Group items tagged

The article comprehensively reviews the theoretical and empirical work on gender and the knowledge society and introduces the articles of the special issue. Three ways in which the knowledge society and economy are gendered are distinguished: the gendering of human capital; the gendering of networks and the gendering of the definitions of the knowledge society. Using data from the Labour Force Survey, an original analysis of the gendering of the UK knowledge economy is presented. It finds that the choice of definition of the knowledge economy makes a difference to its gender composition: the more centred on technology and fixed capital, the more masculine, the more centred on human capital, the more gender balanced. The knowledge economy provides better work and conditions. Gender gaps are narrower in the knowledge economy than the overall economy: occupational hierarchies are narrowed to women's advantage, while differences in work temporalities are narrowed to men's advantage.

This paper is the result of a conversation, started in 2008, about the significance of the struggles for gender and sexual justice taking place in Latin America and more broadly of the challenges global justice and solidarity movements (GJ&SM) are articulating at various national and international levels. Two themes are explored throughout: the extent to which the current Latin American experiments with diversity, plurality, connectivity and mutuality, starting with the 'plural concept of gender and sexuality', challenge existing divides between gender, sexual, social and economic justice and the extent to which they simultaneously question the North/South divide. We also reflect on the problems and challenges that such approaches might present or encounter.

"Educational programs designed to bridge the digital divide for girls often aim to increase girls' technological literacy. However, little research has examined what aspects of technological literacy are highlighted in these programs. In this article, I provide a case study of a video game design workshop hosted by a girls' advocacy organization. Through observations, interviews, and analysis of program materials, I look at how the organization conceptualizes technological literacy as contributing to gender equality. I compare this conceptualization to how technological literacy was taught in the classroom. Finally, I draw on situated learning theory to help explain how girls responded to the class. In the end, both the organization's limited notion of how technological literacy could increase gender equality as well as gender and race differences between the teachers and the girls influenced girls' participation in the workshop."

One of the foundational aims of this journal is to enable articulations of globalisation other than those conceived of within a narrow, economistic modality. The articles that comprise this special issue, in our view, make a timely and innovative contribution to the plurality of analytical insights that have been published in this journal since its inception. Further, this issue represents the first issue of Globalizations that, in its entirety, takes seriously the claim that gender matters to global politics and therefore to globalisation. Ideas about gender are thoroughly bound up in the processes of integration, fragmentation, economic restructuring, and im/migration that characterise the sets of practices and politics described by the short-hand of 'globalisation', and in various ways the articles in this collection interrogate these practices to enrich our understanding of their particular and more general effects.

Systems of governance are legitimised as an almost indispensable response to global co-ordination over matters of environmental degradation. Considering sustainable development as the key label for 'common-sense' political approaches to environmental degradation and a key informant for international environmental policy-making activity, this article seeks to problematise such a widespread discourse as (re)productive of (hetero)sexist power relations. As such, this article, informed by Foucault's conceptions of governmentality and biopower, contends that the global thrust towards sustainable development projects works to construct identities and discipline power relations with regard to gender and sexuality. Specifically, I argue that the disciplinary narratives and apparatuses of international sustainable development initiatives work to construct gendered identities and naturalise heterosexual relations. To demonstrate this, this article focuses on the discourses surrounding one of the most important international documents directed at informing national environmental policy, Agenda 21.

KATHMANDU, Jun 13 (IPS) - Far more than just the learning of ABCs and 123s, education should be playing a transformative role in children's lives if it is to ensure them a better and more 'equal' and gender-responsive future. "Gender is a trigger a

As the U.S. academy increasingly markets "the global" and "diversity" for undergraduate student consumption, feminists face new challenges with respect to the decolonizing goals of teaching. Analyzing race, gender, and culture intersections that inform ep

Mobile communication has become a common phenomenon in most parts of the world. There are indeed more mobile subscriptions than there are people who use the internet. For many people outside of the metropolitan areas of Europe and North America, this is literally their first use of electronically mediated interaction. This preface to the special issue of New Media & Society examines mobile communication in a global context. Through an overview of eight articles situated in the global south, we describe how mobile communication sheds light upon notions of information, appropriation and development and how it is challenging, and in many cases changing, notions of gender. While the mobile phone reshapes development and micro dynamics of gendered interactions, it is not necessarily a revolutionary tool. Existing power structures may be rearranged, but they are nonetheless quite stable. The analysis of mobile communication in the global south helps us to understand the rise of innovative practices around information and communication technologies and, in turn, enables us to develop theory to understand these emergent empirical realities.

