Search

Being Between Binary is a visual critical auto-ethnography, combining collage, cartoon, narrative and photomontage in the form of a four-page A2 scrapbook. Conceptually and materially, the design combines map and memoir, placing Massey’s concept of power geometry into dialogue with personal experiences of sexuality and gender. The piece explores binaries and geographies of here/there, Global North/South, through a lens of borderlands, boundaries and crossings, modelling dissemination as a fluid space of continuing enquiry. This visual essay first contextualizes the making of the piece as creative fieldwork, matching ‘a synthesis of shattered fragments’, and then presents images of the work with brief commentary.

The chapter discusses the application of Doreen Massey's socio-spatial concepts in my theorising of the university. The chapter draws primarily on my research into the impact of gender and intersectional factors on experiences of the workplace and career in a post-1992 university in which Massey's theoretical concepts shape both the research question and the methodology.

This article discusses my experience of developing and presenting a multi-media research dissemination programme comprising presentations, workshops, a visual exhibit and a poetry performance collectively referred to as the g word tour. Programme elements were presented, exhibited and performed between November 2018 and July 2019 to audiences in 25 universities and research centres in the UK and Republic of Ireland. Each element of the programme was based on data collected for a research project: Gender(s) at Work, which investigated the impact of gender on workplace experiences and career trajectories among staff in a UK university. The article argues that this active approach to research dissemination involved dynamics of contraflow and diffraction and that rather than completing or closing the research process created new spaces for dialogue and engagement.

This chapter reflects on xCHANGE, a month-long festival marking International Women's Day (IWD) at Birmingham City University, UK. The author first problematizes expectations of IWD and then outlines the origins of the festival, detailing both practical aspects and program content. The chapter then considers the festival through a lens of “power geometry” (Massey, 1993) in which female academics are positioned in distinct ways in relation to flows and interconnections of power within the university. Does the xCHANGE festival disrupt or merely reflect this power geometry? Does it create conditions for women to thrive in academia?

This chapter discusses contemporary research investigating how gender operates as a geography of power in the contemporary academy, particularly in relation to notions of ‘career’. Massey’s understanding of space as ‘a simultaneity of stories-so-far and places as collections of those stories’ (For Space. Sage, London, p. 11, 2005) shapes the research questions and a methodology of ‘spatial storytelling’ which foregrounds relationships between space and power in considering lived experiences of work and career. The chapter presents a selection of participants’ ‘stories-so-far’ which illustrate the complexity and dimensionality of lived, gendered experiences in the workplace and provide a basis for reflection on the opportunities these afford to resist sexism in the academy.

In many ways the Internet of Things will change everything, as devices and software mesh and become part of the connected fabric of the Internet. This article explores the context and potential offered by the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). It provides an overview of this next phase of the digital revolution that is underpinned by the growth of the social web, web 2.0, and the convergence of technologies such as mobile and ubiquitous broadband. This article also attempts to provide some insight into the potential value of the Internet of Things market in the future. The opportunities offered by the Internet of Things also raise serious questions about privacy and security in a connected world. As Umair Haque noted recently: “At some point, we should all question the value of an internet that objectifies you, tracks you, and polices you...without your consent.” (Haque 2014)

