies framework, the analysis contests state-led containment policies and the consequent narrowing of gender possibilities. Rather, adopting a post-masculinity position, it proposes the underachieving Protestant working-class boy as a critical figure. This lens facilitates an explanatory shift from a simplistic focus on religious difference (the past) toward understanding how identities are simultaneously reframed through boyness (the pedagogical future). Education is thus a vital space for analysing this remaking through a simultaneity of differences - including class, generation and internal belonging - within complex modalities of power.
This study examines how 40 Palestinian-Arab women pursuing master's degrees in education negotiate intersecting structures shaping their lives as minoritized, gendered subjects. Using Photovoice and focus groups, the research analyzes how participants articulate experiences across overlapping roles - Palestinian-Arab, mothers, teachers, students - within sociopolitical conditions marked by patriarchy, inequality, and linguistic domination. Photovoice enabled visual and narrative expressions of tension, agency, and subtle resistance beyond traditional qualitative tools. Guided by an intersectional feminist framework, the study shows how gendered expectations, ethnic marginalization, and linguistic hierarchies generate emotional, academic, and economic pressures. The findings reveal obstacles including time constraints, linguistic exclusion in Hebrew-dominant spaces, and conditional family support rooted in patriarchal bargains. Yet participants mobilized strategies, relational support, time management, and strategic conformity to sustain their studies. The study advances feminist debates on minority women's educational trajectories and underscores the need for institutions to address structural and sociocultural barriers.
Drawing on video data collected by newly arrived migrant children in a Finnish primary school, this article explores how children's practices of gender are enmeshed in site-specific arrangements that enable or constrain their access to certain places and activities at the school playground. Combining feminist theories with theories of practice, we show how children's participation in play is shaped by a combination of intersecting social categories based on linguistic capital, length of stay in Finland, and most notably, gender. However, these categories and the relatings between them are not fixed nor determined. Focusing our attention on two 'hotspots' of the playground, a swing and a basketball court, this article suggests that a practice lens can reveal the fluidity and dynamism of these shifting relations of power in the moment-by-moment happeningness of children's play. Rendering visible the discursive, material and social arrangements that orchestrate children's playground practices opens possibilities to disrupt existing power relations and imagine different ways of relating.
This study traces how sex educators learn to inhabit professionalism through sexlective disembodiment- a process of withdrawing their sexual selves from the classroom context, while simultaneously positioning gender as the sanctioned expression of educator selfhood. Drawing on body-maps created during a community-based training program in Vancouver, Canada, the analysis examines how professional legitimacy is learned through bodily regulation across private, threshold, and public spaces. The findings show that sexlective disembodiment is a practiced way of being, shaped by the field's histories of scrutiny and survival. In this context, gender presentation becomes both a shield and an expectation, translating sex educators' sexuality into composure, care, and trust. Yet within these limits, traces of the sexual body remain - sparkles, braids, capes, and unicorns - marking what is still held and reimagined. Reading sexlective disembodiment as pedagogy reframes professionalism as an embodied negotiation of credibility, boundaries, and presence.
This article is a focused analysis of one participant's written reflections on what it means to be a cis-gender gay man on teaching placement in an Aotearoa New Zealand primary school. Sara Ahmed's queering of phenomenology is a powerful activation of theory offering the possibility of critical, interpretative insight into queer experience within teacher education. We demonstrate how Ahmed's queer phenomenology might generate depth in understanding of the spatial, affective and embodied dimensions of queer student teaching experience in practicum. We show that, in Aotearoa New Zealand, heteronormativity continues to play a significant role in the experiences of LGBTQ+ student teachers. Importantly, we find queer student teachers draw on capacities of resistance in order to enact and anticipate 'liveability' in school spaces.
This paper focuses on LGBTQ+ carers in UK universities and explores how policy problems become personalized. While equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) policies increasingly anticipate LGBTQ+ presence, they often individualize systemic issues. Recognition in care policy may offer symbolic visibility, yet interviewees are routinely expected to embody and enact care themselves - absorbing institutional responsibilities informally and at personal cost. Workers are positioned as 'caring people' who stand in for policy, even as their own diverse care responsibilities - often outside heteronormative, child-focused models - are sidelined. Individuals become the evidence of institutional care, masking policy failure and reinforcing the very inequalities such frameworks claim to address. This cycle exemplifies how liberal policy solutions obscure structural injustice by relying on personal goodwill in 'understanding' line managers, or the 'passionate', caring queer worker. Interrupting the personalization of policy is essential to addressing the enduring gaps between institutional intention and lived inequality.
