Race, ethnicity and gendered educational intersections

ABSTRACT

The articles in this themed issue explore global educational experiences that embrace various cultures, traditions, religions and identities. Collectively this work offers valuable insights into unexplored areas of research, illuminating issues that intersect across race, ethnicity and gender. The significance of these studies lies in the solutions, centred on social justice, that reflect resistance, activism and innovation harnessed in response to the problems discussed. This collection helps to bridge the divide between north and south in the academic world, demonstrating that answers to educational inequalities can be found in models for transformation both within and beyond the western hemisphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• ethnicity
• gender
• education
• intersectionality

For more than a decade, my intellectual work has focused on the dynamics of race, gender, and culture; the relationships between race, power, privilege and inequality, and more recently transformative pedagogy, underpinned by social justice. Through Black British Academics as a global platform for racial equity, I have sought to reflect the diversity of people of colour and articulate our lived experiences. When Transforming the Ivory Tower (Gabriel 2020) was published, I was immensely proud of the fact that as a collective, twelve academics of varied ethnic and gender identities from five different regions of the world; captured the similarities, differences and contradictions of our experiences in the academe. Our volume not only articulated intersectional, gendered experiences of racism; but also detailed our transformative work within the challenging, sometimes hostile spaces we occupy. The process of editing the collection of autoethnographies both consolidated and expanded my knowledge of the manifestations of raced and gendered inequality in the age of neoliberalism. I also learned new strategies and models for transformation and change. Editing this themed issue of Gender and Education on race, ethnicity, and gendered intersections has been equally insightful, informative, educational, at times disturbing, but mostly inspiring and uplifting. Research that originates from the West, particularly the UK and US, dominates the academic world, and I acknowledge my culpability in this process as a British-born academic. However, immersing myself in innovative studies that embrace different cultures, religions, traditions, ethnicities and genders has been a transformative process that has affirmed and strengthened my resolve to expand our global reach. I truly hope that my editorial does justice to the amazing contributions of the authors to this area of research and to the global knowledge economy.

Brooms (2020) qualitative study highlights the prevalence of anti-Blackness in US higher education while informing our understanding of gendered intersections in the Black male student experience. In the wider society, the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 and countless unjustified killings of African American men, serve as a painful reminder of the fragility of Black male humanity and the systemic racial oppression they endure through criminalisation and the routine utilisation of lethal force by law enforcement. Anti-Blackness, as a derivative of White supremacy, reflects the positioning of people of African descent at the bottom of the racial hierarchy (Gabriel 2007). Black students are farthest from the idealised, dominant, White, middle-class identity (Aldridge 2000; Mighty 2001). They are therefore seen as the problem (Dumas 2016) and in the case of Black males, as a threat. Higher education, as a microcosm of society, channels dominant constructions of Black manhood through which negative stereotyping and stigmatisation impedes Black male students’ sense of belonging. As a strategic intervention, the Black Male Initiative (BMI) highlights the value of community in collective resistance against raced and gendered microaggressions and its efficacy in restoring engagement, belonging and a passion for learning among the participants. Brooms’ study demonstrates the salience of lived experience and the need for specificity in examining intersectional racialised experiences in education research. It affirms my belief that equity, inclusion and belonging are primary drivers of the student experience that can be enhanced through measures that focus on the cultivation of social capital and agency.