The study investigates the effectiveness of using design mock-ups by business learners as part of their innovation journeys. It draws on learners’ experiences in a final year elective module (Managing Strategic Design) delivered on an undergraduate management degree. This module has been designed to challenge learners to develop truly innovative business opportunities, utilising design and strategic thinking. The design mock-ups are examined for their capacity to help learners to traverse disciplinary and conceptual boundaries in order to seek out innovative solutions. In design, reliance on mock-ups as teaching tools informs critical aspects of learning about the design concepts and processes, but this is not the case in business. We investigate the impact of creating such artefacts by teams as a means of mediating collaborative interaction within innovation process and for the ways learners encounter the unfamiliar and incorporate it into their learning experiences. The methodology underpinning the investigation is that of participatory action research, where the analysis draws on the observed processes of making the mock-ups, assessment feedback on the mock-up submissions and learners’ reflection on creating the mock-ups. The current literature on innovation already acknowledges that artefacts play an important role in the innovation process. However, our study indicates that the purposeful process of making such artefacts as a way to make sense of the innovation has added value. The physical act of making combines the emotional response to the collaboration with managing the uncertainty of the innovation process. As the artefacts become conduits of the social interactions within the teams, they reveal the role they play in reframing the encountered learning boundaries into a ‘new familiar’. We conclude that the process of making sense of the unfamiliar and re-creating it into the ‘new familiar’ takes place at metacognitive level. Thus, the exploration of the ways in which the creation of design mock-up assists this process of metacognitive reframing has implication for the learning environments in which it takes place.

This article focuses on a Western Vocational Lifelong Learning Network (WVLLN) initiative aimed at supporting Level 3 vocational tutors in further education (FE) who have moved into a teaching career via professional experience rather than through higher education (HE), but who play a significant role in advising young people about progression to HE. In early 2008, it was decided to pilot informal visits whereby small groups of Level 3 FE tutors were invited by departments of WVLLN partner institutions, to visit campuses, to meet with first-year lecturers, faculty admissions tutors and students and to sit in on a typical teaching session. While not originally conceived as a research project, the systematic collection of participant feedback and recording of changes to practice as a result of the visits reflect an action research approach. The article considers the challenges presented by this deceptively simplistic formula. It reviews the inter- and intra-institutional and cross-sector collaborative proce...

It is clear from the chapters in this section that women-only or women-centred sites of learning are important in developing safe spaces where women can resist the gendered , classed, racialised and ageist constructions of their identities. This includes, for example, vocational learning which recognises and values women’s multiple experiences; networks of intimacy which enable educational and career choice s to be made; feminist organisations; and women’s social spaces. Although much of the policy and practice concerned with vocational education and training fails to recognise the value of different types of skills for the economy, including the key transferable skills that are developed by women’s roles in the home, as Cable and Goodliff have shown, some vocational learning can enable women to develop professional identities which increase confidence in the workplace and beyond, and opens possibilities for women to redefine what ‘professionalism ’ means.

Part II has built upon the insights offered in Part I in exploring gendered choices and pathways into and within work. For example, Chap. 12’s reporting of limitations placed on Iranian women’s employment choices within specific sectors, including technical and engineering industries, provides an interesting international reflection of the underrepresentation of women in SET careers outlined by Herman et al. in Chap. 5.

This book is written at a transitional moment in women’s lives at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century. Authored by women who are practitioners, policy advisers and academics, the work draws on a view of feminism as the pursuit of an agenda for social change that aims to improve the position of women, furthering their influence and benefiting society overall by enhancing their contributions. The chapter authors make a distinctive contribution to lifelong learning research by specifically questioning the gendered assumptions that surround choice. While choice has been the mantra of neo-liberal politics in education (Apple 2001), the present volume adds to critical voices that highlight the bounded nature of choice. The authors critique gendered choices that constrain women and limit their access to certain types of learning and careers . Women’s gendered pathways are influenced by assumptions about innate qualities of women and men. These assumptions inform education policies and broad cultural expectations of women.

The previous section considered gendered experiences of learning and the workplace, including the choices or lack of choices women feel are available to them, and ways in which ‘choice’ is exercised. This section moves on to explore the ways in which our gendered identities impact on ‘choice’, which itself is gendered . The authors in this final section consider aspects of women’s gendered identities which inform the formal and informal lifelong learning pathways they take. They explore ways in which identities are developed by and through learning, work and intimate family and other networks. Common to all four chapters is the development of greater understandings of the gendered choices and constraints that impact upon women’s lives, building and developing themes which have been interwoven throughout the book.