Being an Early Career Feminist Academic


Book Description

This book highlights the experiences of feminist early career researchers and teachers from an international perspective in an increasingly neoliberal academy. It offers a new angle on a significant and increasingly important discussion on the ethos of higher education and the sector's place in society. Higher education is fast-changing, increasingly market-driven, and precarious. In this context entering the academy as an early career academic presents both challenges and opportunities. Early career academics frequently face the prospect of working on fixed term contracts, with little security and no certain prospect of advancement, while constantly looking for the next role. Being a feminist academic adds a further layer of complexity: the ethos of the marketising university where students are increasingly viewed as ‘customers’ may sit uneasily with a politics of equality for all. Feminist values and practice can provide a means of working through the challenges, but may also bring complications.




Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University


Book Description

This book offers a contemporary account of what it means to inhabit academia as a privilege, risk, entitlement or a failure. Drawing on international perspectives from a range of academic disciplines, it asks whether feminist spaces can offer freedom or flight from the corporatized and commercialized neoliberal university. How are feminist voices felt, heard, received, silenced, and masked? What is it to be a feminist academic in the neoliberal university? How are expectations, entitlements and burdens felt in inhabiting feminist positions and what of 'bad feeling' or 'unhappiness' amongst feminists? The volume consider these issues from across the career course, including from 'early career' and senior established scholars, as these diverse categories are themselves entangled in academic structures, sentiments and subjectivities; they are solidified in, for example, entry and promotion schemes as well as funding calls, and they ask us to identify in particular stages of 'being' or 'becoming' academic, while arguably denying the possibility of ever arriving. It will be essential reading for students and researchers in the areas of Education, Sociology, and Gender Studies.




The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible


Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible brings together 37 essential essays written by leading international scholars, examining crucial points of analysis within the field of feminist Hebrew Bible studies. Organized into four major areas - globalization, neoliberalism, media, and intersectionality - the essays collectively provide vibrant, relevant, and innovative contributions to the field. The topics of analysis focus heavily on gender and queer identity, with essays touching on African, Korean, and European feminist hermeneutics, womanist and interreligious readings, ecofeminist and animal biblical studies, migration biblical studies, the role of gender binary voices in evangelical-egalitarian approaches, and the examination of scripture in light of trans women's voices. The volume also includes essays examining the Old Testament as recited in music, literature, film, and video games. The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible charts a culturally, hermeneutically, and exegetically cutting-edge path for the ongoing development of biblical studies grounded in feminist, womanist, gender, and queer perspectives.




Complaint!


Book Description

In Complaint! Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens. To make complaints within institutions is to learn how they work and for whom they work: complaint as feminist pedagogy. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. To open these doors---to get complaints through, keep them going, or keep them alive---Ahmed emphasizes, requires forming new kinds of collectives. This book offers a systematic analysis of the methods used to stop complaints and a powerful and poetic meditation on what complaints can be used to do. Following a long lineage of Black feminist and feminist of color critiques of the university, Ahmed delivers a timely consideration of how institutional change becomes possible and why it is necessary.




Feminist Repetitions in Higher Education


Book Description

To do feminism and to be a feminist in higher education is to repeat oneself: to insist on gender equality as more than institutional incorporation and diversity auditing, to insert oneself into and against neoliberal measures, and to argue for nuanced intersectional feminist analysis and action. This book returns to established feminist strategies for taking up academic space, re-thinking how feminists inhabit the university and pushing back against institutional failures. The authors assert the academic career course as fundamental to understanding how feminist educational journeys, collaborations and cares and ways of knowing stretch across and reconstitute academic hierarchies, collectivising and politicising feminist career successes and failures. By prioritising interruptions, the book navigates through feminist methods of researcher reflexivity, autoethnography and collective biography: in doing so, moving from feminist identity to feminist practice and repeating the potential of queer feminist interruptions to the university and ourselves. ​




Routledge Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies


Book Description

This handbook provides a comprehensive analysis of contemporary gender and feminist geographies in an international and multi-disciplinary context. It features 48 new contributions from both experienced and emerging scholars, artists and activists who critically review and appraise current spatial politics. Each chapter advances the future development of feminist geography and gender studies, as well as empirical evidence of changing relationships between gender, power, place and space. Following an introduction by the Editors, the handbook presents original work organized into four parts which engage with relevant issues including violence, resistance, agency and desire: Establishing feminist geographies Placing feminist geographies Engaging feminist geographies Doing feminist geographies The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies will be an essential reference work for scholars interested in feminist geography, gender studies and geographical thought.




The Equivalents


Book Description

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD In 1960, Harvard’s sister college, Radcliffe, announced the founding of an Institute for Independent Study, a “messy experiment” in women’s education that offered paid fellowships to those with a PhD or “the equivalent” in artistic achievement. Five of the women who received fellowships—poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Marianna Pineda, and writer Tillie Olsen—quickly formed deep bonds with one another that would inspire and sustain their most ambitious work. They called themselves “the Equivalents.” Drawing from notebooks, letters, recordings, journals, poetry, and prose, Maggie Doherty weaves a moving narrative of friendship and ambition, art and activism, love and heartbreak, and shows how the institute spoke to the condition of women on the cusp of liberation. “Rich and powerful. . . . A love story about art and female friendship.” —Harper’s Magazine “Reads like a novel, and an intense one at that. . . . The Equivalents is an observant, thoughtful and energetic account.” —Margaret Atwood, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)




Feminist Academics


Book Description

This text explores questions of feminist interventions in academic institutions, covering both the structure and culture of such places and the social divisions between women.




Lean In


Book Description

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A landmark manifesto" (The New York Times) that's a revelatory, inspiring call to action and a blueprint for individual growth that will empower women around the world to achieve their full potential. In her famed TED talk, Sheryl Sandberg described how women unintentionally hold themselves back in their careers. Her talk, which has been viewed more than eleven million times, encouraged women to “sit at the table,” seek challenges, take risks, and pursue their goals with gusto. Lean In continues that conversation, combining personal anecdotes, hard data, and compelling research to change the conversation from what women can’t do to what they can. Sandberg, COO of Meta (previously called Facebook) from 2008-2022, provides practical advice on negotiation techniques, mentorship, and building a satisfying career. She describes specific steps women can take to combine professional achievement with personal fulfillment, and demonstrates how men can benefit by supporting women both in the workplace and at home.




Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship


Book Description

Feminist scholarship is sometimes dismissed as not quite ‘proper’ knowledge – it’s too political or subjective, many argue. But what are the boundaries of ‘proper’ knowledge? Who defines them, and how are they changing? How do feminists negotiate them? And how does this boundary-work affect women’s and gender studies, and its scholars’ and students’ lives? These are the questions tackled by this ground-breaking ethnography of academia inspired by feminist epistemology, Foucault, and science and technology studies. Drawing on data collected over a decade in Portugal and the UK, US and Scandinavia, this title explores different spaces of academic work and sociability, considering both official discourse and ‘corridor talk’. It links epistemic negotiations to the shifting political economy of academic labour, and situates the smallest (but fiercest) departmental negotiations within global relations of unequal academic exchange. Through these links, this timely volume also raises urgent questions about the current state and status of gender studies and the mood of contemporary academia. Indeed, its sobering, yet uplifting, discussion of that mood offers fresh insight into what it means to produce feminist work within neoliberal cultures of academic performativity, demanding increasing productivity. As the first book to analyse how academics talk (publicly or in off-the-record humour) about feminist scholarship, Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship is essential reading for scholars and students in gender studies, LGBTQ studies, post-colonial studies, STS, sociology and education. Winner of the FWSA 2018 Book Prize competition The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315692623, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.