Suchergebnisse

"Higher education has been presented as a solution to a host of local and global problems, despite the fact that learning and assessment can also be used as mechanisms for exclusion and social control. Developing Transformative Spaces in Higher Education : Learning to Transgress demonstrates that even when knowledge may appear to be the solution, it can be partial and disempowering to all but the dominant groups. The book shows the need to contest such knowledge claims and to learn to transgress, rather than to conform. It argues that transformative spaces need to be found and that these should be about the creation of new opportunities, ways of knowing and ways of being"--

Over recent years, young feminist activism has assumed prominence in mainstream media where news headlines herald the efforts of schoolgirls in fighting sexism, sexual violence and inequity. Less visible in the public eye, girls' activism plays out in social media where they can speak out about gender-based injustices experienced and witnessed. Yet we know relatively little about this significant social moment wherein an increasing visibility of young feminism cohabits a stubbornly persistent postfeminist culture. Acknowledging the hiatus, this paper draws on a qualitative project with teenage feminists to explore how girls are using and producing digital feminist media, what it means for them to do so and how their online practice connects with their offline feminism. Using a feminist poststructuralist approach, analyses identified three key constructions of digital media as a tool for feminist practice: online feminism as precarious and as knowledge sharing; and feminism as "doing something" on/offline. Discussing these findings, I argue that there is marked continuity between girls' practices in "safe" digital spaces and feminisms practised in other historical and geographical locations. But crucially, and perhaps distinctly, digital media are a key tool to connect girls with feminism and with other feminists in local and global contexts.

Higher education institutions are working in times of change, including a changing student body, changing demographics, and the challenges of globalization. In the UK and many Western countries, part-time enrolments in universities are expected to rise at a much faster rate than full-time, with the mix between part-time and full-time shifting substantially. Whilst policies and practices have often denied opportunities to part-time learners, the changing landscape of UK higher education – with many similarities to the landscapes in much of the developed world – are opening more flexible opportunities to participate in higher education. However, those possibilities are too often marginal, with full-time and younger learners dominating the discourses and practices of higher education institutions. This paper will discuss ways of supporting academic learning for diverse groups of part-time learners, showing how pedagogic approaches can be developed that enhance and support more flexible and effective learning. Institutions face particular challenges in ensuring that the voices of diverse groups of students are heard. This article will argue that to enhance social inclusion, institutions need to 'speak' to mature students and part-time students – and many currently do not. However, it will conclude that there are pedagogic approaches which enable more inclusive practices in higher education to be mainstreamed.

In a social climate that largely problematizes young women's sexuality, voices of sexual desire and pleasure may struggle to be heard. Teenage magazines, in actively marketing young women's (hetero)sexuality, offer 'permission' to talk about sex through their problem pages. This article examines letters written to the advice pages of an Australasian teen magazine in which writers articulated or alluded to sexual desire. Using a feminist, poststructuralist analytical approach, the article looks at the ways in which sexual desire is constructed by writers and by agony aunts, how sexual subjectivities are constituted in the text, and the identification of cultural resources drawn on in these constructions. Analyses suggest that attempts to 'do' desire in young women's letters were often undermined or 'undone' in the agony aunt's responses, particularly desire for someone of the same gender. The article argues that erasure of desire is deeply ironic, given the magazine's sexual content, and misses an important opportunity to encourage talk about desire.

Although repeated exposure to narratives of romance in popular culture from an early age may lead young women to expect idealized romance in their heterosexual love relationships, a good number encounter abusive experiences. This article draws on young women's stories of abuse in heterosexual love relationships gathered from interviews with 23 young women aged 16-18 years. These stories are examined using a feminist, poststructuralist form of narrative analysis to explore the extent to which young women draw on cultural narratives of romance or alternative narratives and to explore how self and boyfriends are positioned within these narratives. Although at one level romance seemed to be a trap that prevented young women from abandoning an abusive boyfriend, at another it was a resource that they used in an active way to make sense of what had happened. Ways in which this work might usefully inform prevention, education and counselling are discussed.