Susanne Gannon

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Western Sydney University

An Introduction to Gender Un/bound

This special issue presents a collection of recent papers drawing on qualitative research in and about schooling in Australia and the ways in which gender-related issues in the broadest sense continue to shape people’s educational experiences. These papers from the present are positioned in relation to the long histories of policy and research atte...

Feminist engagement in education policy in Australia has been extensive and impactful, with periods of high activity and influence in the past through to a present where it seems difficult to find feminist voices in policy spaces. There are diverse perspectives on the earlier decades of feminist policy influence that shift according to context, the...

What was it like growing up during the Cold War? What can childhood memories tell us about state socialism and its aftermath? How can these intimate memories complicate history and redefine possible futures? These questions are at the heart of the (An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War. This edited collection stems from a collaboration be...

Although gender expansive views are increasingly evident amongst young people, segregation according to binary notions of gender underpins the organisational structures of single-sex secondary schools. While claims of educational benefits are common, particularly for girls, gender is difficult to disentangle from socioeconomic advantage and other f...

During COVID-19, the in-person collaborative filmmaking workshops we had planned with university students to explore how gender matters in their lives were forced online. In this chapter, we work with Erin Manning’s concept of the enabling constraint to consider what is made possible and what is foreclosed with/in a virtual creative making space us...

This article is free access please find it through this link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14733285.2019.1648759

The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped life for all in countless ways. For young people, the pandemic accelerated the digitalization of school education and upended relations with peers, parents, and society as a whole. In this paper, we look beyond these immediate effects to explore how pandemic experiences, feelings, and thoughts suggest profound shi...

Breastfeeding initiation rates in Australia are high but duration rates fall well below the World Health Organization targets. Return to work is a known factor impacting 6 months exclusive breastfeeding and continuation into the infants second year of life. Work related factors can influence a woman's confidence in maintaining breastmilk supply aft...

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This article is written as and ethnodrama. Approaching memory work as decolonial practice, we aimed to multiply stories of Cold War childhoods while simultaneously making the politics of collective biography processes explicit. The script is based on nonfictional reality and is expanded by both researched and speculative elements to compose an evoc...

While gender equality at work and the gendered parameters of workplace conditions are of interest to feminist researchers, this paper brings together sociological and public health perspectives to interrogate factors impacting women who return to work (RTW) while maintaining breastfeeding. Our inquiry is focused on female‐dominated professions, tea...

This article is written as and ethnodrama. Approaching memory work as decolonial practice, we aimed to multiply stories of Cold War childhoods while simultaneously making the politics of collective biography processes explicit. The script is based on nonfictional reality and is expanded by both researched and speculative elements to compose an evoc...

We call ourselves the Arctic terns after the birds that migrate between the northern and southern hemispheres. Three of us live in south-west Britain and three in south-east Australia. We tried to make sense of our lockdown lives and the ways we were imbricated in world events. We wrote and made art in response. We read our work to each other and s...

In 2020 when schooling was abruptly reconfigured by the pandemic, young people were required to demonstrate new capabilities to manage their learning and their wellbeing. This paper reports on the feelings, thoughts and experiences of eight Year 9 and 10 students in NSW and Victoria about the initial period of online learning in Australian schools...

The Reader Collective Memory-Work is meant to foster further exchange about Collective Memory-Work, its use and usefulness, methodological questions, aspects of its adaptation/s, critical elements found in CMW, exemplary applications in various fields of practice and research. Included in the Reader are: first-time English translations of texts by...

Vocational decisions made at school have significant long term impacts on young people’s life chances, their opportunities for securing decent jobs and economic growth for themselves, their families and communities. In the short term, their aspirations dictate the decisions they make about educational pathways in post-compulsory years of schooling...

The population of Australia is significantly increasing and projected to further rise over the coming years (Caughey et al. 2020). As this grows, so does the proportion of elders (people aged 65 years and over). Already in 2012, one in seven Australians was ‘old’ and this ratio is estimated to rise to one in four by 2050 (Negin et al. 2016). Accord...

In secondary schools, English teachers are often made responsible for writing results in national testing. Yet there have been few studies that focussed on this key group, or on how pedagogical practices have been impacted in the teaching of writing in their classrooms. This study investigated practices of English teachers in four secondary schools...

This chapter attempts to hail love back into view in pandemic times. In searching for how love appears and what love can do, it asks how enactments of love in learning and teaching, in our work as journal editors, and in our writing collaborations might work as a potentially hope-full feminist materialist response to the desperate and damaging time...

