Material Feminisms: New Directions for Education

Carol Taylor is a Reader in the Sheffield Institute of Education at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, where she leads the Higher Education Research Group. Her research focuses on space, gender and bodies, mundane materialities, student engagement, and ethics. She has recently co-edited two journal special issues: one on New Material Feminisms for Gender and Education (with Gabrielle Ivinson) and one on student engagement and ethics for the Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education (with Carol Robinson). Her work has been published in Cultural Studies=Critical Methodologies, Studies in Higher Education, and Gender and Education. Her recent funded projects include the development of an ethical framework for student partnership (Higher Education Academy) and an installation on workplace objects for the 2015 ESRC Festival of Social Science. Gabrielle Ivinson is Professor in Education at the School of Education, University of Aberdeen, UK. She is the author of Rethinking Single-sex teaching: Gender, school subjects and learning (with Murphy, 2007), co-editor of Knowledge and Identity: concepts and applications in Bernstein’s sociology of knowledge (with Davies and Fitz, 2011), and co-editor of the journal special issue ‘Material Feminisms: New Directions for Education’ for Gender and Education (with Carol Taylor). As a social and developmental psychologist, she researches the intergenerational transmission of knowledge as a social resource in places of poverty. Her recent　projects involve working with a range of artists to co-produce art forms and artefacts to enable young people to communicate with persons in authority by drawing on the affective power of art to move.

Introduction – Material feminisms: new directions for education 1. A more ‘livable’ school? A diffractive analysis of the performative enactments of girls’ ill-/well-being with(in) school environments 2. Objects, bodies and space: gender and embodied practices of mattering in the classroom 3. Valleys’ girls: re-theorising bodies and agency in a semi-rural post-industrial locale 4. The teacher–student writing conference reimaged: entangled becoming-writingconferencing 5. Theorising learning and nature: post-human possibilities and problems 6. Gendered subjectivities of spacetimematter 7. Making matter making us: thinking with Grosz to find freedom in new feminist materialisms 8. Materialist mappings of knowing in being: researchers constituted in the production of knowledge 9. Re-turning feminist methodologies: from a social to an ecological epistemology