Examining the gendered timescapes of higher education: reflections through letter writing as feminist praxis

ABSTRACT

This article examines the significance of neoliberalism in re/shaping the gendered timescapes of higher education in Ghana through its intersection with patriarchal forces. It draws from a project aiming to create non-hierarchical, co-mentoring spaces in which participants collaboratively generate feminist analyses. Letter-writing was identified as a form of feminist praxis and an auto/biographical method to access the multidimensional inequalities women navigated in their careers. Opening counter-hegemonic time–space and providing feminist conceptual resources, the women explored their aspirations, experiences, and subjectivities. In Ghana, women are attempting to balance the accelerated temporalities of neoliberal higher education, as productive subjects, with the explicit demands of patriarchy, which construct them primarily in reproductive terms as wives and mothers. Our collective reflections illustrate that intersecting forces are at play that impact women’s higher education careers in unpredictable and contradictory ways.

KEYWORDS:

• time-space
• gendered inequalities
• neoliberalism
• patriarchy
• higher education
• women’s careers
• auto/biographical and epistolary methods

Introduction

This paper draws from a body of work exploring feminist writing praxis (Burke and Jackson 2007; Burke, Crozier, and Misiaszek 2017; Burke and Gyamera 2020) and the transformative potential of feminist collaborative methodologies to challenge hegemonic forces that reproduce gendered inequalities (Burke 2002). It draws from an ongoing project aiming to create non-hierarchical, co-mentoring spaces in which participants generate feminist analysis to examine the intersecting dynamics of neoliberalism and patriarchy in Ghanaian higher education and in their lives. The project conception emerged from Gifty Gyamera’s personal experiences as a female, early-career researcher struggling to be taken seriously by the male university leaders in Ghana she sought to interview for her PhD. This led to an increasing awareness that there were very few senior women academics and leaders in Ghanaian higher education, and her determination to better understand the gendered dynamics she experienced through her doctoral studies. The project aimed to open time and space for women academics and administrators in Ghana to critically explore their experiences whilst providing peer mentoring and mutual support. Letter-writing was identified as a method to generate possibilities for exchange, deep reflection and new understanding. This paper draws from the letters produced by the programme participants and our collective analyses of these.

We identified letter-writing as an auto/biographical method, which would enable us to access immediate experience, feelings and emotions (Tamboukou 2020, xvii). In keeping with epistolary studies, letter-writing provides an ‘everyday-ness’ and generates critical reflection on the taken-for-granted nature of lived experience (Halldórsdóttir 2020, 186). This allows examination of complex layers of meaning (Tamboukou 2020, xvii) and the contexts in which letters are written and read (Halldórsdóttir 2020, 190). We drew on letter-writing as a method committed to reciprocity (Halldórsdóttir 2020, 190), to collaboratively re/craft the meanings attached to women’s experiences in specific Ghanaian contexts. However, working with letters raises key questions around a ‘complex spectrum of questions around representation, context, truth, power, desire, identity, subjectivity, memory and ethics, questions’ and requires close analytical attention to the context in which the letters are produced (Tamboukou 2020, xvii). We are interested in the ways our letters reveal women’s everyday experiences over time of the spaces of home, work and study, in which there is a strong patriarchal imperative for women to fulfil what is often constructed as their ‘Divine’ and ‘Existential’ roles in becoming wives and mothers (Gyamera and Burke 2020). As one woman explains in her letter:

That is where the difficulty lies because its either you focus on the family or the career. For there is an adage that, ‘when you look into the bottle with the two eyes you go blind’. Its either you succeed with the academic or the family. Hence for me, the family is first and the career second. With this I know that the speed with which I will need to climb the academic ladder will be less as compared with my male counterpart, but that is the price to pay and I accept with no complaints. (Academic)

Patriarchy does not operate as a singular or monodimensional political force. It works within a complex dynamic of entwined forces and relations, which play out at the macro-level of institutions and affect the micro-level of lived experiences (Burke, Crozier, and Misiaszek 2017). This includes the gendered experiences of neoliberal temporalities, such as the expectation to be a ‘productive’ academic within constrained timeframes that are often out of alignment with the pressures of home and family, and institutional spatialities, such as the ways different bodies are discursively positioned in space in relation to being (mis)recognized as an ‘academic’, ‘manager’, ‘wife’ and/or ‘mother’.