McLean Davies, Truman, and Buzacott’s (2020) teacher-researcher project exposes the persistence of colonial legacies in Australian secondary education, and how they maintain White supremacy through the English curriculum. Their research, approached from a feminist new materialist standpoint, highlights the complexities of whiteness in the institutional processes that influence preferred literature on reading lists and dominate assessment. This results in hegemonic texts authored mostly by White, European males and the delegitimising and exclusion of works by women and people of colour. The issue of inequity is compounded by the neoliberal, marketised culture in secondary education and the bureaucratic burden this entails, leaving little time for teachers to explore solutions to the pro-Imperial, Eurocentric curriculum. The authors argue that the selection of texts used in teaching and assessment is of political significance, since who is included, centred, celebrated and normalised shapes material relations of power along race, gender, sexuality and class lines that have social, cultural and economic consequences in society. Neoliberal ideology prevails in the education sector but is often masked through the appropriation of progressive strategies that are utilised to protect White interests (Jackson 2011). The trend towards decolonisation, is one such example as approaches are often piecemeal, involving superficial gestures that seek to add diversity here and there, rather than overhaul entire programmes with equity and diversity as the starting point. However, McLean Davies, Truman, and Buzacott’s (2020, 9) project represents a meaningful shift towards intellectual activism in the feminist tradition, by focusing on agency through ‘teacher-participants as co-researchers and knowledge producers developing curricular material for themselves’. I believe that to be sustainable, transformative education must be approached holistically and integrate social justice into the very processes that seek to promote diversity, inclusion and equity. Too often there is an unhealthy preoccupation with metrics. However, the best indicator of change is the impact on the educators themselves, who have the power to become changemakers and to inspire their students to also be agents of change.

Giannelli’s (2020) review of Collins’ (1990) reframing of intersectionality as critical social theory, like the text itself is timely and significant. It succinctly extracts key arguments in Hill Collins’ latest offering; one of which is the assertion that within the current neoliberal, marketised academic culture, intersectionality has been appropriated and stripped of its critical purpose. This has expedited the need for affirmative action to restore its utilisation to the intended purpose: as a tool for social change as praxis. This is a familiar argument that I have made myself:

Black feminism has always been a politically oriented mission, whereas the appropriation of intersectionality by some feminist scholars reduces it to a fanciful term in academic writing without even acknowledging its origins (Gabriel 2017, 31).

Giannelli (2020, 1) is quick to point out that Hill Collins’ text is ‘more than “just” an origin story’. It is a call to action for the next generation of scholar activists to defend intersectionality from being relegated to existing purely as theory. However, in reframing intersectionality, Hill Collins’ suggests that social action should be interpreted as critical ways of knowing, arguing that critical knowledge is a form of social action when it is based on lived experience. As a Black feminist scholar, my intellectual activism has been profoundly shaped by Hill Collins’ work. It was through her seminal text referenced by Giannelli Black Feminist Thought, that I was first introduced to the concept of intersectionality. It is central to the research method, autoethnography I adopted for Inside the Ivory Tower, as I assert in its conclusion:

Collins (1990, 221) argues that ‘new knowledge’ is important for social change, and that social transformation occurs when individuals develop the critical consciousness to change the nature of the relations that govern oppression and resistance.

We live in an era of gendered Islamophobia where the misappropriation of feminism too often leads to the portrayal of Islam as misogynistic, serving only to advance colonial interests (Hasan 2012). Such discourses undermine the cause of gender equality; a top priority alongside education, embedded in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Hussain (2020) argues that both education and gender equality in India are mediated through an idealised middle class through the concept of ‘respectable femininity’. This pervasive ideology often represents Muslims as a homogenous group driven only by their religious identity and portrayed as oppositional to women’s empowerment. Hussain’s paper is a timely critique of the notion of Muslim women in India as oppressed by Muslim men and only liberated through western intervention. It offers a rare, intersectional analysis of how Muslim families negotiate issues of ethnicity, class, and education through cultural authorisation. This is defined as a process linked to the concepts of bhal suwali (good girlhood) and bhal ghor (good family), which work in unison to produce a form of symbolic capital, facilitating the enactment of respectable femininity. Hussain acknowledges this as a derivative of colonial values of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, her research also points to the emergence of a ‘new, liberal Muslim’ woman, ‘who embraces education, pursues a career, exercises choice of partners and delays marriage’. Most importantly, this empowered womanhood is not limited to the middle classes but supported by parents from various socioeconomic backgrounds. I thoroughly enjoyed this paper and the significant contribution it makes to our understandings of the intersecting and complex nature of ethnicity, gender, class, education and social mobility in the twenty-first-century India.

