Reclaiming relations : embodied practices of visual arts educators knowing, being and doing evaluation

The articles in this work address histories of how visual art educators have come to exist within scholarship on teacher evaluation. This study, reconceptualized outside of methodology through a post qualitative framework of inquiry, embodies poststructural feminist theories of ethics, exemplifying living theory and process as 'lifework'. (Re)situating the evaluative experiences of art educators through their own visual stories grounded in feminist ethics where research acts as sacred practice invites an exploration of more relational ways of being as teachers, leaders, makers, and researchers. In turn, this research seeks to open spaces where we ask what becomes possible in evaluative practice when we look to the arts as a model. Opportunities emerge as the resistances of art educators reverberate beyond current systemic boundaries and offer a possibility to think differently about evaluation. Utilizing the practices of quilting, the work charts a new coursnowledge and think and perform research and teacher evaluation differently as a practice of mending, challenging (mis)representations, building relational trust through power shifts and receptive listening, and constructing a true capacity for connectedness.

Hiding in Plain Sight

The incidence of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in Australia is rising. Women experiencing IPV seek assistance through Emergency Departments (ED). Women exhibit help-seeking behaviours to nurses who work in emergency over medical or allied health professionals. Nurses’ capacity to recognise the need to care for women experiencing IPV is essential. The aim of this study was to explore nurses’ capacity to care for women who have experienced IPV through outlining inhibiting factors that limit care and create a discourse that contributes to addressing these factors. Pre (n=10) and post (n=6) focus groups (FGs) were undertaken with nurses who work in ED. In between the FGs an intervention was applied to prompt change to caring practices. The discourse generated from the FGs was subjected to a Foucauldian discourse analysis from a poststructural feminist perspective. Participants’ capacity to care was found to be based on the values they formed on IPV, as shaped by their post-registration training. The formation of boundaries was fundamental in inhibiting the participants’ capacity to care. Challenging boundaries through educational inquiry into nursing values can be effective in shifting perspectives of IPV. The raising of awareness of IPV in our communities serves as a vital tool in eliciting cultural behaviour change within EDs and within nursing culture.

Migration ethics in pandemic times

Geographical approaches to studying migration have recently been substantially enlivened by the introduction of social theory from a range of traditions – poststructural, feminist, new materialist, and postcolonial, amongst others. Tedeschi’s introduction of Gilbert Simondon’s notions of individuation, affect, and ethics offers an interesting and important addition to this growing movement to reconceptualising migration. In this commentary, I reflect on the potential of Tedeschi’s approach in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic and its implications for border control and migration. I argue that while the focus on indivdiuation and individual-environment articulations is valuable, Tedeschi’s argument also problematically sets aside collective individuation, affect, and ethics as well as their potential for addressing precarity. Here lies the risk for reconceptualising migration studies – that researchers aim for ever more granular accounts of migration but perhaps lose sight of the politics and ethics of transforming systems and circumstances in ways that enhance migrant lives.

A genealogy of lesbian feminisms in New Zealand: Some implications for young lesbian health and wellbeing

In the 1970s, radical lesbian feminists identifi ed heterosexuality as a socially glorifi ed state of being, and organised to resist social pressure to conform to heteronorms. Decentring of radical feminist discourse has been linked to a ‘shrinking lesbian world’, with implications for the health and wellbeing of young women who identify as lesbian. This article employs a poststructural feminist perspective, and Foucault’s notions of discourse and genealogy. Two sets of data were analysed: issues of Aotearoa New Zealand feminist periodical Broadsheet published 1972-1976, and interviews with 15 young lesbian women conducted in 2012. Findings explore how radical lesbian discourse was marginalised, and some of the implications for the health and wellbeing of young lesbian identifi ed women. Compulsory heterosexuality persists as a health and wellbeing issue which produces ‘sexual minority stress’ and legitimises discrimination, violence and harassment. Marginalisation of radical lesbian discourse via compulsory family status operates to limit opportunities for collective and public lesbian resistance.

9. Feminism

This chapter examines international feminism, focusing on how feminist international relations theories are necessary for understanding international politics, what feminist international relations theories provide for understanding international politics, and how feminist international relations theories have influenced the practice of international politics. The chapter proceeds by explaining feminism and feminist international relations theory as well as feminist conceptions of gender and power. It also discusses four feminist international relations theories: liberal feminist international relations, critical feminist international relations, postcolonial feminist international relations, and poststructural feminist international relations. Two case studies of women's organizations are presented: the Women's International League of Peace and Freedom and the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. There is also an Opposing Opinions box that asks whether feminist foreign policy changes states' foreign policy decisions.

Narrative and Curriculum Theorizing

Within contemporary, conventional, interpretive, qualitative paradigms, narrative and curriculum theorizing have traditionally been understood as primary constructs through which educational researchers seek to explain, represent, and conduct inquiry about education. This article traces shifting understandings of Western constructs of narrative and curriculum theorizing from a modernist perspective, in which they were conceived primarily as methods central to the representation of knowledge, to postmodernist perspectives in which they are conceptualized not as epistemological constructs, but as ethical/ontological systems of becoming through/in relationships. Historically, the emergence of “curriculum” and “narrative” (as phenomena) within a modernist, technocratic paradigm, rooted in an epistemological worldview, were constructed as “technologies” whose purpose was to represent knowledge. Current critiques of narrative and curriculum theorizing from the perspective of postmodern, poststructural, feminist, and new materialist perspectives illuminate understandings of these constructs as ethical-ontological-epistemological phenomena. From this perspective, narrative and curriculum theorizing have shifted from being understood as grounded in epistemology in order to provide “better” understanding/knowledge of experience, and alternatively are understood as ethical obligations to “be” in a web of relationships/intra-actions.