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This paper draws on the career narrative interviews with 15 female academics to unravel the performative politics of gender in Greek Medical Schools. I explore the gender positioning and embodied performances of Greek women as they relate to the contingencies of participation, recognition, and esteem in academic medicine and framed within the wider gendered discourses and structures of the increasingly neo-liberal Greek academia and society. Drawing on Butler's notion of performativity, I illustrate the possibilities of making the successful Greek female academic subject through subjection to normative, gendered discourses of respectability, encompassing integrity, respectable aesthetics, and affective work and scripted along intersecting privileges of class and heteronormativity. I argue that although Greek women's gendered professional authenticity and respectability projects demonstrate intentionality and agency, they leave little, if any, room for displacement of gender norms. Gender transformation and promotion of gender equality in Greek academia requires institutional support and political action.

This book explores gender stereotyping and gender inequalities in secondary education in England, Hungary and Italy. The authors highlight the importance of addressing student and teacher attitudes if long-term changes in mindset are desired, as well as the underlying stereotypes that persist and linger in these educational contexts. Promoting a whole-school culture change approach, this book explores views of gender stereotypes from teachers and students concerning subject and career choices, as well as collaborative work with teachers, experts and NGOs in implementing and evaluating gender equality charters. Drawing on extensive research, this book employs an intersectional and cross-country approach: while the authors acknowledge the challenges and opportunities of researching gender equality frameworks across different countries, ultimately these link to the UN Sustainable Development goal of gender equality.

PurposeDespite the well‐documented resistance to feminism and gender equality within universities, the profound implications for feminist academics have not received sufficient attention. In this paper the author aims to focus on the inauthentication of feminist academic work by powerful actors in higher education and the implications for feminist academic careers. The author illustrates through her professional experience at a UK medical school how the othering and exclusion of feminists, sustained through surveillance and power mechanisms of organisational life, can disrupt and interrupt feminist academic identity.Design/methodology/approachThis is a reflective piece of work that attempts to illustrate the author's experiences of occupational segregation and marginalisation within a patriarchal and an emerging "entrepreneurial" academic department. The author attempts to represent her lived professional experiences as a feminist academic in a medical school, through the use of narrative and metaphors.FindingsDrawing on notions of othering, interrupted and storied subjectivities, the author illustrates how gendered expectations and constructions of academic performance and success within patriarchal organisations can "make up" and "break up" the professional self and affect the nomadic nature of academic careers and identities.Practical implicationsThis paper contributes to theory about workplace identities and practice of gender equality in academia.Originality/valueThe author illustrates how the intersections of identities (feminist, social scientist, woman) can shape personal stories, professional experiences and careers within universities. The author demonstrate how personal stories can uncover gender inequalities and challenge dominant paradigms of knowledge and research within a micro‐web of emotionality and power relations.

PurposeIn this paper we explore the gendered ways in which academic staff resistance and compliance is configured in a post-1992 University in England, including the emotions implicated in the navigation of neo-liberalisation and research intensification of their academic institution and its associated disciplinarian mechanisms.Design/methodology/approachWe draw on data from an interview study of a diverse sample of 32 academics of different gender, discipline and academic grade. Analysis informed by a feminist post-structuralist framework of power and discourse explored different forms of academic resistance and compliance; how the embodied academic subject was (re)negotiated within gendered discourses of neo-liberal research excellence and managerialism and the gendered emotions generated in processes of resistance and compliance.FindingsInstitutional change and expectations to engage with research performativity generated fear, anxiety and anger. Female staff appeared to actively resist the masculinized research subject performing all hours work and individualism in the context of private and institutional gendered relations and labour. Male staff though actively resisted the feminization of higher education and the neo-liberal instrumentalization of caring and therapeutic cultures and ideologically resisted the surveillance mechanisms of higher education including the REF.Research limitations/implicationsOur work contributes to scholarship problematizing the assumed neutrality of resistance and compliance and highlighting women's symbolic struggle to (dis)identify with a masculine professional norm. In terms of theorising academic resistance to neo-liberalism and identity construction, further attention should be given to the mobilization and symbolic capital of academics and emotions positioned differently due to their gender and intersecting differences.Originality/valueOur study addresses a gap in the scholarship of academic resistance and compliance by advancing the understanding of gender inequalities and emotions implicated in the process of resistance and compliance against neo-liberalism.