Harassment in academia continues to be a severe problem in the Netherlands. To address it, Dutch universities established a complaint infrastructure through the appointment of three key practitioners: confidential advisors, ombudspersons, and complaints committees. Their role is to handle complaints, investigate potential wrongdoing, and propose possible solutions. On the basis of 24 individual interviews, involving 11 confidential advisors, 12 ombudspersons, and 2 members of complaints committees, this study examines the everyday work experiences of the three practitioners in order to assess what they do and cannot do about harassment in academia. The findings of this study indicate that the complaint infrastructure functions as a leaky pipeline, in which relatively many people share their experiences of harassment with the confidential advisor, yet decide to not forward it to the ombudsperson of complaints committee. In short, the more formal the process gets, the more people drop out. Moreover, the practitioners working within the complaint infrastructure primarily view themselves as individual problem-solvers, leaving the structural and organizational causes of harassment largely unaddressed.
In Zimbabwe, gender inequalities, economic precarity, and entrenched patriarchal norms continue to shape girls' educational trajectories. Against this backdrop, this paper examines how parents in rural Shona communities mediate gender norms that structure what becomes possible for girls' schooling and gender-just education. Drawing on interviews and focus group discussions with parents, and informed by Afro-feminist and masculinity perspectives, we analyze how gender emerges as a contested terrain. The findings show that patriarchy is institutionalized through son preference, while the customary practice of muridzi wemusha and bridewealth consolidates masculinity. Patriarchal authority, however, is not static as women strategically negotiate customary norms, illustrating flexibility within gender hierarchies. Whilst parents view schools as places that can expand girls' educational futures, they also contest the erosion of customary norms and male authority. We argue that parent-school alliances attentive to socio-cultural practices shaping masculinity are central to advancing contextually grounded gender-just education.
This article contests a tendency in popular debates and some research about 'toxic' masculinities to flatten complexity by describing them in terms ('misogyny', 'sexism') that take for granted their meaning for and effects on young people. To counter such reifications, we consider data from creative participatory youth research and an interview with a sexuality educator to open up more nuanced understandings of masculinities and pedagogies. Our analysis develops through Laura U. Marks's The Fold: from your body to the cosmos (2024), which reworks the Deleuzian 'Fold', emphasizing the processual and relational onto-epistemology of experience as always in motion, generating posthuman agencies and pedagogical possibilities rather than fixed positions (i.e. us/them; knowledge/ignorance). We extend this by un/enfolding with the concept of masculinity assemblages and advancing response-able pedagogy as a mode of careful, curious, and exigent engagement. We aim to contribute to reimagining pedagogical approaches that might attune to how (more-than) masculinities are on the move and how they move us.
Work-life conflict causes issues for many women in the Australian labour market. Historically, teaching has been positioned as one of the few careers that allow women to balance their professional and personal lives. These associations have contributed to teaching being one of the most gender-segregated labour sectors, despite being marked by intense workload, long hours and demanding physical, cognitive, and emotional labour. This article examines work-life conflict, specifically time-based and strain-based conflict, among teachers in hard-to-staff schools. Contrary to the idea that resolving work-life conflict is the responsibility of the individual teacher, we argue that such conflicts should be understood as embedded in the broader professional culture of teaching and tied to gender dynamics that are shaped by structural inequalities in care responsibilities as well as cultural narratives that idealize care work, both of which disproportionately affect women.
This study adopted a holistic perspective grounded in masculinities theory and the concept of gender vertigo to explore how Chinese male early childhood teachers (ECTs) perceived and responded to gender vertigo. Six in-service male ECTs were recruited through convenience and snowball sampling; data were generated via the 'River of Life' method and semi-structured interviews. Findings from the exploratory interpretation of participants' narrated experiences revealed that while gender vertigo primarily arose from three major gendered constraints, participants simultaneously relied on emotional fulfilment from child interactions and certain gendered privileges to try to construct a relatively positive working identity, which fostered belonging and emotional rewards. As coping strategies, three distinct patterns emerged: passive ('bailan'), emotionally-mediated, and professionalism approach, constituting a continuum through which participants navigated the gender vertigo. This study offers a nuanced, culturally specific understanding of the gendered conflicts, constructions, and negotiations for male ECTs in the Chinese context.
This paper reveals how trauma is not only endured but reworked into practices of survival, resistance, and knowledge-making. Trauma is conceptualized not solely as an individual psychological response, but as a collective, historical, and intergenerational condition shaped by the enduring impacts of colonization, dispossession, and systemic racism. The narratives reveal the layered ways in which trauma is embodied, resisted, and negotiated in daily life, whilst highlighting the silences and burdens imposed by dominant Western frameworks within the university. Drawing on Indigenous feminist and Aboriginal research methodologies, the analysis raises Aboriginal women's voices emphasizing how cultural practice, kinship systems, and collective resilience function as critical sites of healing. By situating personal accounts within broader structural contexts, the article challenges deficit-based understandings of Aboriginal women and contributes to both critical trauma studies and Indigenous methodologies. It argues for the necessity of privileging Aboriginal women's perspectives in shaping trauma research, policy, and practice.
