Conference Agenda

This workshop aims to create a collaborative space to share insights on writing approaches, reviewing practices, and publishing strategies for scholars doing qualitative and quantitative research that examines and theorizes the interrelated experiences of gendered subjects in formal and informal education settings.

Led by current researchers and editors with substantial experience of publishing in ‘quality’ journals across disciplines, ECER networks, and education levels the workshop is oriented to scholars at the beginning to their careers and those seeking to re-tool their skills. The workshop has a practical focus: to place of gender in relation to other key differences, to further feminist knowledge, philosophies, theory, action and debate.to share strategies, exchange information, and build networks. Its goal is to highlight ways to maximize involvement in writing, reviewing and publishing for scholars at any career stage who are striving for gender equality in education via their research and practice. The workshop leaders are currently co-editors of the leading, international journal Gender and Education.

In considering writing as a craft, this presentation hones in on the details. It provides advice on how to deal with what the ‘technical’ aspects of writing journal articles. It analyses the importance of writing titles that are clear, concise and eye-catching in an age of search engines and metrics. It reviews how to effectively structure a paper to maximize the clarity of the argument. It also suggests ways of creating a balance between theory and empirical data.

However, writing a good article needs more than craft. It is about having something ‘new’ to say, it is about shaping what it is you want to say in ways that enable the writer to make an original contribution (theoretically and/or empirically) to on-going debates, and it is about staking a claim to enter a particular discourse community. We discuss how to do these things effectively.

The workshop also considers writing journal articles that matter to both you and your audience. We need to attend to the writing’s artistry as achieved through a corporeal mode of mattering in which one’s heart, mind and identity are entangled (Barad, 2007). In discussing this entanglement of heart, mind and identity, workshop participants will be invited to dispense with the notion that ‘good’ article writing requires ‘genius’ or ‘inspiration’, that writing can only be done ‘when the mood takes me’, or that it requires a long time ‘alone’. Instead, academic article writing as a material practice, a ‘habit geography’ (Dewsbury & Bissell, 2015). This is habit not as stale routine but as a corporeal event of lived importance which releases pleasure and gets the writing done (Author, 2016).

The workshop will provide important insights into the practices that shape writing, reviewing and being published in journals focused on gender research in education settings. The publishing world is rapidly changing, with greater opportunities for informal modes of disseminating scholarship, alongside publication in a wider range of open access journals. However, within this expanding field, established journals continue to hold considerable power. This power is reinforced by international rankings and ratings metrics across neo-liberal, higher education systems, and by institutionally-entrenched performative, accountability structures. These wider forces shape the careers of individual academics and their publication aspirations. Journals that are recognised as the leading ‘quality’ journals are, then, those that early career academics often to aspire to be published in. Such journals provide access to valuable discourse communities and the circulation of new ideas, knowledge and theory; and they are repositories of historical expertise and experience in mapping a field. The workshop is significant in demystify writing, reviewing and publishing in a ‘top’ international journal.