Challenging social hegemonies through pedagogies of resistance

Abstract

It is my great pleasure to author my first editorial for International Studies in Widening Participation (ISWP). I write these words directly after attending the Gender and Education Association 2018 conference, hosted by the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education (CEEHE), University of Newcastle, Australia. The conference theme, Gender, post-truth populism and pedagogies: Challenges and strategies in a shifting political landscape, interrogated the specific challenges to feminist and critical research about gender and education in contemporary socio-political contexts which are often challenging to those with a concern for social justice. Another aspiration of the conference was the exploration of possibilities for feminist interventions across a range of intersecting platforms: scholarly, activist, and pedagogical.

In many ways, both ambitions resonate with this Issue of ISWP. The articles gathered here are diverse, including in terms of their epistemological, theoretical and empirical standpoints. They also span a range of institutional and cultural contexts. Yet they are brought together by their shared scholarly and political concern for deconstructing the power relations at play in relation to discourses of widening participation and for pedagogies of resistance and the possibilities that come with these.