This article focuses on academic temporalities to consider the rhythms, repetitions and discontinuities of academic work. Using a photo-serial methodology which generated an archive of images taken at the same time of day for a fortnight, we take up material and affective theories to rethink academic work as assemblages or micro-worlds that emerge...

While there have been various investigations of the impact of standardised testing in Australian schools over the decade since the introduction of NAPLAN testing, few of these have focused on the extended writing component in particular and on the experiences of secondary English teachers. These teachers are of interest because, despite cross-curri...

Universities are dominated by marketisation, individualisation and competition, forces inimical to individual flourishing and collaborative endeavours. This article presents four stories from a collective biography workshop in which a group of women academics explored everyday moments in their university lives. The stories are grim tales of damage,...

In the history of modernity, childhood represents societies’ hopes and desires for the future. An offspring of modernity, the socialist project had a unique preoccupation with children and childhood for the social (re)making of societies. However, research on both sides of the Iron Curtain has explored children’s lives in socialist societies by foc...

Aspiration for higher education has been a focus of significant policy intervention in Australia for some time, with numerous large-scale research studies investigating the formation of aspiration amongst high school students. However, case studies in particular schools which might provide insights into the complexities and contradictions of aspira...

Neoliberal ideologies, marketization and performative regimes associated with recent reforms in universities have exerted considerable pressure on academic working conditions and subjects in recent years. While analysing these pressures is important, it is also productive to consider the ways in which academics engage in moments of resistance by mo...

This chapter examines two resource kits produced 20 years apart for Australian secondary schools: No Fear: A Kit Addressing Gender-Based Violence (1995) and Building Respectful Relationships: Stepping Out Against Gender-Based Violence (2016). It considers whether there is a ‘subject didactics’ for teaching and learning about gender-based violence (...

Collective biography has, since its origins, been an intervention into sexist knowledge practices. Groups of women have gathered to generate knowledge of their own lived experience and interrogate the discourses and practices through which they have become (more or less) recognisable as appropriately feminised subjects. Working in a post-structural...

This chapter explores the parameters of an ‘autoethnography to come’ that might be endlessly expansive, inventive, and creative. Autoethnography is approached as a troubling textual space where writer(s) and reader(s) meet and touch, momentarily, or are repelled, where affect moves and the material things and events of the world bump up against eac...

This chapter explores the mechanisms by which academic subjects willingly make themselves amenable to measurement. It explores how measurement is deployed via practices that commodify academic labour and promote an individualising and competitive milieu that is simultaneously experienced as repellent and desirable. In particular, it examines the co...

I am starting in the middle.

Close encounters with research participants and collaborators invariably involve more than formal meetings. We argue in this paper that for research that aspires to living educational theory, vulnerability needs to be experienced, encountered and reflected upon as part of the research process. Our insights in this paper emerged from our work on equ...

This chapter traces the temporality and potentiality of aspiration among students from disadvantaged backgrounds who are educationally successful. We argue that aspiration is dynamic, with rational, affective and imaginative dimensions, and that it requires strategic intentionality that develops over time within families, communities, schools and u...

Since 2010, the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP) has provided funding for Australian universities to ‘raise aspiration’ among under-represented groups. Underpinned by utilitarian discourses of human capital and individual capacitation, these resources have transformed the ways that universities seek to engage prospect...

This chapter uses a collective biography methodology to explore threshold moments of academic legitimacy. They demonstrate the precarious processes and liminal spaces of being and becoming ‘academic’. We examine how the well-documented practices that characterise the corporate/managerial/enterprise university frame the experiences of women aspiring...

This article offers a diffractive methodological intervention into workplace studies of academic life. In its engagement of a playful, performative research and writing practice, the article speaks back to technocratic organisational and sociological workplace ‘time and motion’ studies which centre on the human and rational, and presume a linear te...

How can I respond to such an extraordinary cascade of memories of socialist childhoods from so far outside those worlds? This feels like an ‘afterword’ from an ‘other world.’ Geopolitically and ideologically, my childhood in rural Australia seems to be more than a hemisphere away. But memories work subliminally and affectively and moments of resona...

This article will argue that the notion of a teacher and the coexisting teacher education processes are being progressively emptied out, and replaced by the model of a corporate worker, serving the needs of a post-industrial financial capitalist society. This society requires flows of money, as lines of differentiated credit and debt repayments, an...

This chapter explores intimate encounters between secondary school students and the creatures of a suburban wetland in south-west Sydney, Australia. Through unexpected encounters with distressed animals, the students began to recognise the interconnectedness of all things, the vulnerability of the animals of the lagoon and their responsibility to i...