Given the marked rise in transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) children and adolescents, schools need to be equipped to support gender transition. This article explores how mothers of TGD children in Israel experience school responses to their children's gender expression or transition in the absence of formal policy. Assuming local social constraints and values shape parents' interactions with schools, we analyse three types of schools in the Jewish-sector - state, state-religious and independent. We identify two key dimensions that shape children's experience of coming-out as TGD in schools: spatial and temporal. These dimensions reveal less visible aspects of this process, which go beyond formal educational policy. We argue that the coming-out process is affected by the centrality of the gender dichotomy in the organization of school space and practices, and is often marked by a lack of synchrony between school response and mothers' perspectives on the temporality of their children's gender transition.
Social media offers Chinese female PhD students unprecedented opportunities for self-presentation and identity negotiation, yet internal perspectives on their identity construction remain understudied. This study employs multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) to investigate how Chinese female PhD students use linguistic and visual resources on Xiaohongshu (Rednote), a female-dominated social media platform, to construct their identities. The analysis identifies three interrelated dimensions of identity: (1) the individual self, which foregrounds diligence, self-discipline, and self-affirmation, re-signifying appearance management, consumption, and leisure as legitimate enactments of self-care and agency; (2) the role-based self, which oscillates between vulnerability and competence, transforming doctoral stress and uncertainty into shared narratives of resilience and professional achievement; and (3) the sociocultural self, which interrogates gender norms, age- and marriage-related expectations, and structural bias in academia through metaphor, evaluative language, and collective imagery, articulating aspirations for recognition and change. Embedded within and responsive to Confucian gender norms, neoliberal ideology, postfeminist discourse, platform capitalism, and academic institutional structures, these identity practices reflect strategic negotiations between mobility and social change. This study advances understanding of how Chinese female PhD students assert agency and negotiate identities online, contributing to scholarship on gender, higher education, and digital culture in contemporary China.
Although there is increasing public concern about patriarchal influencers' harmful impacts, young men's own voices have been largely absent from these discussions. Focus group interviews with 117 young men aged 16-21 years in Australia find that young men show diverse responses to Andrew Tate, giving cause for both hope and concern. Some young men see Tate as a source of inspiration for self-improvement in fitness or finances. Some see him as a legitimate advocate for men in the context of male marginalization or defend him against media misrepresentation. Some emphasize influencers' inauthenticity and exploitation of social media or simply were not interested in them. Some were more critical, denouncing Tate's sexism, hypocritical and criminal behaviour, or negative impacts on more impressionable boys. Efforts to engage boys and young men in gender-equitable responses to manfluencers should be informed by the evidence of the complexity and diversity in their responses to manfluencers' narratives.
While digital sex crimes are not unique to South Korea, their prevalence and severity have drawn significant domestic and international attention. The 2024 'deepfake porn' scandal revealed that male students at hundreds of schools and universities created Telegram channels to produce and share synthetic explicit videos of female teachers, classmates, and family members. Many victims and perpetrators were minors.Through an analysis of mass and social media discourses surrounding the scandal, this paper finds that digital misogyny lies at the centre of this dystopian development. It operates as a multidirectional ecosystem rather than the work of isolated 'manfluencers'. This ecosystem encompasses male-dominated online communities that generate and monetize narratives of male grievance, politicians who amplify these narratives and fuel their offline spillover, and authorities who deflect responsibility by placing the burden of intervention on female students and teachers.
The underrepresentation of women professors signals the persistence of dynamics that inhibit women's full participation in science. Using the lens of epistemic injustice, we highlight how gendered experiences of inequality are 'unspeakable'. We focus on two women senior researchers from a medical science department at a Danish university whose interviews reveal how epistemic gaps manifest, showing how the women are unable or unwilling to express their experiences of gender inequality as unfairness and injustice. These gaps are shaped by contextual dynamics, including the postfeminist gender regime, the ideal researcher norm, the positivist research paradigm, and the meritocratic myth. We further mobilize 'testimonial smothering' to discuss how epistemic oppression may lead the women to self-silence, thereby reinforcing the status quo. The study highlights the need for adequate vocabulary that facilitates critical discussions about gender inequality which, in turn, may challenge the institutional and epistemic contexts that hamper these conversations.
Celebrity academic programmes are a prominent feature of British television culture. This research examines how these figures are represented in the media through an intersectional lens. The findings reveal that cultural value is attached to a specific type of woman, one I term the scholarpreneur. She embodies the narrative that educational and life success stems solely from merit and individual effort. As a neoliberal role model, the scholarpreneur champions self-endeavour and personal transformation through extended study, while aligning academic achievement with consumerist ideals of beauty and self-promotion. In doing so, she reproduces a classed value system that reinforces the association of higher education with elite, middle-class professionalism and embeds this within a postfeminist discourse of sexual agency. This representation erases structural inequalities, marginalizing working-class women, older women, and black women, and contributes to the systemic inequities faced by academic women in the neoliberal university.
