The Gender and Education Association would like to announce that the ninth international Gender and Education conference will be held at London South Bank University from Tuesday 23rd – Friday 26th April 2013.

The Compelling Diversities, Educational Intersections conference engages with key debates surrounding the interplay between dynamics of education, work, employment and society in the context of crisis, upheaval and cutbacks, which reconfigure – rather than erase – axes of intersectional inequalities. The conference continues the strong focus on gender, interrogating other axes of ‘intersectionality’ across time and place. It brings together a focus on pre-compulsory, compulsory and post-compulsory education, seeking to more fully situate educational journeys and experiences of staff and students. It also aims to consider the ‘intersectionality’ and (dis)connections between (non)academic sites and subjects as ‘diverse’ approaches to learning, engagement and participation are encouraged, even compelled.

Our (non)academic selves, subject matters and senses of the University are complicated in re-telling the inside of the University, in and through a sense of the outside: the proximity and distance to the ‘local’ city; the rhetorical appeal of ‘widening participation’ and the reality of elitism; the drive of public engagement and the economies of impact; the complexities and complicities between power, privilege and (dis)engagement (Gillies, 2012; Taylor, 2012). In considering diversity in education, this conference will explore the relationship between new equality regimes and continued educational inequalities, exploring organisational ambivalence, change and resistance. This conference attends to these pertinent issues at a time when Education, and its variously placed subjects (academics, pupils, students, and policy makers), wrestle with the commitments and contentions in doing diversity and being diverse. Drawing on these notions key themes will variously attend to what the future hold for feminist research in contribute to shaping new heightened context of educational (in)equality.

Key themes include:

· Compulsory Education, Compelling Diversity

· Pedagogies of Progress

· The (re)making and (un)doing of privileged identities

· The politics of diversity and ‘different’ differences

· Educational ‘mix’ and the marketing of ‘mix’: diversity dividends?

· Widening participation: Access and existences in (post)compulsory sites

· Intersections: when sexuality, class and race meet in Higher Education

Conference Team: Dr Elaine Bauer, Dr. Chamion Caballero, Prof. Val Gillies, Dr. Nicola Horsley, Dr. Tracey Reynolds, Dr. Shaminder Takhar, Dr. Yvonne Robinson, Dr. Ria Snowdon, Prof. Yvette Taylor

Further information will shortly be available