Lopes Cardozo and Srimulyani’s (2018) research acknowledges the reality that while education can empower minoritised and marginalised communities, it can also reproduce existing inequalities and exacerbate societal tensions. As such, education remains a key site in political struggles for social change and transformation. Their study is significant in deepening understanding of the role female educational leaders play in this process, within Islamic boarding schools in Aceh Province, Indonesia. Aceh Province has a complex history, both in terms of the devastation caused by the 2004 tsunami, and as the only region in the country to be governed by Sharia Law. This research offers important insights on the intersections of religion, gender, education and development, and the challenges women navigate to gain agency. Combining an adapted version of the Strategic Relational Approach with feminist theory, Lopes Cardozo and Srimulyani’s (2018) study highlight the limited spaces female educational leaders have in which to manoeuvre, resulting in varied modes of resistance from passive and compliant, to a collective form of resistance based on kinship and sisterhood. Women’s leadership and contribution to social transformation and peacebuilding is largely absent from mainstream media coverage. This study is therefore paramount in illuminating the role that grassroots and female social actors play in processes of peace and development.

Meetoo’s (2019) case study challenges dominant representations of South Asian Muslim girls as passive and possessing limited educational and career opportunities due to parental and cultural restraints. Her article posits that mainstream media coverage frequently associates South Asian Muslim communities with ‘backward’ and dangerous traditions such as forced marriage and honour killings. Such representations lead to the othering of South Asian Muslims within a racialised social hierarchy where their religious and cultural values are positioned as oppositional and incompatible with British values. This is compounded by the weaponisation of cultural difference constructed through the lens of state multiculturalism, where the ‘failure’ to manage difference through integration is perceived as responsible for segregation, social conflict and ‘home grown’ terrorists. It is through these negative discourses that South Asian Muslim girls are constructed as being ‘between two cultures’ navigating home, family and community with British social life. Metoo’s (2019) study is important in advancing an alternative conceptualisation of multiculturalism, focused on everyday lived experience in the school setting. Her findings reveal that while a superficial tolerance of cultural difference exists, this is interspersed with subtle experiences of religious and gendered racialisation, sufficient to render feelings of exclusion and marginalisation. Far from being passive victims, the south Asian Muslim schoolgirls in her study formed collective resistance around their Asian identity. This research is significant in highlighting the dynamic nature of everyday multiculturalism and how it plays out within racial, gendered, religious and educational contexts.

Owusu-Kwarteng’s (2019) article resonated with me, not least because she adopts a methodology that enables a personalised, reflective account of her educational and academic experiences, and how both have been shaped by her grandmother’s influence. She argues that adopting an autobiographical narrative approach enables her voice as a marginalised Black woman to be heard. As creator of Black British Academics’ Ivory Tower project on race and gender inequality, fusing autoethnography and participatory witnessing with critical race theory and Black feminism (Gabriel 2020; Gabriel and Tate 2017), has been of paramount importance in centring multiple voices and facilitating intersectional analysis of our lived experience from a Black feminist standpoint. I also engaged with the way that Owusu-Kwarteng (2019) pays homage to her grandmother’s contribution to her educational and professional outcomes, through the social and emotional capital she invested in her family. Numerous studies attest to the presence of maternal grandmothers improving a child’s health, nutrition, survival (Aubel, Touré, and Diagne 2004); their roles in supporting the care of children, mediating conflict, and generally playing an influential role within their communities (Sear, Mace, and McGregor 2000). My maternal grandmother also had a profound influence on my academic and educational development. She ‘never attended university, yet the knowledge and wisdom she imparted to me in my adult years has shaped my academic life more profoundly than anything gleaned through my primary, secondary and tertiary educational experiences in the UK’ (Gabriel 2020, Xii). Race and gender oppression as articulated by Owusu-Kwarteng (2019), like the testimonials in the Ivory Tower series, demonstrate that the discrimination we face often serves as motivation to rise above the marginalisation, exclusion, invisibility, and hypervisibility underpinned by patriarchal, hegemonic whiteness (Gabriel and Tate 2017). In so doing, they facilitate our collective resistance, agency, and contributions as changemakers in transforming the spaces in which we undertake teaching, research, and professional practice.

