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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.

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...

The work in the present section of the book can be located in a tradition of women’s learning that draws on feminist principles and pedagogies to empower women in seeking non-gendered choices . Women’s learning through shared experience and networking, which is an important focus in the chapters above, emerges as a theme that resonates in discussions of work and identity in subsequent sections of the book. In Chap. 6 Olivier reveals the crucial role played by solidarity among women to support those affected by gender violence . Networking and sharing experience emerge in women’s concerted action to support more equitable learning relationships . This leads in one example to the inception of a new learning programme (Chap. 5) and in another to new approaches to learning relations (Chap. 3). In the chapters above, mutual support helped women to develop learning to address unequal power relations (Chap. 6) or to enter workplaces where power relations contribute to women’s under-representation (Chap. 5).

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.

About the Editors.- About the Contributors.- Introduction Sue Jackson, Irene Malcolm and Kate Thomas.- Part One: Learning Pathways - Gendered Learning.- Introduction Part One Irene Malcolm, Sue Jackson and Kate Thomas.- 1. Re-asserting a relational model of teaching and learning: a gender perspective Ursula Murray.- 2. Widening Educational Participation : masculinities, aspirations and decision-making processes Penny Jane Burke.- 3. Innovative educational models for women returners in science, engineering and technology professions Clem Herman, Barbara Hodgson, Gill Kirkup and Elizabeth Whitelegg.- 4. Women's Choices Shattered: the impact of gender violence at universities Esther Oliver.- Conclusion Part One Irene Malcolm, Sue Jackson and Kate Thomas.- Part Two: The Agenda for Gender in Workplace Learning.- Introduction Part Two Kate Thomas, Sue Jackson and Irene Malcolm.- 5. Women work-based learners: factors affecting lifelong learning and career opportunities Linda Miller.- 6. Where is gender within the workplace learning agenda? Suzanne Hyde.- 7. An opportunity to widen participation through work-based learning? The impact of gender Anita Walsh.- 8. Educated women in the labour market of Iran: changing worlds and new solutions Narjes Mehdizadeh and Gill Scott.- Conclusion Part Two Kate Thomas, Sue Jackson and Irene Malcolm.- Part Three: Identity, Intimacy and In/formal Pathways.- Introduction Part Three Sue Jackson, Irene Malcolm and Kate Thomas.- 9. Transitions in professional identity: women in the early years workforce Carrie Cable and Gill Goodliff.- 10.- Getting by' or 'getting ahead'? Gendered educational and career decision-making in networks of intimacy Alison Fuller, Ros Foskett, Brenda Johnston and Karen Paton.- 11. Power, resistance and informal pathways: lifelong learning in feminist nonprofit organisations Leona English.- 12. Lifelong Learning in later years: choices and constraints for older women Jan Etienne and Sue Jackson.- Conclusion Part Three Sue Jackson, Irene Malcolm and Kate Thomas.- Conclusion Irene Malcolm, Sue Jackson and Kate Thomas. Index.