Gender, Definitional Politics and ‘Live’ Knowledge Production

Sticky care and conference travel: unpacking care as an explanatory factor for gendered academic immobility

“…This article has focused on conference mobility both as a form of short-term mobility (and a catalyst for further mobility) and also as a practice that contributes to the construction of a mobile academic ideal. While the importance of conferences for academic careers is at times downplayed (Henderson 2020), it is clear from this study that the effects of missing out on conference attendance are felt keenly by those who are less able to engage in high mobility . It is equally clear that academics with caring responsibilities-predominantly women academics in this study-struggle to attend conferences and that their conference attendance is limited to fewer conferences, trips of a shorter duration and destinations which are closer to home.…”

“…Conference mobility is a major form of short-term academic mobility, and yet it has received little scholarly attention in the higher education field (Henderson 2015;Nicolson 2017). Conferences are perhaps so normalized in the academic career (Henderson 2020;Mair 2014) that they have seldom been singled out for their contribution to the construction of the mobile academic ideal, though conferences do appear as brief references in many publications on inequalities in the academic career. Indeed conferences seem to be integral to the image of a globetrotting academic, as conferences frequently appear as a trope in popular culture representations of academics (Henderson and Reynolds 2017).…”

“…The internal dialogue, which is a recognized feature of women's challenges to reconcile professional with care roles (Hochschild and Machung 2012), recurred in participants' accounts as they explored the challenges associated with enacting professional and care-related activities which were practically and ideologically incompatible (Amsler and Motta 2019). Arguably, conference travel is particularly challenging in this respect as it is perceived as both optional or luxurious and vital (Henderson 2020), so it is even more difficult to justify potentially disrupting care routines for travel purposes. The night/s away strategy thus reveals that care as an explanatory factor for gendered immobility both comprises stickiness in terms of daily-task specialism at a practical level, and in terms of a gendered ideal of physical presence at home, which is maintained at an ideological and emotional level.…”

On being the ‘gender person’ in an academic department: constructions, configurations and implications

“…The empirical research that underpins this article was an ethnographic study that explored the construction of conceptual knowledge production about gender at three national women's studies association conferences, in UK (FWSA, Nottingham, 2013), the US (NWSA, Cincinnati, 2013) and India (IAWS, Guwahati, 2014) (Henderson, 2016(Henderson, , 2019a. Part of this study involved c. 10 gender scholars per conference charting the conceptualisations of gender that they witnessed and were involved in during the conferences.…”

Not Getting Over It: The Impact of Sara Ahmed’s Work within Critical University Studies

“…Looking across representations of conferences in Ahmed's works, it is apparent that a different type of discourse is being surfaced to the dominant ones deployed to construct the in/significance of academic conferences. These dominant discourses are the 'conference fatigue' and the 'defining moment' framings (Henderson 2020). The 'conference fatigue' discourse serves to diminish the importance of conferences, portraying them as boring and/or wasteful.…”