This article turns to a handwritten travel journal from more than two decades ago to explore how the past might be animated in the present through provoking affective, material and imaginative encounters with the text, the subject, and the world. This experimental animation of space-time through writing draws upon the figure of the mirror in Foucau...

This article deploys a collective biographical methodology as a political and epistemological intervention in order to explore the emotional and affective politics of academic work for women in neoliberal universities. The managerial practices of contemporary universities tend to elevate disembodied reason over emotion; to repress, commodify, or co...

This essay is inspired by Kathleen Stewart's call to pay attention to the affective, material, and relational qualities of everyday life, and by the posthuman imperative that we recognize how we are imbricated with all creatures, objects, and forces in our worlds. It assembles little scenes of weather in everyday life, aiming for an atmospheric att...

Almost 20 years ago the Australian government released Gender Equity: A Framework for Australian Schools (1997). It was adopted by all states but almost immediately disappeared from sight after a conservative change of government. This was followed by the dismantling of gender equity units in each state, and a turn to boys’ education that eclipsed...

Superdiversity provides a conceptual framework for thinking through contemporary sociolinguistic and cultural complexity in urban globally mobile communities. In this chapter, we put it to work in a project that explored aspirations for higher education within public schools in a highly diverse area in western Sydney, Australia. While superdiversit...

In education, posthumanist approaches require us to pay attention to the more-than-human contexts within which young people come to take themselves up in the world, and to the affordances and capacities of worldly things and affective flows to shape young people’s desires and ways of being in the world. While there has been considerable work in ear...

In education, posthumanist approaches require us to pay attention to the more-than-human contexts within which young people come to take themselves up in the world, and to the affordances and capacities of worldly things and affective flows to shape young people’s desires and ways of being in the world. While there has been considerable work in ear...

The highly imagined and contested space of higher education is invested with an affectively loaded ‘knowledge economy optimism’. Drawing on recent work in affect and critical geography, this paper considers the e/affects of the promises of the knowledge economy on its knowledge workers. We extend previous analyses of the discursive constitution of...

Emerging posthuman paradigms are beginning to influence approaches to educational research and pedagogy, including the ‘common worlds’ investigations of relations among children and wild animals in early childhood settings. This paper turns to child-animal encounters in a secondary school wetlands project to explore some of the implications of post...

There is considerable debate both in Australia and internationally about the best way for schools to deliver the thinking skills required for university study and professional work life - skills that are often referred to by the term "critical thinking". This article reviews the literature on the effective teaching of critical thinking and looks at...

Collective biography draws on memory work methods developed initially by feminist sociologists (Haug et al., 1987) where people collaboratively examined the social and discursive resources through which they take themselves up as particular gendered subjects in the world. Their own memories become resources to investigate processes of subjectificat...

In this article, the authors respond to Deleuze and Collaborative Writing: An Immanent Plane of Composition. The book's authors (Jonathan, Ken, Susanne, and Bronwyn) and two discussants (Elizabeth St. Pierre and Norman Denzin) consider questions such as the following: What does this book open up? How might it help us to think differently (e.g. abou...

This study examines one of the central elements of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme, the Theory of Knowledge (TOK) course. Four case study schools in Sydney, Australia have collaborated with the research team in 2013 in order to share their perceptions, implementation strategies and evaluation of the TOK course. The case study scho...

Contemporary Issues of Equity in Education argues that equity and social justice must be brought back to the centre of discussions about education. It traces international, system-wide and local effects of policies that increase marketization and competition between students, schools and systems, whilst erasing wider considerations of the socio-cul...

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 const...

In this paper, from the particular positioning of educational researchers working in Australia, we unpack the figure of the ‘21st century learner’ from both broad and specific perspectives. The paper begins with a policy genealogy that traces this figure through networks of documents, events and bodies that transcend borders and hemispheres. We sug...

This paper performs a textual analysis on three popular children's picture books that describe the ‘facts of life’. It positions the books, published over a 60-year period, as components of a broader pedagogical apparatus incorporating texts, parents, children and experts in particular spatial and temporal locations. It traces movements of affect,...

This layered account of an inquiry into ‘red’ emerged out of a collective biography workshop. In the middle of the Wiltshire countryside, an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars gathered together to write and make other things and marks on paper that asked questions of, and into, the spaces between words, people, things and their e...

Through stories of young girls at play produced in a collective biography workshop we trace flows of desire and excesses of joy, and bring recent feminist work on positive affect into our analysis of girlhood becomings. Ringrose (2011, 2013) argues that the concept of the “affective assemblage“ brings together affect, embodiment, and relationality...

