Our article employs a feminist perspective to interpret ethnographic data on soft skills programmes (SSPs) for female staff in Higher Education (HE). We use the story of Arachne as a metaphor for how, under neoliberalism, women are instructed to create local 'nets of power,' only to find themselves tangled in a web of conflicting expectations. Our…

Qualitative researchers can discard data that are unsaturated or unrelated to research questions, but what do we do when these data affect us, or 'haunt' us, 'long after collecting "it"' (Taylor 2013, 691)? In this paper, we draw upon Sara Ahmed to guide our engagement with 'discarded data': young children's gendered accounts of violence…

Student self-assessment has been framed as a way to address the issues of power in assessment in higher education. However, rarely has self-assessment been used to challenge the broader political issues of grading. In this study, I introduce the concept of summative self-assessment, drawing on self-grading as a practice that seeks to disrupt the…

The hierarchy in our educational institutions and services often mirror societal attitudes towards power and whose voices are privileged or ignored. Historically, those with power feel uncomfortable when marginalised voices are heard. There is a lot at stake when power is threatened and new voices demand changes within society. This discussion…

This essay offers an organizational critique based on ongoing observations and reflections from a two-year process of establishing collective gardens that honor Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Key findings include illuminating interconnected relationships among plants, animals, and people living near one another, new meanings of power, and why…

Especially since 2010, conservative interests' dominance at advancing their preferred policies across U.S. states has been clear, with large and escalating impacts in education. Although adversaries on the political left remain in catch-up mode, there have been auspicious developments. This study focuses on one of these, seeking to understand a…

Engaging students as pedagogical partners aspires to reposition students with more agency within universities as egalitarian learning communities. The growing literature reports numerous beneficial outcomes of such positioning, yet many partnership opportunities are limited to small numbers of selected students in extra-curricular,…

This article examines the experience of six participants in the Maritimes-Guatemala Breaking the Silence Network (BTS) delegation program. Human rights education is central to this program that operates between Canada and Guatemala. Key findings from this research include participants' rethinking of their own power and privilege upon returning to…

The work of Hardt and Negri offers the field of education important theoretical resources for reconceptualizing subjectivity as a site of politics. Yet recent shifts on the Left toward more articulated mobilizations, along with the emergence of new decolonizing movements that interrogate the undifferentiated character of the common, partly affirm…

This article documents a collaborative inquiry between four parent-child dyads. Adopting an approach of duoethnography, the collaborative explored the question, "What happens when parents and children co-construct meaning regarding the challenges and opportunities in using digital technologies?" By positioning youth as co-researchers,…

The aim of this study is to set out to explore how children living in Polish-English transnational families in the UK develop "symbolic competence" and "symbolic power" in home settings. By focusing on the children's use of metaphor in family discourse when talking about the Moon, from a cognitive discursive perspective, this…

While insights into the effects the COVID-19 pandemic has had on formal schooling are still patchy, even less is known about the pandemic's impact on nonformal education systems, including institutions of Islamic learning. In this paper, we explore the nexus between pandemic control and the securitization of Qur'anic education in northern Nigeria;…

Activists and writers on injustice have highlighted as a structural problem that injustice is experienced differentially. What injustices of privilege lie hidden in my daily academic life? Three deeply discomforting moments relating to Class, climate, and Whiteness privilege, form the core of an account of gradually admitting to my passive…

Shifting the existing lens of mentorship in graduate education to one that frames graduate students as mentors, rather than mentees, I explore how 10 STEMM doctoral student mentors considered social identities and organizational power structures in mentoring undergraduates. Using sociospatial and in-depth interview data, findings illuminate how…

Space and place are central to understanding the production and maintenance of racial inequality in the United States. Though examinations of the racialized dynamics of space are present in other disciplines, higher education scholars have infrequently interrogated how space becomes racialized on college campuses. This conceptual paper functions…