Gender, post-truth populism and higher education pedagogies

Across varying global contexts, significant feminist contribution has been demonstrated through gains in education, such as the high level of female participation in higher education in many countries worldwide (Leathwood and Read 2009). Policies of access and equity have contributed to growing diversity in higher education, and female students have increasingly out numbered male students in many higher education contexts, leading in some cases to processes of ‘gender mainstreaming’ (David 2016a). However, the recent rise of populism in some regions of the world, together with the apparent resonance of ‘post-truth’ narratives, suggests an emerging formation of power concerned with the undoing of hard-won gains in relation to gender and other intersecting forms of inequality and difference. Increased incidences of the public articulation of misogynistic and racist discourses (particularly via social media) and the apparent legitimation of these practices in some high-profile instances (including the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump), point to the ongoing and urgent need for feminist critique, as well as wider social movements for women's and LGBTQI rights and equalities. This indeed has led to new social movements, such as #metoo against sexual violence and harassment, aiming to empower women to take a stand against institutionalized sexism. This has been taken up by feminist scholars to explore

how the issues being raised by #metoo are manifest in the everyday practices of the contemporary university, what political and interpersonal tensions are brought forth by various responses to the issues and how might we best respond to such tensions (Kenway et al. 2018).

Higher education has a key role to play in deconstructing the issues connected to contemporary social movements on emergent formations of power. This includes challenging the anti-education, anti-expertise and anti-intellectual strands of post-truth populism, as well as paying attention to the ways that gendered inequalities are potentially reproduced through pedagogical spaces and formations of difference (Burke, Crozier, and Misiaszek 2017). This special issue pays close attention to the relationship between gender, power and higher education pedagogies in the context of current political struggles and divisions attached to competing claims to ‘truth’, ‘fake news’ and ‘post truth’ discourses.

It has been argued that processes of ‘gender mainstreaming’ have often been used ‘to dismiss the necessity of feminist analysis’ (David 2016a). Gender mainstreaming tends to ignore feminist analyses of context and difference with the ‘frequent use of gender-neutral language in laws produc[ing] inattention to gendered power relations’ (David 2016a, 65–66). The dis/connections between gender mainstreaming, the undermining of feminism and the rise of post-truth populism requires in-depth analysis to understand its implications for teaching, teachers and students in a range of different pedagogical contexts. Over the past decade, feminist scholars have brought attention to moral panics attached to ‘masculinity in crisis’ discourses and the perceived ‘feminization’ of teaching and learning in higher education (Leathwood and Read 2009; Burke 2015). Although feminist scholars have provided detailed, extensive and close-up critique of masculinity in crisis discourses, including in schooling contexts (Epstein et al. 1998), the simultaneous mainstreaming of gender equity has arguably undermined feminism and weakened anti-sexist policies and practices in higher education (David 2016a). For example, although feminist research has exposed rape culture and ‘lad culture’ on campus (Phipps and Young 2015), feminist scholars argue that policies remain woefully inadequate, not only for students, but also for women and feminist academics (e.g. David 2016b; Burke, David, and Moreau 2018).

Feminist critiques of the ‘feminization of higher education’ have also pointed to ongoing binary divisions at play in universities that privilege the rational over the emotional and undermine an ethics of care, potentially marginalizing those dispositions associated with femininity (Burke 2015, 2017). Scholarship focused on intersectionality has engaged with the ways gender intersects with a range of social and cultural differences including class and race (see for example Mirza (2015) on ‘embodied intersectionality’). Furthermore, despite a long-term commitment to widening participation in many national contexts, research on teaching in higher education has minimally engaged questions of participation, to contribute to theoretical understanding of what constitutes ‘participation’, particularly in relation to gendered power relations and intersecting social inequalities (Burke, Crozier, and Misiaszek 2017). Although there have been attempts to raise the profile of teaching in higher education across different national contexts through moves towards ‘modernizing the university’ for the twenty-first century, many of these considerations tend to reinforce neoliberal discourses of marketization, positioning teachers as service providers and students as educational consumers. Consequently, the complex dynamics of pedagogical relations and experiences in relation to gendered practices and subjectivities has been largely absent from research on teaching and learning in higher education (see Burke, Crozier and Misiaszek 2017; Carolissen and Bozalek 2017).

Building on the body of work that has examined teaching in higher education in relation to gender, diversity and difference, this special issue considers the complex relationship between different and competing political forces at play, how these political forces shape pedagogical practices in complex ways and how this re/produces relations of gender and difference. This includes consideration of the pedagogical challenges posed by the rise of populism in relation to gender equity in education; the potential for feminist interventions in pedagogies and practices in post-truth, populist and authoritarian contexts and critical consideration of which truths matter, whose truths matter and who gets to decide what is truth. The special issue explores the relationships and the tensions between feminisms and activism including the dis/connections between the temporalities of the academy and of popular discourses, and how feminist interventions circulate, for example through digital media. Considering the particular challenges for feminist educators of diverse backgrounds in educational institutions and in the context of the rise of post-truth populism, the special issue addresses the affective dimensions of gendered and pedagogical formations in populist, post-truth contexts. In developing gender sensitive frameworks, pedagogical strategies require attention to the relationship between theory and practice, as well as the politics of knowledge and being a knower. This special issue examines such questions in relation to (re)framing feminist epistemologies, which tend to foreground constructivist perspectives, in the context of ongoing assaults on ‘truth’; the ways media literacies offer pedagogical forms within and against a post-truth world and the resultant research agendas for higher education scholars.