The Student Trajectory Aspiration Research (STAR) project was a partnership between the Blacktown Learning Community and the Centre for Educational Research, University of Western Sydney. It was funded by the Higher Education Participation Program, a scheme initiated in Australia by the Commonwealth Government in 2010 in response to the Bradley Rev...

In this paper we explore the very particular forms and productive possibilities of collaborative writing that are generated in collective biography workshops, focusing in particular on the collaborative generation of memory stories. Drawing on conceptual resources from Deleuze and Barad we work our way through the paradox of working with intensely...

Using a collective biography method informed by a Deleuzian theoretical approach (Davies and Gannon 2009, 2012), this article analyses embodied memories of girlhood becomings through affective engagements with resonating images in media and popular culture. In this approach to analysis we move beyond the impasse in some feminist cultural studies wh...

In June 2011, seven feminist academics gathered to spend a week working together on a collective biography workshop in a small resort town, called Hawk’s Nest, in New South Wales, Australia. Some of us were senior faculty with prior experience with the methodology of collective biography, others were freshly minted or about to be minted PhDs who we...

Where else can educational research begin and end, if not with the body of the researcher, if not with the particular material/ corporeal/ affective assemblages that this body is and has been part of? This paper traces the mutual constitution of bodies, identities and landscapes through memory as the body of this educator travels through multiple s...

This paper proposes a new move in the methodological practice of collective biography, by provoking a shift beyond any remnant attachment to the speaking/ writing subject towards her dispersal and displacement via textual interventions that stress multivocality. These include the use of photographs, drama, and various genres of writing. Using a sto...

This paper explores the metaphor of the classroom as a ‘crucible’ for early professional learning where beginning teachers forge professional identities in complex, unpredictable, paradoxical, affectively and physically potent contexts of practice. It works into the dissonances and contradictions of the micro-narratives embedded in the accounts tha...

Along with a range of other neoliberal managerial incursions into education, the bureaucratisation of teachers' work has included the development of Professional Standards that regulate the profession and purport to improve teacher quality. This paper begins by contrasting two alternative approaches to standards in Australia, the new, centrally dev...

"There are three friends in life: courage, sense, and insight." An apparent resurgence in gender-specific marketing of products for children has been linked to post-millennial anxieties about the destabilizing of categories such as gender and nationality. Although links can be traced to past patterns of gender segregation in print culture for child...

In this paper, we examine The Daring Book for Girls and its follow-ups for their constructions of gender. We suggest that, as examples of how neo-liberalism finds its way into notions of proper girlhood, the books provide intentional and unintentional “lessons” to their readers in how to perform themselves in these times. In both the American and t...

This paper explores the effects of audit cultures on school education through a highly personal reading of the My School website, launched in Australia in 2010. It situates two personal narratives, from the points of view of student and teacher, alongside the other stories available about two of the secondary schools listed on the website. Although...

This chapter looks at queer places and times on Summer Heights High, the hit Australian television mockumentary. The success of the program pivots on the credibility of the performances of actor Chris Lilley as 16-year-old schoolgirl (Ja'mie King), 13-year-old Tongan schoolboy (Jonah Takalua) and drama teacher Mr G. Although Lilley's performances c...

This article uses Deleuze and Levinas and those who work with their ideas to explore pedagogical encounters across difference in two texts: A collective biography story of a White teacher in an Indigenous school and an excerpt from the landmark “Sorry” speech by the previous Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. It begins with a reflection on the m...

Place pedagogy change is a work of creative experimentation in which we explore the ways in which pedagogies of place can enable the relational learning of connections between people, places and communities. In adding the element of place to the dynamic relations between teacher, learner, and knowledge, we articulate a pedagogy of ethical uncertain...

The place writing that we have each included in the first part of this book was integral to the place pedagogy work with our secondary teacher education students. This chapter is the story of those students learning place pedagogy through translating it into their own teaching practices. We included earlier versions of our place writing in the read...

In this chapter we go back to the group of students we introduced in Chapter 7. This small group of seven students was enrolled in an alternative Professional Experience unit offered to secondary teacher education students at the University of Western Sydney (UWS).This alternative practicum, Professional Experience Three, or PE3, was designed to gi...

Place-making begins with the investigation of oneself in place, and with the experience of the body—a particular enfleshed body—situated in a particular material and affective landscape. The body in this chapter is my body. It is my body in a place that I used to call home, and that I still respond to as home with a resonance in the deep folds of m...

I am an English teacher and a teacher educator and my particular passion is for writing. I was born in the south in the damp green landscapes of Gippsland and I now live near the sandstone escarpments of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. I have lived on the salt stunted soils at the edge of the Mallee in western Victoria and beside cerulean se...