Adopting a transnational feminist framework that draws on situated knowledge and embodied experiences of gender, Lewinger and Russell’s (2019) study highlights the continued legacies of colonialism and its impact on women and girls in developing countries. The perception that people in the developing world need saving by westerners is pervasive and this includes sex education. As the authors argue, abstinence-only education (AOE) is based on the notion that abstaining from premarital sex is the sole responsibility of girls, underpinned by a moral code that emphasises the purity of females and the need to protect their virginity that leads to blaming and shaming girls. Prior research suggests AOE to be largely ineffective, a fact affirmed by Lewinger and Russell’s (2019) case study. Their findings also point to the gendered inequalities inherent in AOE, given that male students are not held accountable for engaging in premarital sex. Their study offers critical insights into the gendered, imperial nature of AOE in sub-Saharan Africa. Their findings suggest sex education is more effective when it promotes inquiry and critical thinking and when it is delivered in a non-judgemental and gender-responsive manner.

Drawing on the theoretical approach of possible selves, Stahl, McDonald, and Loeser’s (2020) research offers important insights into the experiences of Asian women in Australian higher education, as a key site where identities are formed and negotiated. It charts how the university experience shapes their subjectivities in terms of possibilities, positioning and performances. Increasingly, a liberal, post-gendered view portrays higher education as an equitable space free of barriers, where young women can be empowered and successful. However, as Stahl, McDonald, and Loeser’s (2020) study posits, this is not the case for Asian women, who face intersections of racialisation and sexualisation, combined with the model minority stereotype, that constructs people of Asian descent as compliant, obedient, studious, and educationally gifted. The findings reveal the social and academic identities of the two case study participants informed and shaped each other. Their experiences highlight the fragility of identities, with one struggling to gain a sense of belonging and another failing to make meaningful friendships. Their study demonstrates the utility of the possible selves’ model in illuminating the differential ways that Asian female students negotiate, conform to and resist gender and learner identities in the university environment.

Wijaya Mulya and Sakhiyya’s (2020) research is a timely critique of meritocracy in the neoliberal academe, with its increasing focus on marketisation, corporatisation, competitiveness, entrepreneurism, and bureaucracy. It offers important intersectional analyses outside the dominant US–UK context, of women’s leadership based on subjective realities in the Indonesian context. As the authors note, women face numerous barriers in breaking through the glass ceiling to attain leadership roles, not least the old boy’s network, gender bias and closed recruitment practices. It is unsurprising therefore, that women are under-represented in leadership roles in the corporate world, as well as in higher education. With regards to the latter, academia is often portrayed as a progressive space of objectivity, neutrality, and equality. The façade of meritocracy masks structural inequalities and instead points to personal deficiencies as the cause of stagnant careers. As the third largest democracy in the world with the largest Muslim population, Indonesia offers a rich space for analysis given the dynamics of gender, religion and culture. The alternative discourses on leadership this study offers are a refreshing rebuttal of dominant ideologies around leadership rooted in individualism and bureaucracy. The conceptualisation of leadership as a moral responsibility accountable to God, and the university as a family (amanah), is the antithesis of neoliberal meritocracy. It provides cultural relevance as well as constructing non-Eurocentric models of leadership.

This is a brief review and reflections on an international collection of research, on the myriad of ways that race, ethnicity, religion, and gender shapes intersectional experiences within the global education sector. I hope it inspires you to engage with the authors’ work beyond this special edition. When our teaching, research and professional practice is informed by non-dominant epistemologies, our critical ways of knowing are expanded, and as Patricia Hill Collins asserts (Giannelli 2020), transition from knowledge to agency to action, and eventually to social change.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deborah Gabriel

Dr Deborah Gabriel is a consultant and leader in education and social justice and the founder and director of Black British Academics. She specialises in strategic approaches to equity, diversity, inclusion, curriculum development, inclusive teaching strategies and emancipatory research. Her work is interdisciplinary and broadly focused on the dynamics of race, gender and culture; analysis of the relationships between power, privilege and inequality, and transformative pedagogy.