Susanne Gannon – författare

“At last a book that not only describes what collective biography is but also explains how to use it … The book describes how to set up collective biography workshops in which participants examine how discursive structures and power relations have both enabled and limited the conditions of possibility for their lived experience. Focusing on a more complicated reflexivity than is usually described in social science research, collective biography, inspired by Frigga Haug and refined by Davies, will no doubt be used increasingly by researchers interested in the production of subjects in a postmodern world.”Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre, University of Georgia, USA

This book introduces the reader to collective biography, an innovative research methodology for use in education and the social sciences. The methodology of collective biography overcomes the theory/practice divide, by putting theory to use in everyday life, and using everyday life to understand and to extend theory.

Doing Collective Biography provides guidelines for developing a collective biography project and demonstrates how these guidelines emerged from and were shaped by projects on such topics as subjectivity, power, agency, reflexivity, literacy, gender, and neoliberalism at work. Each chapter gives a detailed example of collective biography in practice, showing how a group of students and/or scholars can work collaboratively to investigate aspects of the production of subjectivity, and clearly demonstrates how poststructural theory can be elaborated and refracted through the experiences of ordinary everyday life.

This is key reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students on Education and social science courses with a research element, as well as for academics and professionals undertaking research projects.

Becoming Girl interrogates the everyday of girlhood through the collaborative feminist methodology of collective biography. Located within the emergent interdisciplinary field of girlhood studies, this scholarly collection demonstrates how memories can be used to investigate the ways in which girlhood is culturally, historically, and socially constructed. Narrative vignettes of memory are produced and collaboratively investigated to explore relations of power, longing, and belonging, and to critically examine the ways in which girlhood is constituted. These are snapshot moments that, when analyzed, expose the social, embodied, and affective processes of “becoming girl,” making them visible in new ways. Incorporating the concepts of Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault, the authors investigate food, popular culture, sexuality, difference, literacy, family photographs, and trauma.Bringing together international and interdisciplinary girlhood scholars, this volume provides an innovative, inclusive, and collaborative method for understanding the relationship between the individual and the collective.

This collection is focused on the possibilities for unbinding people from gendered expectations in and around educational spaces, and accounts for the ways gender is reconstituted in and through education.This book presents a broad interpretation of gender, of what education might mean, and where educational experiences manifest. It explores more conventional schooling spaces to communally generated inclusive spaces, families and marginalised sites where gender is realised and contested. Alongside more familiar framings, the book incorporates decolonial and Indigenous contestations, theoretical innovations and methodological experiments that pry open the ways that gender binds and limits individuals. The chapters are organised in smaller conceptual clusters, offering multiple and overlapping reading paths according to the interests of the reader. A mapping of clusters and potential reading paths is included at the opening of the book, designed for instructors to expand course content.Written to enrich reading for preservice teacher education students and to challenge researchers, postgraduate and doctoral candidates, this book provides essential new perspectives on gender, education and the various ways in which they are un/bound together and apart.

This collection is focused on the possibilities for unbinding people from gendered expectations in and around educational spaces, and accounts for the ways gender is reconstituted in and through education.This book presents a broad interpretation of gender, of what education might mean, and where educational experiences manifest. It explores more conventional schooling spaces to communally generated inclusive spaces, families and marginalised sites where gender is realised and contested. Alongside more familiar framings, the book incorporates decolonial and Indigenous contestations, theoretical innovations and methodological experiments that pry open the ways that gender binds and limits individuals. The chapters are organised in smaller conceptual clusters, offering multiple and overlapping reading paths according to the interests of the reader. A mapping of clusters and potential reading paths is included at the opening of the book, designed for instructors to expand course content.Written to enrich reading for preservice teacher education students and to challenge researchers, postgraduate and doctoral candidates, this book provides essential new perspectives on gender, education and the various ways in which they are un/bound together and apart.

Resisting Educational Inequality examines poverty, social exclusion and vulnerability in educational contexts at a time of rising inequality and when policy research suggests that such issues are being ignored or distorted within neoliberal logics. In this volume, leading scholars from Australia and across the UK examine these issues through three main focus areas: Mapping the damage: what are our explanations for the persistent nature of educational inequality? Resources for hope: what do we know about how educational engagement and success can be improved in schools serving vulnerable communities? Sustaining hope: how might we reframe research, policy and practice in the future?Using a range of theories and methodologies, including empirical and theory-building work as well as policy critique, this book opens innovative areas of thinking about the social issues surrounding educational practice and policy. By exploring different explanations and approaches to school change and considering how research, policy and practice might be reframed, this book moves systematically and insightfully through damage towards hope. In combining pedagogy, policy and experience, Resisting Educational Inequality will be a valuable resource for all researchers and students, policymakers and education practitioners.

Resisting Educational Inequality examines poverty, social exclusion and vulnerability in educational contexts at a time of rising inequality and when policy research suggests that such issues are being ignored or distorted within neoliberal logics. In this volume, leading scholars from Australia and across the UK examine these issues through three main focus areas: Mapping the damage: what are our explanations for the persistent nature of educational inequality? Resources for hope: what do we know about how educational engagement and success can be improved in schools serving vulnerable communities? Sustaining hope: how might we reframe research, policy and practice in the future?Using a range of theories and methodologies, including empirical and theory-building work as well as policy critique, this book opens innovative areas of thinking about the social issues surrounding educational practice and policy. By exploring different explanations and approaches to school change and considering how research, policy and practice might be reframed, this book moves systematically and insightfully through damage towards hope. In combining pedagogy, policy and experience, Resisting Educational Inequality will be a valuable resource for all researchers and students, policymakers and education practitioners.

Pedagogical Encounters demonstrates how learning spaces that are ethical, responsive, and transformable can enable students and teachers to open toward new ways of being in the world. Through collective biography, ethnography, and arts-based research, the authors – educators with experience in diverse settings – generate rich descriptions of classroom practices, and elaborate and clarify new theoretical concepts through their discussion in relation to specific sites of teaching and learning.

This book is a passionate engagement with Gilles Deleuze and collaborative writing, in which four writers explore together the insights that Deleuze has contributed to the topic. This powerful and complex text, which will appeal to scholars within qualitative inquiry, investigates the question of how we might begin to write, together, on what Deleuze would call an immanent plane of composition. On such a Deleuzian plane, or plateau, the writers seek to bond with Deleuze, to open up with him a new stream of thought and of being.

This book examines how young people and those who work with them think, feel, experience and represent gender in Australian secondary schools. In the Australian Capital Territory and New South Wales, the authors engaged with culturally diverse recent school leavers across all sectors of schooling, in focus groups, interviews and a series of arts-based workshops. The findings provide important evidence of the need for a more sustained and coherent commitment from all levels of government as well as within schools to pursuing gender justice if young people are to flourish and exit their schooling equipped to participate in a democratic, inclusive and equitable society. The book will appeal to students and academics who are interested in teacher education and the sociology of gender, as well as teachers and policymakers who are keen to better understand the complexities and necessities of pursuing gender justice in schools.