This article introduces a forum of response articles to the edited volume Masculinities in Text and Teaching. The forum features two scholars of English in a transatlantic conversation and then a response by the editor of the volume. The forum develops, from the edited collection, the theme of pedagogical uncertainty in studies of masculinity and the ways those conversations can be used to help students develop their own humanistic ethics in the classroom. Employing two styles of doing work on teaching from the perspective of textual scholars, the author of one article reads her own experience and classroom moments to build an argument about the high stakes of doing work around gender for students and the profession. The other author reads from both classroom experience and from a text she teaches to open up new pedagogical possibilities. These techniques are echoed in the collected volume. A key argument throughout is that classroom struggles around texts and identities - which often provoke feelings of vulnerability and uncertainty for both teachers and students - can be deployed in conversations that enable students to learn about both the humanities subject and themselves.

"Intergroup dialogue is designed to foster commitment to action. This article analyzes papers written by students in 52 intergroup dialogue courses (N = 739) to test a theoretical model of how intergroup dialogue is expected to encourage frequency of acting to educate others and to collaborate with others. The theoretical model posits that dialogue pedagogy fosters distinctive communication processes, which influence psychological processes that, in turn, relate to action (Nagda, 2006 21. Nagda , B. A. 2006 . Breaking barriers, crossing boundaries, building bridges: Communication processes in intergroup dialogues . Journal of Social Issues , 62 : 553 - 576 . [CrossRef] , [Web of Science ®] View all references ; Sorensen, Nagda, Gurin, & Maxwell, 2009 31. Sorensen , N. , Nagda , B. A. , Gurin , P. and Maxwell , K. 2009 . Taking a "hands on" approach to diversity in higher education: A critical-dialogic model for effective intergroup interaction . Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy , 9 ( 1 ) : 3 - 35 . [CrossRef] View all references ). Statistical analyses of the number of references to each of these concepts that were coded in the students' papers provide substantial support for the model. Dialogue pedagogy, communication processes, and psychological processes all influenced how much students wrote about action, and the influence of these concepts conforms to the theoretical model. Results also show that educating others was written about more by students in race/ethnicity dialogues than in gender dialogues, at least partially because students in race/ethnicity dialogues also wrote more about the communication processes and psychological processes that specifically related to educating others."

"The cultural complexity of student populations presents major challenges for contemporary schooling in Western migrant nations such as Australia. While this has much to do with the diverse linguistic and ethnic backgrounds of students, other differences such as socio-economic status, family histories and gender add to this complexity. Yet, the complexities of education are not only a function of the cultural and social diversity of the student population. There are vast differences in students' educational and physical capital which are related but not reducible to these diversities. Complexity is inherent in the culture and philosophy of schooling; the processes of becoming literate, numerate and learning how to learn. While students have diverse needs, there are common skills that must be acquired, skills that are requisite for effective social participation in contemporary globalized societies. The challenge for education, and for dealing with complexity in any field, is to avoid being reductionist in the process. This article explores approaches to navigating these complexities in educational policy and practice, highlighting the ways in which simplistic understandings can prove problematic and yet, how certain forms of complexity reduction are necessary in achieving goals of educational access and equity."

"Drawing on the case of Taiwan, this article looks at high-skilled migration from the West to Asia. I explore how Western high-skilled migrants exert agency to negotiate their positions as non-citizens, privileged others and professional workers. I have coined the term 'flexible cultural capital conversion' to describe how English-speaking Westerners convert their native-language skills, as a form of global linguistic capital, into economic, social and symbolic capitals. Their privileged positions are nevertheless mediated and constrained by their class, nationality, race/ethnicity and gender. In the global context, whiteness is marked as a visible identity and the 'superior other'. Such cultural essentialism functions as a double-edged sword that places white foreigners in privileged yet segregated job niches. Their flexibility in capital conversion and transnational mobility is territory-bound. Many experience the predicament of 'cultural ghettoisation' in the global South, and they often face grim job prospects on returning home to the North."

