Feminist Repetitions in Higher Education

"Why must feminism still repeat itself? What must feminism still intervene in? How can we stretch our colleagues, disciplines, universities and ourselves in our feminist interruptions? How do feminists negotiate the ambivalences of working in the non-feminist university? This vital book responds by creatively attending  to unequal educational journeys along intersecting paths of privilege and precarity across academic ‘career courses’."—Professor Mary Lou Rasmussen, The Australian National University, Australia
To do feminism and to be a feminist in higher education is to repeat oneself: to insist on gender equality as more than institutional incorporation and diversity auditing, to insert oneself into and against neoliberal measures, and to argue for nuanced intersectional feminist analysis and action. This book returns to established feminist strategies for taking up academic space, re-thinking how feminists inhabit the university and pushing back against institutional failures. The authors assert the academic career course as fundamental to understanding how feminist educational journeys, collaborations and cares and ways of knowing stretch across and reconstitute academic hierarchies, collectivising and politicising feminist career successes and failures. By prioritising interruptions, the book navigates through feminist methods of researcher reflexivity, autoethnography and collective biography: in doing so, moving from feminist identity to feminist practice and repeating the potential of queer feminist interruptions to the university and ourselves. ​​
Maddie Breeze is Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Strathclyde, UK. She is a feminist sociologist researching educational inequalities, particularly in higher education, widening participation, and academic identities. Her first book Seriousness in Women's Roller Derby was awarded the 2016 British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Prize. Yvette Taylor is Professor at the University of Strathclyde, UK. She is a feminist sociologist and researches intersecting social inequalities, often around manifestations of gender, social class and sexuality. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, teaches on the MSc in Applied Gender Studies, and edits the Palgrave Gender and Education Series.