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This article explores how care and space shape doctoral becoming. We extend previous higher education research that has critically examined the spatial arrangements of postgraduate study to explore how doctoral students negotiate both study from home and care-work responsibilities. The article draws on collaborative autoethnographic texts created by the authors to understand the ways in which care shaped their decisions about study spaces. We identify both exclusions and disadvantage in these accounts, at the same time as we discern wilfulness in the ways the contradictory positions of postgraduate student and caregiver were negotiated. We conclude the article by arguing that educational spaces are involved in the maintenance of academic norms that position care-work as invisible and out-of-place/space. Despite this, the creation of productive home spaces that facilitate both care and doctoral work remain possible.

This paper aims to examine some of ways sole parents sought recognition as postgraduate students in Australian universities. Judith Butler's theory of recognition notes that recognition is always partial and any account we give of ourselves must be given to another. Participants articulated that supervisors were critical in the process of recognition; without recognition from an academic supervisor, postgraduates are unrecognisable and are unable to account for themselves. University timetabling often conflicted with sole parenting responsibilities, academic conference attendance and expectations of academic publications were understood as problematic factors in recognisability for sole parent postgraduates. Problematic supervisory relations, restricted access to academic classes or seminars and limited access to academic conferences exacerbated sole parent isolation and influenced their recognisability as sole parent postgraduates.

This paper draws on research that considers how gender and agency influence the engagement of sole parent postgraduates within the Australian academy. I argue that parental care responsibilities critically influence participation in higher education for sole parents. I suggest that the gendered construct of caring for children is a feminine performative which significantly determines how sole parents are able to engage with postgraduate education. By exploring motherhood practices and discourses as performatively queer, I am able to draw attention to everyday operations of motherhood and also begin to disrupt the naturalised link between female bodies and their care of children. This queering analysis aims to re-frame gendered constructs of feminine caring of children which significantly shapes participation and orientations towards higher education. Queer theory usefully investigates naturalised, so-called common-sense identity markers, including those re-inscribing gender. I suggest that "motherhood" equals feminine and that this powerful gendered social construction is an important site of critique. I suggest that sole parenting can be materially different because it is often experienced through intensified levels of childcare, domestic and financial management responsibilities. I argue that this increased level of childcare, household work and financial responsibility has material implications for sole parent's time, energy and engagement with postgraduate education.

This article explores student and teacher engagement with Australian Indigenous Studies. In this article I identify key themes in the film "September" (2007) that demonstrate how the film can be used as a catalyst for student learning and discussion. Critical whiteness theory provides a framework to explore three themes, the invisibility of whiteness, the reachability of whiteness and the cultural interface. Critical whiteness theory identifies the way in which non-Indigenous people centralise and normalise whiteness within colonised societies, and particularly considers how white privilege is maintained. Interpreting the film "September" through the lens of critical whiteness theory contributes to translating curriculum and social justice aims of education into action.

This conceptual paper describes, interrupts and diffractively explores named patriarchal practices as performatively and situationally (re)produced via gender norms. We are attentive to ways in which heteronormative familial conventions maintain and reinscribe gendered binaries reductively as natural. We suggest that heteronormative familial relations re/produce gendered difference as intrinsically disadvantageous to female bodies and that this requires a response; a mobilization of creative feminist affirmative counteraction. In this paper, we respond to the failure of feminism (for us personally and at large) to re-signify gendered norms associated with parental care work that tie the female body naturally to reproduction. By making this move, we aim to (re)deploy theoretical analysis of so named patriarchal power. Through employing a diffractive analysis, we attempt to move on from a simple binary debate that we suspect only reiterates female oppression and disadvantage supported through compulsory heteronormative investment. We discuss a reframing of patriarchal power that necessarily releases it from the male/female, feminine/masculine dichotomy. We frame this relation of power as heteronormative affective violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]