Thinking about gender. Women and girls' education in an age of vulnerability, inequality and planetary boundaries

• In Event: The 70th anniversary of the International Review of Education: Reflecting on the history of comparative education and ‘development’ (Part 2)

Proposal

In concluding a detailed, reflective analysis in International Review of Education (2014) of the work of Paulo Freire from a gender perspective Nelly Stromquist wrote ‘Our future will be always stronger when we recognise that knowledge is cumulative and thus a collective process.’ (Stromquist, 2014) This article attempts to trace the path of this cumulative and collective process looking at work on gender and education over five decades of the journal’s publication. It distinguishes two lines of discussion. One comprises work on or about gender, girls’ and women’s education, which seeks to describe or contextualise gender relationships in or through education, often linking these with forms of inequality, injustice, hierarchy and sometimes violence. A second seeks to develop a gender perspective, sometimes linking this with other emancipatory ideas for education, such as empowerment or social justice. The article examines some of the tensions and implicit connections between the two perspectives. In the last decade a third approach has emerged, which I term discursive dispersal, linking this with some neoliberal processes. Here the two meanings become blurred. In making a case against dispersal, and for a clearly articulated and reasoned form of connection between the two strands for analyzing gender , cognisant of why the cumulative and collective knowledge making Stromquist delineated was important, the article frames work on gender and education needing to be linked with processes of critical scholarship, alliance building, solidarities and concerns with human development in the face of planetary boundaries and immense vulnerabilities.

Author

• Elaine Unterhalter, Centre for Education & International Development