Network
NW 33. Gender and Education
Title
Early Career Researchers: Building Learning Communities and Shared Futures
Abstract
We seek papers exploring the question of how early career researchers are meeting the challenges of the 21st century, achieving the potential of education research through diverse perspectives on gender in context. In our disruptive societies, complexity concerning gender is increasing because of threats to the status of women and girls and their roles. The importance of education and empowering women through strong learning communities has never been more critical. Feminist and gender researchers are engaging with the conceptual, political and social issues which arise from populist and counter-populist trends.
The Call
This special call seeks papers that engage with personal, intellectual, theoretical, practical, and political challenges (and resolutions) relating to increasingly complex gendered environments in society.
We invite submissions which explore how early career researchers can build learning communities. Contributors are encouraged to consider how gender-based research into early career researchers can move beyond observation to become a tool for justice, transformation, and accountability.
We welcome abstracts that interrogate the gendered politics of knowledge, the role of the early career researcher, and the possibilities for education research to act as a catalyst for inclusive and equitable change.
We invite you to consider the following issues:
The experience of gender including all who identify as women within the context of European academia's heritage and the way that heritage shapes well-being and career progression.
Transcending European binary frameworks by exploring lived experiences to inform a more nuanced understanding of gender.
Intersectionality as an analytical framework, drawing on the relevant feminist literature and postcolonial theory to capture the complex interplay between gender, class, race, and legacies in academia.
If the gender binary can be challenged it is also possible that it offers new opportunities to rethink gender as a concept more widely. There are problematic omissions within feminist and gender research. Black, Asian, Hispanic, Roma, Disabled, LGBTQI+, Working Class, communities from the Global South, and many other social groups of all genders have often viewed mainstream feminism and its binary gender categorisations as unrepresentative of their embodied experiences. These frameworks are frequently seen as reflecting the interests of a small, globally dominant group — typically white, middle-class women — rather than addressing the diverse realities of marginalised communities.
We seek papers exploring these challenges especially in the context of early career researchers. Example questions and themes:
- What barriers and opportunities shape early career researchers' experiences within academic and professional learning communities?
- In what ways are early career researchers contributing to the creation of shared futures in education?
- Can the concept of gender(s) be transformed to incorporate a wide range of gendered embodiments and experiences including building learning communities?
- Can we foreground the importance of characteristics beyond gender, such as age, disability, LGBTQ+, class and race?
- How do issues of identity, belonging and inclusion influence early career researchers' participation in learning communities?
- The role of education research on gender in responding to and shaping social justice movements, policy shifts, and institutional change.
- Methodological reflections on how researchers, especially early career researchers, navigate the tension between knowing and acting, especially in relation to gender within marginalised communities.
- Critical perspectives on gender and the politics of knowledge production in education, including whose voices are heard, valued, or silenced.
- The potential of education research to serve as a transformative tool — not only for understanding but for reimagining educational futures for women and girls.
Contact Person(s)
Victoria Showunmi, v.showunmi(at)ucl.ac.uk