This article seeks to further understandings of contemporary patterns of parental government. It explores the politicisation of family life by examining a pilot programme tasked with enhancing parental engagement in education amongst 'hard-to-reach' families within the white British community of a large inner-London borough. Focusing on the programme's signature device – the deployment of community-based 'link workers' to bridge home and school – 'governmentality' (Foucault, 2009) is used as a theoretical lens through which to foreground the link workers' role in governing parents. We draw on qualitative data collected from link workers, parents, and school leaders, to argue that link workers represent a mode of governmentality that privileges the instrumental use of trust to achieve strategic objectives, rather than coercive authority. The aim being to produce responsible, self-disciplined parents who act freely in accordance with normative expectations as to what constitutes 'good' parenting and effective parental support. As such, the article highlights the link workers' role in (re)producing the ideal, neoliberal parent. However, governing through trust comes at the cost of being unable to firmly secure desired outcomes. We thereby conclude that this gentle art of parental government affords parents some latitude in resisting institutional agendas. ; Camden City Council

PurposeAttempts to modernise the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK involve promoting flexible approaches to work and training, restructuring postgraduate training and increasing control and scrutiny of doctors' work. However, the medical community has responded with expressed anxiety about the implications of these changes for medical professionalism and the quality of patient care. This paper aims to address these issues.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on literature on nostalgia, gender, identity and organisations, the paper explores the narratives of 20 senior NHS hospital doctors to identify ways in which doctors use nostalgia to react to organisational and professional challenges and resist modernisation and feminisation of medicine.FindingsThis paper illustrates how senior hospital doctors' nostalgic discourses of temporal commitment may be used to constitute a highly esteemed professional identity, creating a sense of personal and occupational uniqueness for senior hospital doctors, intertwined with gendered forms of othering and exclusionary practices.Practical implicationsNostalgia at first sight appears to be an innocuous social construct. However, this study illustrates the significance of nostalgia as a subversive practice of resistance with implications for women's career and identity experiences. Change initiatives that seek to tackle resistance need also to address discourses of nostalgia in the medical profession.Originality/valueThe main contribution of this study is that we illustrate how supposedly neutral discourses of nostalgia may sometimes be mobilised as devices of resistance. This study questions simplistic focus on numerical representation, such as feminisation, as indicative of modernisation and highlights the significance of exploring discourses and head counts for understanding resistance to modernisation.

Perceptions of vulnerability to illness are strongly influenced by the salience given to personal experience of illness in the family. This article proposes that this salience is created through autobiographical narrative, both as individual life story and collectively shaped family history. The article focuses on responses related to health in the family drawn from semi-structured interviews with women in a qualitative study exploring midlife women's health. Uncertainty about the future was a major emergent theme. Most respondents were worried about a specified condition such as heart disease or breast cancer. Many women were uncertain about whether illness in the family was inherited. Some felt certain that illness in the family meant that they were more vulnerable to illness or that their relatives' ageing would be mirrored in their own inevitable decline, while a few expressed cautious optimism about the future. In order to elucidate these responses, we focused on narratives in which family members' appearance was discussed and compared to that of others in the family. The visualization of both kinship and the effects of illness led to strong similarities being seen as grounds for worry. This led to some women distancing themselves from the legacies of illness in their families. Women tended to look at the whole family as the context for their perceptions of vulnerability, developing complex patterns of resemblance or difference within their families.

Based upon the findings of a national survey of school coordinators and leaders on citizenship and community cohesion, this research indicates that teachers perceive their students to feel a sense of belonging to multiple communities, each with their own required actions for effective participation. There appears to be wide variation in the characteristics of students' engagement in community activities depending on their individual needs and circumstances. While there is convincing evidence of schools successfully implementing strategies to equip students with a conceptual understanding of their roles as citizens, the research also identifies a need to develop students' practical skills and self-efficacy to interact with their immediate and wider communities. In order to support students to participate most effectively in their communities, there is a need for schools to provide tailored support to those groups of students who may otherwise be least likely to participate in community activities.