The lens of a ‘landscape’ has been a central way to articulate higher education research and policy. However, this has been critiqued by higher education scholars (Burke and Manathunga 2020) who argue for a ‘temporally balanced approach’ – or a ‘power chronography’ – which enables a ‘balanced space–time approach to understanding different temporalities’ (Sharma 2013, 316). Higher education is not a static institution; it is constituted by material and discursive spatialities and temporalities that contribute to producing and/or challenging gendered relations and subjectivities. Higher education time–space – or ‘timescapes’ (Adam 1998) – are shaped by the social practices, embodied subjectivities and inequalities that generate assumptions about what higher education is, and who it is for (Burke 2012). The increasing expectation of academics to be tireless workers (Oleksiyenko 2018, 193) who are always available and committed to juggling competing professional demands in the increasingly accelerated temporalities of academic labour (Burke and Manathunga 2020) is in contestation with the patriarchal demands on women associated with reproductive labour. Although it is now well-established that higher education has entered an era of neoliberalism globally (e.g. Slaughter and Leslie 1997; Gill 2010; Morley and Crossouard 2016), we need to understand this within specific national contexts. In Ghana, neoliberal frameworks have gradually but steadily seeped into the core fabric of higher education (Gyamera and Burke 2018; Gyamera 2019) with significant effects for women academics and administrators, who are confronted with gendered socio-cultural expectations within what is discursively constructed as a level playing field through neoliberal discourses of meritocracy (Francis, Burke, and Read 2014).

Despite the pervasiveness of neoliberalism in Ghanaian higher education, both faculty and administrators have limited time and space to make sense of its impact and/or to critique neoliberal policies and practices, which have become discursively engrained and thus to some extent invisible. Indeed, the move towards neoliberalism is highly desired by Ghanaian executive university leaders and thus those who exhibit neoliberal orientations are perceived as heroes and leaders worth emulation (Gyamera 2014). Within this context, this paper explores the heterogeneous perspectives of women academics and administrators in Ghana navigating the intersecting forces of neoliberalism and patriarchy on educational and career experiences. Building on Gyamera’s doctoral study (2014), we examine the extent to which Ghanaian academics and administrators are compelled by neoliberalism; and what possibilities there are for resistance to the hegemonic timescapes of higher education workplaces. We explore how the performative demands of neoliberalism intersect with the social, cultural and traditional expectations of women. We consider this through feminist methods of letter writing, facilitated through our participatory project that offered a series of workshops held in Ghana and co-designed by Gifty Gyamera and Penny Jane Burke. This participatory project brought us together with women academics and administrators across Ghana over sustained time (from 2017 to present) in a community of praxis (Burke 2020), which we name the Ghanaian Feminist Collective.

Gendered inequalities in the (neoliberal) timescapes of higher education

Neoliberalism impacts gender equity in subtle ways that are not straightforwardly measurable, such as feelings of shame, resentment or isolation, and this requires close-up feminist analyses to bring to light these insidious inequalities (Burke 2020). Feminist analyses involve the detailed work that enables contextualization and in-depth understanding of the complex relation of neoliberal timescapes to lived experiences of gendered inequalities. Intersectional theory (e.g. Hill Collins 2019; Hill Collins and Bilge 2020) illuminates that feminist analysis is required at the personal level (e.g. how gender and neoliberalism are intersecting forces that differently position and construct academic subjectivities and practices) and at the macro level (e.g. how inequalities are systematically organized and produced through intersecting structures of oppression and relations of power). Feminist theory of social justice as multidimensional (Fraser 2009, 2013), when applied to higher education (e.g. Burke 2012; Bozalek, Holscher, and Zembylas 2020), enables nuanced analysis of lived experiences across social (redistributive justice), cultural (recognitive justice) and political (representative justice) dimensions. Feminist analyses emphasizes the importance of attention to the inter-related global, national, institutional and micro-level contexts in which experience and subjectivity is formed across time–space. Mono-dimensional explanations that focus on a singular political force (e.g. a focus on neoliberalism alone) and one dimension of inequality (e.g. a focus only on the cultural expectations of women) are always limited in illuminating the complex lived, embodied experiences of gender within and across the timescapes of higher education in relation to other intersecting timescapes (e.g. of family, home and work).