After critically reviewing the apparent 'turn' from welfare states to pedagogic states, I focus on forms of pedagogy evident in notions of citizen empowerment. Issues raised through documentary analysis of key UK policy texts are examined through frameworks offered by Aradhana Sharma's work on women's empowerment in India in order to widen the analytical lens, opening up issues and questions that might be helpful in analysing new configurations of governance in the UK. These include the problem of multiplicity in the identification of strategies and technologies; the idea of pedagogy as a gendered domain, both in terms of the subjects targeted and in those involved in pedagogical work; and the problem of conceptualising 'the state' in formulations such as the 'pedagogical state'. Although questioning the idea of a 'pedgagogic turn', I conclude by addressing the forms of politics and political subjects called forth by pedagogic projects. The paper was written before the 2010 election but the analysis has much to offer to the politics of Cameron's Big Society.

Marie Lall's contribution uses recently collected empirical data to analyse a slow shift from traditional discourses regarding attitudes towards girls' education according to ethnicity. Using a series of case studies from different ethnic groups in Pakist

MONTEVIDEO, Jul 30 (IPS) - The girls who attend the school of Villa García, a township on the outskirts of the Uruguayan capital, are still playing dolls and dress up - only now they do it on their laptop computers.

"Meet Benjamin, an aspiring Game Designer. If he works hard to accumulate the required skills in the game design industry, his career path will move steadily and predictably from Beta Tester to Hacker and finally to Game Designer. If he is not satisfied with that achievement, Benjamin can keep working and move up to Venture Capitalist, opening his own company, or ultimately to Information Overlord, entirely monopolizing the regional media. No glass ceiling will bar his ascent; no workload increases will tax his resolve; no layoffs will frustrate the steady pace of his advance. Regardless of age, race, class, or gender, with a little hard work and ingenuity, Benjamin can achieve any career he wants. If this career vector seems too good to be true, it is because it is not true. Benjamin is a simulated character-a sim-inhabiting the virtual space of the popular video game The Sims. McKenzie Wark, author of the book Gamer Theory, created Benjamin as an example of how games are not so much simulations of reality, but ideal models that embody hegemonic ideology (20-22). In this case, Benjamin's easy prosperity reveals how the algorithm governing economic life in The Sims is based on an "American Dream" in which an ideal combination of meritocracy, full employment, equal opportunity, and upward mobility is perceived to be the norm. Wark purposely contrasts his virtual Benjamin, who lives in this free-market ideal of capitalism, to the real Benjamin, a game designer struggling to survive in today's harsh economic landscape. After losing his job at a small game-design firm that went belly-up, the real Benjamin moved to a larger firm-Electronic Arts, owners of The Sims. In an online forum, Benjamin's wife exposed how"

"Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's long career as teacher, theorist and activist has been characterised by a sustained commitment to pedagogy, and in particular by an awareness of how the dilemmas and problems that teaching throws up - whether in the classrooms of subaltern communities in West Bengal or in the seminar rooms of Columbia University - can offer a beginning for theoretical reflection. Such problems, which often serve as anecdotal starting points in her essays as Spivak describes moments of problematic encounter with resistance, confusion, privilege and silence, often work to trip up, in enabling ways, the kinds of paradigms that theory might otherwise want to impose, whether onto notions of cultural, social or gender difference, or onto ideas of development and globality. They are occasions for Spivak to draw attention to the ideological conditions in which differing forms of education (elementary and tertiary, Southern and Northern, public and private) operate, sutured as they are in their different ways to the nation-state. Yet an equally longstanding insistence of Spivak's work, from earlier essays such as her review of Derrida's Limited Inc, 'Revolutions that as Yet Have No Model' (1980) through to later works such as Other Asias (2008) has been that the classroom, whether located in rural West Bengal or in New York, offers a crucial site for the training of the imagination into the possibility of a different, collective political life of the future."

In 2002, attacks on six Asian women and girls temporarily living in the Greater Vancouver Area, Canada to study the English language garnered significant attention. Beginning with the attempted murder of Korean national Ji-Won Park, and ending with the mu

A central tenet of feminist pedagogies is to engage students in dialogue, rather than a teacher-centered lecturing method that is commonly used in college classrooms (Chow et al. 2003, Friere 1970, hooks 1994). This possibility is complicated by faculty's

As we read the many pieces submitted for this special issue, "Knowledge That Matters: Feminist Epistemology, Methodology, and Science Studies," we found we needed multiple literacies to understand the numerous types of writing and art. The transdisciplina