Ali Black

This book interrogates the roles games and playfulness bear in both formal education and informal social learning. Responsive to contemporary social and ecological challenges, this book especially explores games’ interactions with social power. On one hand, games sometimes operate to reinforce ideologies that normalise social injustice and environmental disregard. On the other, games offer rich possibilities for questioning such ideologies and encouraging change.

Strongly interdisciplinary, the book assembles twenty chapters written by fifty experts across fields including education, game design, cultural studies, sociology, Indigenous studies, disability studies, queer studies, STEM, legal studies, history, creative writing, visual arts, music, the creative industries, and social inclusion. These contributions not only make games a focus, but incorporate playful research writing strategies, demonstrating methods of what we term ludic inquiry. This includes chapters written using arts-based research, practice-led research, poetic inquiry, narrative inquiry, autoethnography, duoethnography, and more.

Organised across four themes – ‘philosophical sparks’, ‘lived experiences’, ‘pedagogical perspectives’ and ‘the spirit of play’ – this book emphasises the radical egalitarian possibilities inherent in critical attention to games and how we play (or get played by) them. Its fresh insights will interest all readers interested in creatively remaking our worlds.

This book explores the capacities and desires of academic women to reimagine and transform academic cultures. Embracing and championing feminist scholarship, the research presented by the authors in this collection holds space for a different way of being in academia and shifts the conversation toward a future that is hopeful, kind and inclusive. Through exploring lived experiences, building caring communities and enacting an ethics of care, the authors are reimagining the academy’s focus and purpose. The autoethnographic and arts-based research approaches employed throughout the book provide evocative conceptual content, which responds to the symbolic nature of transformation in the academy. This innovative volume will be of interest and value to feminist scholars, as well as those interested in disrupting and rejecting patriarchal academic structures.

This book engages expansively with the concept of motherhood in academia, to offer insights into re-imagining a more responsive higher education. Written collaboratively as international, interdisciplinary and intergenerational collectives, the editors and contributors use various ways of understanding 'motherhood' to draw attention to - and disrupt - the masculine structures currently defining women's lives and work in the academy. Shifting the focus from patriarchal understandings of academe, the narratives embrace and champion feminist and feminine scholarship. The book invites the reader to question what can be conceived when motherhood is imagined more expansively, through lenses traditionally silenced or made invisible. This pioneering volume will be of interest and value to feminist scholars, as well as those interested in disrupting patriarchal academic structures.

Lived Experiences of Women in Academia shares meaningful stories of women working in the academy, from numerous disciplines, backgrounds and countries, to unveil the complex and distinct dimensionalities they experience in their life and work. Chapters are written using a range of responsive, personal and aesthetic techniques, including metaphor, manifesto and memoir, with reflections inspired by textiles, online blogs and forums, theatre, creative writing, fiction and popular culture. They engage with themes and ideas including gender roles, family-making, work-life balance, motherhood, institutional violence and harassment and the self and identity, revealing how these uniquely manifest for women in academia. This collection takes account of the experiences of female academics from previous decades and the experiences of those to come, as well as those outside the academic system entirely. Lived Experiences of Women in Academia aims to liberate thinking around the life of a female academic through collaborative storytelling and discussion, to encourage new conversations and connections between women in academia across the globe

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.

This book explores the complexities of investigating minorities, majorities, boundaries and borders and the experiences of researchers who choose to work in these spaces. It examines epistemologies that appear to shape researchers' beliefs about the forms of research that are valued in educational research and theory. It also considers 'the researched' and notions of privilege, voice, agency, authority and authenticity. Researching Mainstreams, Margins and Spaces In-Between engages with issues of ethics, disclosure, and representation and contends with and seeks to contribute to emerging debates around power and the positioning of researchers and participants. It also considers the motivations that researchers bring in relation to participant transformation and empowerment, and the importance of research that genuinely seeks to explore voice, culture, story and identity. Resisting the backdrop of standardisation, performativity and accountability agendas pervading governments and organisations, this book attends to the stories of real people, to understand regional and rural landscapes, to examine culture and the human condition, and to give voice to those at the fringes of society who remain largely neglected and unheard. This text therefore provides an overview of the many types of research being engaged in, revealing the value of different kinds of research, and gaining insight into how meaning and findings are disseminated in research and educational sectors, and back into the contexts where research takes place. The book will interest early career researchers and academics internationally. It will also appeal to postgraduate students completing research methods courses in the field of education, and the wider social sciences. [Book Synopsis]