Wolfson Education Society meetings

Friday October, 18, 2019, Dr. Mark Carrigan, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Culture, Politics and Global Justice Research Cluster, Faculty of Education

“What does it mean to platformise a research centre?”

Fuchs House Meeting Room, Wolfson College, 17:45-19:00 (Refreshments from 17:30)

Research about social media platforms in higher education has tended to focus on individual users, exploring the opportunities and problems entailed by their use of these services. Even when cooperation and collaboration figure into these accounts, it tends to framed in terms of interactions between individuals. But what happens to collectives when they embrace social media? How does an organisation like a research centre change when it embraces the use of social media and what does this mean for the individuals working within it?

Friday November 15, 2019, Dr. Marie-Pierre Morreau, Professor of Education, Anglia Ruskin University

‘Care/rs in academia: in/visibilities, mis/recognition and hierarchies of care’

17:45-19:00 (Location TBD)

Once the preserve of the White, middle-class, male and ‘unencumbered’ scholar, ‘Western’ academia has considerably diversified over the past fifty years, with many students and academic staff now having some form of caring responsibilities (Carers UK, 2014). Yet academic excellence continues to be associated with the ‘bachelor boy’ (Hinton-Smith, 2012) as Cartesian dualisms, which produce academic identities through a denial of emotional domestic, physical and domestic matters, still permeate academic cultures  (Ahmed, 1998; Braidotti, 1991; Leathwood & Hey, 2009). While an ethics of care and care work are not the preserve of those ‘with caring responsibilities’, this group offers a unique lens to explore the way carers are positioned in academic cultures as they cannot easily renounce these responsibilities.

Drawing on a critical and post-structuralist feminist understanding of higher education and care and on a corpus of interviews conducted in England since 2010 with HE students and academics with caring responsibilities, I explore how this group negotiates the conflicting demands of two ‘greedy institutions’ (Coser, 1974): family and higher education. More specifically, I consider how the intersections of care and academic work play out in their experiences and how these are shaped by gender, in intersection with other identity markers such as ethnicity, sexual orientation and social class. Three themes emerge from this large corpus of data: the in/visibilities of carer/s their mis/recognition and the hierarchies of care, pointing to the need for ‘regimes of care’ which consider both inequalities between carers and non-carers, and inequalities among carers.

Thursday November 21, 2019, Dr. Aliandra Lazzari Barlete, Recent graduate Faculty of Education

Title and location to be announced