Feminist work has highlighted how neoliberalism presents higher education as gender neutral, by constructing humans in discourses of individualism operating as consumers of the market of higher education. In such constructions, students and staff are perceived as agentic subjects, freely exercising their individuality, individualism and individual choice. This impacts on personal understanding and articulation of experiences of higher education and tends to make invisible the impact of gendered and other structural inequalities on identity-formation.

Furthermore, feminist scholars have brought attention to the ways that neoliberal demands often impact more heavily on women academics than their male counterparts (Currie, Thiele, and Harris 2002). Although neoliberal cultures affect every individual academic, women are positioned differently in relation to complex gendered inequalities and power relations (Currie, Thiele, and Harris 2002). For example, women as a group have lower salaries and hold fewer senior positions across transnational higher education contexts (Hills et al. 2010; Lipton 2015). There is evidence that women have a lower success rate with prestigious funding bodies (Boyle et al. 2015; Ley and Hamilton 2008; Watson and Hjorth 2015), which might be reflective of their underrepresentation in the disciplinary fields that tend to attract more prestigious and larger funding. Furthermore, family and domestic responsibilities continue to place a heavier weight on women rather than men (e.g. Lynch 2010; Beaudry and Prozesky 2017) and women tend to be concentrated in casual, part-time and/or teaching-only contracts (Probert 2005). In Ghana, male staff far exceed females, even in subject areas historically associated with women (Atuahene and Owusu-Ansah, 2013). Female students and staff similarly often face gendered inequalities that operate at a number of levels, including negotiating multiple and contradictory demands on their time through caring commitments, facing sexual harassment and violence and being constructed in deficit ways in relation to gendered polarizing discourses (such as lacking confidence).

Letter writing as a feminist collective praxis

This paper draws on a participatory project with women who form the Ghanaian Feminist Collective and who occupy different roles and positions in Ghanaian higher education. The project was framed by Pedagogical Methodologies (Burke, Crozier, and Misiaszek 2017; Burke and Lumb 2018) or PPOEMs (Praxis-based Pedagogical, Ethically-oriented, Methodologies, see Burke 2020), with the aim to open up counter-hegemonic time–space and feminist conceptual resources for women to explore the ways that intersecting power relations and multidimensional inequalities play out in relation to their education and career aspirations, experiences and subjectivities. PPOEMs reframes research as a pedagogical space, in which time is prioritized for collaborative meaning-making of shared questions. We engaged a process of re-searching our experiences of higher education together through feminist analysis and by collectively examining the discourses at play in the different timescapes we were situated within, across and between (e.g. of work, study, home and family). The methods were co-developed with the aim to generate a shared sense of understanding whilst recognizing the differences, contestations and contexts across the Collective. Our praxis-based framework was developed by a commitment to ongoing dialogue facilitated through the workshops and re-search methods, with sustained consideration of the power dynamics within and beyond the workshops and the ways these shaped the politics of representation. Our key methods were Letter Writing as Feminist Praxis and Autobiography of the Question (Burke and Gyamera 2020), which enabled expression of our different histories and experiences with close and critical engagement with feminist concepts, material, and insights. In thinking about our work as ‘re-search’, we are emphasizing the continual and reflexive process of bending research back on itself (Usher 1997, 36) and of taking up positions of un-knowing (Lather 2009). Our aim was to invite collaborative and personal engagement across the different contexts, disciplines, perspectives, inequalities and dilemmas that the re-searchers navigated and to interrogate our ‘social location to disentangle how it shaped [our different] definition[s] of the situation[s]’ (Haney 2004, 297) we explored though our letter-writing, auto/biographical exploration and workshop exchanges.

The Ghanaian Feminist Collective was constituted of a diverse group of sixteen women academics and administrators at different stages of their careers, representing different positions, age groups and home-life contexts. The women were from five Ghanaian universities (one private university and four public universities in the Accra and Central regions of Ghana). The Collective was comprised of eleven academics, eight of these at the early stages of their careers, and five administrators at different career stages. The women were aged between 25 and 65 with the majority between the ages of 40–55. Fifteen of the women identified as Christian and ten of the women were married with children. Six of the women belonged to a Ghanaian minority ethnic group and six of the women worked in three of the largest universities in Ghana. Five of the women were undertaking PhD research.

