Women Activating Agency in Academia ― Metaphors, Manifestos and Memoir

Women Activating Agency in Academia seeks to create and expand safe spaces for scholarly, professional and personal stories and assemblages of agency. It provides readers with the opportunity to connect with the strategies women are using to navigate academe and the core values, linked to trust, relationship, wellbeing and ethics of care, they live by.

The collection offers the stories of women academics from around the globe and across disciplines and showcases their efforts to meaningfully listen and converse in order to resist self-audit and diminished identities. Reflections come from a range of responsive, personal and aesthetic techniques, including writing groups, guided autobiography, auto-ethnography, collective activism and slow scholarship. Chapters engage with themes and ideas such as agency, neoliberalism, ontological security, androcentricity, identity and collegial support, which manifest in unique ways for female academics.

The focus in this volume is what really matters to women in the academy, as they share their efforts to ‘be’ themselves in their work, to ‘care for themselves and others’ and to ‘count what isn’t counted’. It aims to prove how collaborative storytelling and discussion can empower female academics to preserve and achieve these ambitions.

Alison L. Black is a narrative researcher and early childhood educator. Her arts-based research and scholarly work seeks to foster connectedness, community, wellbeing and meaning-making through the building of reflective and creative lives and identities. Ali is interested in storied and visual approaches for dismantling personal/professional binaries and representing lives. Her research and writing is concerned with the power and impact of collaborative and relational knowledge construction.

Susanne Garvis is Professor of Child and Youth Studies in the Department of Education, Communication and Learning, University of Gothenburg. Her focus is the field of early childhood education. Susanne has been involved in Australian, European and international research projects and is the current organizer of the Nordic Early Childhood Systems Approach Research Group.