Negotiating and enabling spaces for gender justice

Abstract

Through feminist informed understandings of injustice, this paper draws on significant research to re-articulate prevailing issues of gender inequity within and beyond the contexts of education in Australia. Following a location of the unconvincing but pervasive warrant for boys' issues to dominate the gender equity scene, the paper turns to a discussion about locating and leveraging strategic points of intervention for transformative gender just educational policy and practice. New and emerging policy environments, more receptive to educational research, that address issues of economic and cultural marginalisation in new times are argued to offer generative spaces to reinvigorate crucial gender debates associated with post-school pathways and social outcomes. Foregrounding feminist concerns in these areas is presented as central to constructing strong policy frames that can better address issues of gender, economic marginalisation and cultural disadvantage. The paper then turns to a discussion about how radical re-envisionings of curriculum and pedagogy, to reflect issues of distributive and cultural justice, might work to dismantle and transform the inequitable power relations and underlying frameworks that generate gender injustice within and beyond the contexts of education. The paper concludes by illustrating the imperative of drawing on transformative gender justice lenses to evaluate and, in particular, anticipate the limits of particular reform agendas and interventions.