The workshops were co-designed and facilitated by Gifty and Penny with the aim to generate a feminist timescape in which participants had the opportunity to explore their personal experiences with their peers and in relation to wider structural, social, cultural and political inequalities. The workshops provided access to feminist theories and methodologies to facilitate possibilities for critical reflexivity, and through letter-writing, participants were invited to engage in writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson 2003).

The letters drawn from in this paper were generated through participation in two 3-day residential workshops, which aimed to offer a timescape shaped by an ethics of care, empathy and collaboration. The workshops, held in 2018, introduced the Collective to feminist concepts to explicitly critique neoliberal higher education and to stimulate critical reflection of personal and collective experiences. The project intentionally redistributed pedagogical, theoretical, methodological and material resources via literature, feminist methods, accommodation, travel expenses and workshop materials with the aim to bring the women together in a peaceful, caring and relaxing space that enabled peer-exchange and co-mentoring. The workshop venue in Ghana was deliberately selected as a scenic, beautiful, and restorative space as a form of recognition of the value of each woman’s important contribution and of the significance of re-searching together. The intention was to create a timescape that contrasted the neoliberal and patriarchal demands of higher education and family, both critiqued as ‘greedy institutions’ (Edwards 2017). The workshops were designed to bring women together in collective dialogue, helping to create feminist ‘communities of praxis’ (Burke 2020), with the aim to collectively interrogate the taken-for-granted assumptions and practices within our professional and academic communities and to begin a process of praxis, or ongoing critical reflection/action. A series of workshops enabled sustained engagement with collaborative and pedagogical processes of deep analysis of the personal (our autobiographical accounts through letter writing) and the political (our collective analysis of the neoliberal and patriarchal spaces of higher education). It is important to recognize that the workshop was strongly shaped by the feminist values and perspectives brought by Penny and Gifty as the workshop designers and facilitators. This inevitably formed the ethos and tone of the project and shaped the Collective. However, as part of the PPOEMs process, we took care to create a time and space in which it felt possible for participants to express dissent and to critique the workshop materials offered.

Letter writing was drawn on as a ‘method of inquiry’ (Richardson 2003), through the ‘autobiography of the question’ (Miller 1997). Participants formed part of a feminist writing collective and were encouraged to let their writing flow in any way they wanted to, disrupting the regulatory conventions of academic writing (Lillis 2001). Letter writing created a sense of connection, being heard and ‘being part of something that happens when you know someone else is reading you’ (Lira, Muñoz-García, and Loncon 2019, 480). A set of questions were offered to support the writing process without expectations of rigidly following these in any prescribed way. Writing-in-progress was shared in a supportive environment to generate discussion, connection and reflexivity, creating emergent spaces of co-mentoring and praxis. An iterative approach to letter writing enabled the women to consider the impact of intersecting forces on their lives in relation to personal, educational and career experiences and subjectivities and to identify intersections of struggles for freedom (Davis 2016). The letters were crafted as drafts that could be reworked over time as the women gained a deeper grasp of what they wanted to say in relation to the workshop materials, discussions and processes.

The challenges in working collaboratively inevitably brought to the fore the ethical dilemmas in working across differences, respecting the diverse perspectives and values across the group and recognizing the personal autobiographies and experiences brought into dialogue with broader theories and concepts and in relation to wider social structures and contexts. It was important to be sensitive to the different relationships of the women to feminist theories, methodologies and debates, including that many of the Collective members were unfamiliar with these and were coming to these ideas for the first time. This was deeply challenging for some of the women as well as for Gifty and Penny in sustaining sensitive pedagogical relationalities across the different time, space and embodied experiences opened by the PPOEMs framework. Furthermore, it was important that Penny in particular interrogated her assumptions as a White feminist academic, based outside of Ghana. In writing this paper, Gifty and Penny reread the letters and identified emerging themes which were then shared with the Collective for their thoughts. Drafts of this paper were circulated to all members of the Collective for their feedback. Inspired by a feminist collective biographical approach (Davies and Gannon 2006), we have woven extracts from the letters in relation to the emergent themes, to explore women’s lived experiences and subjectivities within the timescapes of higher education.

