Is Gender Not Enough? Intersectionality for Contextualizing Teachers' Work in Transnational Spaces

• In Event: 31.019 - Intersectionality and Transnational Education Research for a New World Order?

Abstract

Is gender not enough for understanding teachers’ work in transnational contexts during power pandemonium? This is the central question the paper aims to address. The paper is premised on the need for education policy researchers to rethink their analytical frameworks in productive conversation with the self, the contemporary context in which rethinking occurs, and research(ers) from different contexts and timeframes.
The two-part response to the central question involves reflexivity as a study in and of itself and a new standalone study. First contemplated is setting aside gender for intersectionality (Robert & Yu, 2018) as analytical concept for education policy analysis. How does a shift away from gender-foregrounded research affect a feminist research agenda? Then two studies of teachers and their work from Southern contexts: Connell’s Teachers’ Work (1985) from Australia and Robert’s Neoliberal Education Reform (2017) from Argentina are re-analyzed. What is gained (and lost) when re-analyzed with Choo and Ferree’s (2010) three intersectional approaches translated for transnational education policy research (Robert & Yu, 2018)?
The reflexivity and re-analysis transpire in a swirl of rising awareness and emboldened calling out of gender inequality, violence against women, and sexist education. Centuries-old feminisms in the Americas are pulled from closets and dusty shelves, transformed in and over social media (e.g., #MeToo and #NiUnaMenos) and on the streets. However, historic changes such as legal abortion in Argentina also transpire at the same time as legal access to abortion is eliminated for the vast majority of United States-based women/girls. Furthermore, social movements fighting for equity like #blacklivesmatter and the LGBTQ community should not be ignored. Protecting human rights is a grave challenge. Crafting education policy research to understand teachers’ work involves contextualizing these various power dynamics.
Crafting education policy research also requires contextualizing context. The nation still plays a significant role in the formation of differences and inequalities (Grzanka, 2014; Mohanty, 2013). While attention to global transformations in policy making and power are merited, the nation should not be “transmogrified into an independent variable” (Grzanka 2014, p. 197). The nation is context and power broker on global and local levels, part of “a historical process that is produced within and by local and global gender, sexual, economic, and racial politics” (ibid). Education researchers must articulate a more complex understanding of nations, borders, and migrations (Patil, 2013) to produce policy knowledge in historical and contemporary perspective.
A double hermeneutic exercise, the paper tackles the challenges and possibilities of intersectionality in transnational education policy research, generally, and more specifically for
the study of teachers’ work. A surge in strong-man authoritarianism, right-wing politics, and populism, layered on top of global neoliberalism and a worldwide refugee crisis creates an urgent need to document and to critique the ways power works with and through the policy process to shape where teachers work (e.g., charter schools, deteriorating public schools, conflict zones), when teachers work (e.g., multiple jobs, longer hours, with “flexibility”), and why teachers work (and why they do not work).

Authors

• Sarah A. Robert, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Danielle V. Lewis, University at Buffalo - SUNY