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Carers in academia is a young but growing field, which has quickly expanded since the 2000s and has gained new momentum during the Covid-19 pandemic and the accompanying disruptions of personal and professional lives. It is also one which, through its associations with reproductive and women's work, remains relatively marginalised. This article examines the English language research literature on carers in academia. Drawing upon feminist poststructuralist theories, we contend that, because the literature is not 'out of the discourses' of care and academic work and, instead, contributes to construct the objects it speaks of, the state of the field is a matter of cognitive and social justice. Following the presentation of the methodological and theoretical frameworks and a discussion of the authorial voices framing the field, we consider the relative in/visibilities of various groups of care/rs. Drawing on a review which identified 158 relevant texts, we find research in the field broadly ignores male, disabled, BME and LGBTQ+ carers, as well as ancillary workers and professional groups other than academics, and forms of care work other than parenting healthy, abled children. We then move to discussing the liminalities of care, noting the absence of studies of care work in academia related to non-humans and to end of life. We conclude by pointing out the need for further reflexivity in terms of how processes of knowledge production include and exclude in ways that are complex and fluid.

This article is concerned with the discourses of teachers and teaching work that have circulated in UK and US education policy circles during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on UK and US policy texts published in Spring and Summer 2020, we discuss how the policy discourses underpinning these texts re/define and mis/recognise teaching work. On a theoretical level, the article bears on a poststructuralist tradition calling, inter alia, for a critical deconstruction of discourses and the relationships of power they sustain, while also borrowing from critical theorists' understandings of social justice. We argue that while some aspects of teachers' work have attracted more visibility and recognition, these processes have been partial and coexist with the strengthening of some of the hierarchies of teaching work in place prior to the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how academics with caring responsibilities negotiate the mobility imperative, with specific reference to attending conferences. We argue that, in the neoliberal and 'careless' context of higher education, negotiating conflicting identities of academic and carer are fraught with tensions for carers as they try to reconcile the mobility imperative with their caring responsibilities. We acknowledge and also challenge the naturalised relationship between care and femininity, and use a feminist poststructuralist approach to analyse the competing discourses surrounding academic and care work. We draw on two distinct, but related, research projects with predominantly UK-based participants. Moreau's project ('Carers and Careers', 2015-2017) explored how academic carers negotiate academic cultures which tend to render care work invisible, using interviews with academic carers and policy staff. Henderson's project ('In Two Places at Once', 2017-2018) focused on the impact of caring responsibilities on academics' conference participation, using diary-interview method.

This article draws primarily on a dataset of 60 semi-structured interviews conducted with teachers working in English and French state-funded secondary schools. Informed by feminist sociological theories of work and education and a cross-national comparative perspective, it explores the mechanisms leading to the production of gender inequalities in a profession which is often thought of as egalitarian or even favourable to women: teaching. A multi-level approach is adopted, which considers how the macro-social, meso-social and micro-social dimensions of the social world interact with each other and lead to the production of context-specific gender patterns, with specific attention to the effects of the spatio-temporal regimes of teaching which prevail in each country.

Despite a cultural positioning of care at the margins of academia, student parents now represent a significant proportion of the higher education population in England and in other Western countries. Research shows that, beyond the diversity of their experiences, time, childcare, financial, and well-being related issues prevail among them. However, extant research concentrates mostly on the experiential level--often alluding to policies, yet rarely focusing on their role in compounding or easing the issues experienced by this group. Using the lens of sociological and feminist theories and drawing on data collected in ten English higher education institutions, this paper addresses this dearth of research. It does argue that, through policies that overall tend to be geared towards childfree students, universities contribute to the marginalisation of student parents within higher education. However, despite the prevalence of such policies, attempts to redefine the student body/ies in more inclusive ways are also identified, suggesting a partial transformation of academic cultures. Through its identification and discussion of various institutional policy approaches to student parents, this paper attempts to further the development of a sociology linking areas of society and of people's lives (in this case, care and academia) which have historically been constructed as separate, and to understand how institutional policies reproduce or challenge this binary.

This article explores the circumstances in which individuals become secondary school teachers in England and France. Using a social constructivist theoretical framework, it specifically considers how national contexts play out in this decision. The findings presented in this paper draw on a corpus of 60 interviews with a sample of teachers based in English and French secondary schools. They show that national frameworks remain relevant to an exploration of teachers' identities and cultures, as French and English interviewees draw on distinctive reasons to explain why they became secondary school teachers. While becoming a teacher is often thought of as a "vocation" or as the result of "intrinsic" factors, this paper highlights the role of national contexts, as well as of gender and social class, in this process.

While student parents now represent a significant proportion of the higher education population in England, this group has been given limited consideration in policy circles. Using a social constructivist and feminist theoretical framework, this paper draws on a research project investigating the role of higher education policies in supporting student parents in England. It focuses on findings from 40 interviews conducted with student parents enrolled on university programmes. It shows that, in the context of the default construction of the university student as carefree, student parents often describe their experience of navigating academia as a struggle, in which time-related, financial, health and emotional problems prevail. However, the stories they tell also emphasise the benefits associated with their dual status. By doing so, they resist the discourse of deficit typically applied to "non traditional" students and produce a counter-discourse that disturbs the long-lived binary opposition between care and academia.

This paper looks at online representations of women and men in science, engineering and technology. We show that these representations largely re/produce dominant gender discourses. We then focus on the question: How are gender cliched images re/produced online? Drawing on a discursive analysis of data from six interviews with web authors, we argue that there are two reasons why their awareness of gender issues does not always translate into website content. First, web authors think of themselves as working within either journalistic or scientific cultures, and draw on associated criteria, which exclude gender equity, to make content decisions. Second, they construct distinctions between representation and reality, judging representations on their "empirical realism" (how accurately they represent a reality seen to exist outside the text), foreclosing considerations of their productive power. Finally, we draw on interview data with young people to show that these constrain the meanings made by web users. (Contains 3 notes.)

Through the example of what is now known in a large part of the Anglo-saxon world as the boys' underachievement debate, this paper explores the construction of gender issues, which underpins educational policies in England and France. It argues that the formation of particular questions as "policy issues" bears limited relation to what happens on the ground, yet is contingent on societal contexts. For example, while England and France share similar patterns in terms of the differential achievement of boys and girls, in the former the boys' underachievement debate is prominent, but in the latter it is non-existent. This supports the view that the emergence of the boys' underachievement debate is not related to a "grounded reality". Rather, the debate appears embedded in the discursive construction of gender and education and, more generally, of notions of citizenship and equality/difference. These findings provide a strong case in favour of a reflexive approach to equality matters in educational policy making. They also suggest that the analysis of what is constructed as a key issue in policy circles represents a rich terrain for feminist analysis, and they highlight that national frameworks continue to structure the thinking on equality issues. (Contains 9 notes and 1 table.)

In this paper, based on a project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council considering how people position themselves in relation to popular representations of mathematics and mathematicians, we explore constructions of mathematicians in popular culture and the ways learners make meanings from these. Drawing on an analysis of popular cultural texts, we argue that popular discourses overwhelmingly construct mathematicians as white, heterosexual, middle-class men, yet also construct them as "other" through systems of binary oppositions between those doing and those not doing mathematics. Turning to the analysis of a corpus of 27 focus groups with school and university students in England and Wales, we explore how such images are deployed by learners. We argue that while learners' views of mathematicians parallel in key ways popular discourses, they are not passively absorbing these as they are simultaneously aware of the cliched nature of popular cultural images. (Contains 13 notes.)