These collaborative methods generated a unique feminist timescape for the project enabling (drawing from words generated by the Collective): a ‘rethinking of sisterhood and identity’, ‘an awakening’ and a timescape for ‘re-energising strength’. The workshops were described as ‘insightful’; a space for ‘rethinking gender’; ‘enlightening’; ‘wonderful’; ‘creating new social ideas’; enabling ‘unique experiences’ and generating a sense of ‘women power’. The next sections present a series of representations of the key themes expressed collectively and drawn from across the letters.

Collective reflection 1: examining the intersections of patriarchy and neoliberalism in higher education access and participation

Neoliberalism is further compounded by society’s negative traditional and cultural practices such that opportunities to have formal education are first and predominantly offered to males. Being the only female in my family did not call for me to be able to go to school and reach a higher level of education because everybody is expecting me to marry and give birth for the continuity of the family tree. My mother though was of a different opinion that females should be empowered and have the same opportunities as their male counterparts. She believed that education was the only weapon for a woman to have relevance in our society where males continue to rule. She encouraged and supported me with all the resources she had to see me through education. Having higher education opened doors that otherwise would have been difficult. However, females who are lucky enough to have educational access are still required to play the roles expected of mothers or wives by helping or lending a hand at home to clean, cook meals and care for children. Yet, one of my key constructive moments when I was growing up was the opportunity to building my capacity through the house chores that my mother gave me. The hard work of walking long distances to the farm, weeding, planting, harvesting, carrying loads of food home, fetching water from the river, house cleaning, cooking, etc. has been my best training in life. It helped me develop the attitude and skill of hard work, a valuable resource in the neoliberal university. In this way, women are empowered to manage the home, children, career, micro and macro businesses and her whole life independent of the man. (Administrator)

When I finally got the appointment to start teaching there in 2008, I was sure I had done the right thing and was finally at the right place. But I was wrong. As a lecturer in gender studies and later on as a manager of a Gender Development Centre, I soon realized that I was not regarded as a “proper” lecturer. Some colleagues even nicknamed me “madam gender”. I was excluded from most meetings, courses outside and was even denied some entitlements. Femininity is marginalized, underestimated, undermined, silenced and more often than not, made irrelevant. Yet the Centre was making a lot of money from the courses being run. Can neoliberalism explain this? How can commodification of knowledge explain this? Does culture or ethnicity play a part? (Academic)

These reflections illustrate that neoliberalism is not a monolithic force that straightforwardly explains experiences of gendered inequalities in and outside of higher education. Rather different, heterogeneous and intersecting forces are at play across a range of social and personal timescapes that impact women’s higher education access and experiences, often in unpredictable and contradictory ways. This includes ways that expectations of girls in the family sometime work in surprising ways as valuable foundational training for the neoliberal university. Continuity and change happen simultaneously across the timescapes of women’s struggles to access education and to be positioned as legitimate, recognizable and valued persons within the micro-politics and macro-structures of family and educational spaces. Although family structures and patriarchal discourses often reinforce girls’ unequal access to education, their position of responsibility provides a source of power as a resource to navigate and challenge gendered inequalities. Yet even when ‘successful’ in gaining access to higher education as a lecturer and managing an income-generating centre that theoretically should generate some form of position and esteem in terms of neoliberalism, sustained patriarchal structures repeatedly recuperate unequal and exclusionary relations that reposition women as ‘out of place’ in the university. This gendered misrecognition is formed through the unequal patterns of cultural value that are sustained in the neoliberal timescapes of higher education, in which enduring forms of women’s status subordination are at play with contemporary neoliberal imperatives.

Collective reflection 2: unequal time structures and the politics of gender

My joy of joining academia was the opportunity to have control over my time – not to be fixed into an 8am – 5pm job. However, I need to publish or perish so my time is always not enough for me. Your promotion depends on the writing of articles, your teaching and your service to the community in which you find yourself. Eiiii!!!!! Hmmmmm!!!!. I have to take up the household responsibilities as well as teaching, community service and publication roles. I have been continuing with my blended approach with the support of my husband always. This has helped me to be relevant in my field of specialization at the same time as fulfilling my role as a mother and a wife to my family. (Academic)

