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Abstract
In this paper, in keeping with developing feminist methodologies, we reflect on how we became second-wave feminists in the 1970s. We consider how the theories and practices that we were involved in have been changed as the global socio-political context has transformed higher education practices. Second-wave feminism originated as a political project around ‘the personal’. As it entered the academy, feminism developed and drew on emerging concepts in the social sciences and humanities to develop more sophisticated conceptualizations of the personal. Personalization and the personal have now become ubiquitous in the pedagogical discourses of higher education. As higher education has expanded in the context of globalization and itself become global, it has both elided and incorporated questions of diversity, difference, inequality and power. Concepts such as the personal, love of learning and knowledge, have entered the new literatures of learning and teaching in global higher education. However, in some of these versions concepts of the personal appear to be based upon an impersonal and disembodied subject. New forms of global higher education have built upon feminist theories and yet, at the same time, they have done so by the marginalization and occlusion of feminist critiques. This is evident both within the mainstream neo-liberalism and also within the critical and post-structuralist literatures. In this paper, we offer an alternative critical feminist reading of some of these tendencies and speculate on the lack of personal reflexivity which allows some British authors to expunge feminist analysis from their texts. This leaves a denuded and a-historical concept of the personal, a pale shadow of the agentic political subject of second-wave feminism. The personal as a political project forms the basis of our critique of global higher education practices. It allows for a re-imagining of universities not as disembodied sites of masculine freedom but as socially situated spaces for creative thinking for the twenty-first century.