Emily Danvers begins examining such themes with a feminist rethinking of the ontological construction of the ‘critical thinker’ illuminating the implications of the decontextualized discourse of critical thinking in higher education. Her reflection helps shed light on the ways that the desire for a particular notion of the critically thinking subject masks power relations and the politics of difference from view. Drawing on empirical data, Danvers shows that be(com)ing a critical thinking student is tied to gendered, embodied performatives and subjectivities. This is a valuable reflection on a highly taken-for-granted dimension of becoming a recognizable subject as university student, entangled with claims to knowing and tied in with embodied and gendered ontologies.

Jessica Gagnon builds on this with a focus on the politics of misrecognition, with her analytic focus on the experiences of daughters of single mothers in the UK. She argues that histories of pathologization, tied to notions of (il)legitimacy – both within and outside of university contexts – continue to play out in ways that mis/frame higher education pedagogical relations and experiences. She points to the complicity of academic research in producing negative constructions of single mother families through its decontextualized analyses and normalization of the heterosexual nuclear family form. Through her important analysis, Gagnon outlines significant spaces for feminist approaches to re/frame the problem of who is seen as a legitimate student in (and beyond) higher education.

However, feminist pedagogies do not provide a straightforward solution to the complex power dynamics that circulate around knowledge production and ontological positioning. Indeed, Judy Rohrer eloquently articulates that the ‘interdisciplines’ (e.g. Women's, Gender and Ethnic Studies) have been complicit in the rise of neoliberalism, making it ‘more difficult to respond effectively in the classroom to the current upsurge within the U.S. in racism, xenophobia and post-truth populism’. Her important analysis examines the entanglement of the ‘interdisciplines’ in the institutionalization of neoliberal corporatization of the university over past decades, to then contextualize an approach she names ‘its in the room’, which points to the often discomforting truth that whatever the social justice issue being explored, it is almost always a presence in the classroom. Through this, Rohrer helps to emphasize the urgent need for deep, critical and careful reflexivity.

This theme of ‘it's in the room’ is helpful when considering the power of the populist discourse against ‘intellectual-elites’ of whom teachers in higher education might be cast. Barbara Read examines two aligned but distinctive discourses: ‘Real World Anti-Elitist’ and the ‘Ivory Tower Rationalist’ to uncover their gendered, classed and raced underpinnings. She argues that these discourses can be linked to distinct epistemological and ontological conceptions of the nature and purpose of academic knowledge, with significant implications for conceptions of ‘truth’ and ultimately the nature and purpose of higher education.

A feminist and Freirean perspective brings light to processes of ‘curriculum activism’. Natalie Jester argues that curriculum is a key site of contestation, and points to the value of bringing in the voices of those historically marginalized from curriculum development. Analysing two digital campaigns as curriculum activism, Why is my Curriculum White (established by a group of UCL students in 2017) and Women Also Know Stuff (established in 2016 by a group of academics in the US) Jester argues for a pedagogy of difference to recognize the multidimensional, relational and complex nature of power relations in higher education. This curriculum activism she locates as part of fourth wave feminism, one that focuses on difference and intersectionality and that draws on digital technologies as a pedagogical tool and a space for marginalized voices to be mobilized and articulated. This is an article that captures the hope and excitement of new ways of being and doing through deep engagement with feminism in all its trans/formations.

This includes post-humanist feminisms, which shed new light on teaching and the affective and everyday experiences of uncomfortable pedagogical encounters. Sherilyn Lennon, Tasha Riley and Sue Monk draw on their experiences of ‘uncomfortable teacherly moments’ to foreground the affective over the rational and to reposition teaching within an ethics of care, criticality and concern. Taking from Barad’s (2007) concept of onto-ethico-epistemology, they show that what we know is inextricably tied to how we know. Through an analysis of their everyday experiences as teachers, they examine how emotions and the physical feelings they produce become entangled in the material and discursive realities of pedagogical practices and identities and the intensive nature of teaching. They reframe the ‘act of teaching as unstable, political, performative and entangled in the words/worlds of others’ to ‘push back’ against the rationalism and reductivism of neoliberalized higher education.

Themes of care-fullness are also explored by Sara Motta and Anna Bennett in their analysis of enabling education. They critique ‘care-lessness’ and posit three dimensions of care-full pedagogical practice; care as recognition, care as dialogic relationality and care as affective. Drawing on feminist Freirean pedagogical approaches they argue for embodied praxis by foregrounding the centrality of caring work as part of the ethico-pedagogical commitments to care as a multidimensional pedagogical praxis within the field.

In the final Points of Departure contribution to this special issue, Jessica Ringrose presents a charged and powerful analysis of the potential of digital pedagogies to create a pedagogical platform for the visibility of feminist critiques against post-truth populism. She locates this within her own pedagogical work and in the context of the presidential election and Donald Trump's ‘dramatic win’ in late 2016. Ringrose with her colleague Victoria Showunmi draw on this moment as an opportunity to engage students in deep sociological analysis, drawing on the tools of Black feminist and intersectional feminist theories. Ringrose shows the power of digital feminist activism and how it might be put to work in the classroom.

It is perhaps also important to ask what the omissions in submissions and final pieces are in terms of significant feminist scholarship that challenges post-truth populism. One notable absence is the specific tradition of feminist decolonial work that draws on intersectionalities (see for example the special edition of Journal of Feminist Scholarship).

This special issue – a collection of eight significant pieces of feminist scholarship and intervention, at a moment of and against post-truth populism – contributes to the pedagogical spaces of Teaching in Higher Education. It is our hope that these eight pieces spark you the reader's pedagogical imagination to create spaces of critique and hope, to recognize what and who is in the room, and to contribute to transformational practices through, within and beyond higher education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.