Going through the terminal degrees programme as a mother of four young children was a great challenge. I had to plan my life such that I was working throughout the night to meet deadlines and schedules. I continued the blend model until I successfully completed my programme. Yet, putting papers together for promotion is even seen as a threat because one man asked if I wanted to be the next Dean or Pro VC. This man felt I needed to slow down because certain positions are destined for men. I strived to be the best throughout my entire educational life. However, neither the efforts nor the excellence were applauded, I was rather prejudiced. Everything I achieved as the best student, and the best female student for the year, were all attributed to grade favours from men in exchange of sex; something I never tried. The image painted of me was so horrible that I needed to stay away from my course mates after school in order not to hear more of such demeaning stories. (Academic)

Unfortunately, these misconceptions once again followed me to the workplace where most people thought I didn’t deserve certain positions because of my gender and my age. In their minds, such positions could only be given to a young woman like myself who had sexual relationships with men in top management positions. My life even got worse at work when I was assigned to a male boss who always wanted to prove to me that I wasn’t as intelligent as I had been made to believe. (PhD candidate)

In my institution’s dynamics, there are complex power relations there where femininity is marginalized, underestimated, undermined, silenced and more often than not, made irrelevant, thus meritocracy no longer works the way it should, but networks and mediocrity prevails. (Administrator)

Letter writing illuminated that neoliberal discourses of meritocracy are deeply flawed, as are the time structures that subtly work to conceal gendered injustices. Neoliberal discourses of meritocracy tend to construct time as a neutral site to be managed effectively by the individual, disregarding the inequalities that shape a person’s differential relationship to time (Bennett and Burke 2018). Rather, time is not straightforwardly managed to ensure success but is an unequal structure that conceals gendered inequalities. Managing time to produce papers for publication is highly challenging when time is pulled in multiple and competing directions with the demands of universities rubbing against gendered expectations and commitments within familial spaces. Yet, despite these challenges many of the women in our Collective met the rigid demands and expectations of higher education through an individual tenacity and resilience that is arguably celebrated by neoliberal higher education. Despite this, the intersections of neoliberalism with patriarchy sustained gendered injustices of misrecognition for many of us. Indeed, this was often problematically perceived by others as a deliberate manipulation of abusive patriarchal practices for personal gain. In this way, the pressures of the neoliberal university were made untenable by the patriarchal discourses and structures that women attempted to navigate.

Collective reflection 3: discriminatory structures

An interesting issue happened when my husband was asked to hold a higher position on one of the university’s campuses that needed to take my family out of Accra. I had been ranked higher than him but was not asked to take up that position because all those in the position are males. When it was communicated to him to go, he told them that they needed to ask permission from me if I was interested in moving out of Accra. He was told that, a woman would automatically follow the husband so he was not to worry. When the time was due, I refused to move and it became a big issue for them to deal with. (Academic)

[X HE Institution] is still male dominated. Female academics still suffer a lot of discrimination in terms of appointments and promotions as they are not regarded as capable of leading. This explains why to date, [X HE Institution] cannot boast of even an acting Dean of any school. There are all men in the Executive Management team and the situation will remain so in the foreseeable future. As more and more female lecturers join the ranks of academics, they are subject to all kinds of treatments from even students. There have been instances where students had the nerve to ask female lecturers for a date. (Academic)

I have personally suffered prejudice as a young woman in male dominated environments where intelligence and hard work were never appreciated/applauded, but I was judged based on my gender. It was perceived that a young fashionable woman could not excel in the engineering and technology fields without receiving favours from men, or ultimately, sleeping with men in exchange of grades. (PhD candidate)

The letter extracts point to shared experiences of discriminatory structures that make it difficult for women to progress in relation to their aspirations, despite their achievements and capacities, which were regularly misrecognized. Although these were personal accounts, the collaborative, feminist approach to sense-making enabled a collective analysis to emerge of how the personal was shaped by broader structures and relations of inequality. Our analysis pointed to the institutionalized misrecognition of women’s capability in higher education, further compounded by the lack of women in senior leadership positions. There was little institutional space therefore for women to directly represent the gendered injustices that perpetuate women’s status subordination within higher education despite the achievements that might be expected to generate recognition. The recognitive injustice perpetuated the deeply flawed perception that women did not have the ability to excel in male-dominated subject areas such as engineering and technology and further enabled the sexual harassment and abuse of female lecturers. Together we considered the question: how might such gendered injustices be challenged by developing collective knowing, sense-making and awareness across our different contexts and experiences?

Collective reflection 4: interrogating critiques of neoliberalism

Neo-liberalism did not affect universities much as they were not forced to restructure or change their policies – for example, same rules and regulations regarding recruitment and progression remained, and the government still gives study loans to students and allocates to public universities, and the numbers of universities increased modestly as a result of neo-liberalism. Commercialization of education was not promoted feverishly. All citizens had fees paid for at university, as part of post-independence manpower development. My government paid for my education from primary through Ph.D and I have never been required to pay this back. The only requirement was to work for at least two years for the government after my first degree. (Academic)

As professionals in academia, the opportunity to build linkages and networks has been largely due to neoliberalism. Professional networks have provided avenues for female staff to be given the opportunity to meet or interact, as we are doing now at this workshop, and learn, teach and contribute towards capacity building, policy formulation and sometimes implementation. It provides the opportunity to get cues and learn lessons regarding coping strategies which would enable one to withstand and fare well in academia. (Administrator)

The letter-writing process gave space to acknowledge the complexities of how political forces such as neoliberalism have unpredictable effects, at times supporting women’s aspirations and career progression. We considered the importance of developing critical analysis with the capacity to examine the intricacies of intersecting political forces in ways that do not reduce constructions of these as monolithic or one-dimensional entities. Reflections through letter-writing of our experiences of neoliberalism brought to light the complicated nature of its relationship to gendered injustices, at times enabling women to challenge patriarchal discourses and to engage in higher education as equal and institutionally recognized participants. Furthermore, neoliberalism works in complicated ways with government policy, which continues to provide funding to universities and students in Ghana as public institutions. This encouraged us to recognize the importance of nuanced questioning, avoiding taken-for-granted assumptions about how neoliberalism shapes gendered experiences and inequalities to recognize the ways women might at times experience neoliberalism as an enabling force in their lives.

Collective reflection 5: recognition of the value of a collective feminist timescape

I have not really reflected on the effect of neo liberalism on my life. The presentation gave me the opportunity to reflect on my experiences at (X Institution). Indeed, as I sat through the presentation, I asked myself many questions. Could neoliberalism be responsible for the kind of treatment I got from (X Institution)? Could it be that gender issues were not the ‘big issues’ that could bring in money? Were lecturers in gender inferior? It was really difficult to tell how neoliberalism could provide all the answers to the many questions that were running through my mind. (Academic)

Discussions at this gathering has energized me to remain focus in order to succeed in my career and also mentor students who are facing worse situations of exclusion as a result of neoliberalism and gender. Neoliberalism has become the common sense but I have heard of the choice to strategize, lobby and collaborate to be relevant in higher education space and also to be resilient to avoid exclusion – conscientization has taken place. It is evident that we have not found a replacement for neoliberalism but we can also make adjustments to structures to suit changing trends. (PhD Candidate)

The sense of political activism and awareness is unforgettable. I hope we will meet soon to learn from each other as we did. (Academic)

This gathering has been very rewarding, the opportunity to meet, interact and share with women of substance. It rekindled the Ghanaian way of living – communal life. Our diversity makes gatherings like this very inspiring as we share from our varied lives and experiences shaped by our culture and beliefs. (PhD candidate)

The value of the timescape provided through collective letter writing and the feminist PPOEMs framing the workshops was repeatedly articulated through the letters. The opening up of time and space to deeply consider the effects of neoliberalism and patriarchy on personal and collective experiences was seen as significant for the women to make sense of their identities and lives in, through and beyond higher education. The emphasis on praxis as reflection/action and as a form of feminist scholarship and activism was deeply valued by the Collective. The collaborative ethos and the emphasis on re-searching, co-learning, reciprocity and peer mentoring was identified by the Collective as key dimensions of struggles for greater gender equity in higher education, which we hoped to sustain over time. The pedagogical underpinning of the workshops as a form of ongoing interrogation of our ‘knowing’ about our lives, experiences and the institutions we inhabited was found to be of value to the reflexive processes we committed to as re-searchers. Furthermore, the focus on an ethics of care, the relational, and the collaborative helped create new practices and orientations against the individualist, competitive and performative environments we navigated.

Discussion and final reflections

This paper has explored the experiences of women in Ghanaian higher education as they navigate and make sense of the intersecting forces of neoliberalism and patriarchy through letter writing as feminist praxis. We engaged a process of re-searching our experiences of higher education through feminist analyses and by collectively examining the discourses at play in the different timescapes (e.g. of work, study and family) we navigated. Our reflections illustrate that neoliberalism is not a monolithic force that straightforwardly explains experiences of gendered inequalities in and outside of higher education. Rather different, heterogeneous and intersecting forces are at play across a range of timescapes that impact women’s higher education experiences in unpredictable and contradictory ways.

Neoliberalism emerges as a complex context in which there are some opportunities for women’s access to and participation in higher education and for their career aspirations to be realized, albeit in highly constrained and problematic ways. Indeed, there are moments in our collective letter-writing that neoliberalism is represented as an appealing and enabling framework for women to progress their careers. Yet, patriarchal structures and discourses intersect with neoliberalism in insidious ways perpetuating institutionalized patterns of cultural value that privilege masculinity, and this is illuminated through accounts of ‘gender-specific forms of status subordination’ (Fraser 2013, 162) revealed in the letters. Neoliberalism and patriarchy work together to intensify the temporal structures and the everyday pace in which women are expected to be highly productive in higher education while simultaneously meeting the pressures imposed on them within the spaces of home and family.

Drawing from feminist theory, we have argued that higher education is a fluid, dynamic and complex institution, constituted materially and discursively in relation to the lived and embodied time–space that women navigate across multidimensional inequalities. These inequalities include maldistribution of time, resources and labour. They also include the misrecognition of women, both in terms of hegemonic constructions that perpetuate gendered expectations and inequities of unpaid labour and caring commitments and in terms of women’s capability and potential. Further, the achievements of women are often grossly misrepresented as connected to sexual favours, distorting the profound problem of sexual harassment and abuse in higher education (Morley 2011). Opportunities for women to directly represent their interests institutionally are not only greatly limited by the lack of women in senior leadership positions but also by the political asymmetries embedded in higher education structures, related to the intersections of neoliberalism and patriarchy.

Through our collective feminist praxis we ask: what are the possibilities for resistance and for developing counter-hegemonic timescapes in the struggle for gender equity? The letters indicated moments of feminist resistance within the family, opening opportunities for daughters despite the patriarchal order and unequal access to education for girls and women. There were also moments of explicit recognition of the contradiction at play that the pressure on girls to meet gendered expectations in the family can become a form of strength and resilience for women in the neoliberal university.

The opening of time and space through the redistribution of resources, by funding the residential workshops and by creating pedagogical resources that made feminist theories accessible for all workshop participants, was important in supporting a sense of collective energy for change. This enabled deep consideration of the effects of neoliberalism and patriarchy on gendered inequalities and women’s experiences of the contradictory timescapes of family and higher education. The women expressed the significance of this in processes of making sense of their identities and lives in, through and beyond higher education and in sharing a commitment with others in struggles for gender equity. This countered the individualism of neoliberal frameworks, and allowed us to embrace deep collaboration through feminist praxis.

Through our workshops and analysis, key questions emerged, which we share here as a form of conclusion and in the spirit of ongoing and collective reflexivity: how can we sustain a shared commitment over time to trouble persistent but dynamic patterns of inequality through concerted attention to our lived and different experiences? And, through our commitment to this process of transformation, what are the possibilities for challenging gendered inequalities in higher education? How can new practices of knowing through difference (perhaps through a process of exercising ‘un-knowing’ in Lather’s 2009 terms) emerge through our collective commitment to transformation?

This raised the ongoing challenge for our Ghanaian Feminist Collective about the possibilities to create and sustain counter-hegemonic timescapes and, through this, to contribute to creating the conditions for collaboration, reflexivity and resistance against the persistent maldistribution, misrecognition and misrepresentation that women continue to navigate.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The workshops for this project were funded by University of Newcastle Vice Chancellor – Research Making a Difference.

Notes on contributors

Penny Jane Burke

Professor Penny Jane Burke is the director of the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education and Global Innovation Chair of Equity at the University of Newcastle in Australia.

Gifty Oforiwaa Gyamera

Dr Gifty Oforiwaa Gyamera is the Head of Department, Development Policy, at the Ghana Institute of Public Administration and Management.