Rethinking gender equity in the contaminated university: A methodology for listening for music in the ruins

Abstract

This paper offers a new way to engage with gender, race, and class relations in academic leadership and organizations. Viewing our research materials through different images helps us to ask new questions, open up new kinds of answers and ultimately other ways of knowing gender and leadership in academia. Our approach has three connected steps. Firstly, we engage with the ruins of the three main promises upon which the contemporary university has been built: enlightenment, liberalism, and feminism, drawing on Anna Tsing's mushrooms at the end of the world and Gibson‐Graham's notion of a post‐capitalist economy. Secondly, we use intersectionality as a methodological lens, combining it with Karen Barad's ideas about how “matter comes to matter.” We explore the intersections between four themes arising from the accounts of our participants: Reshaping the disciplinary field; gender, class, and race; traveling and mobility; and Institutional structures and policies. The third and final step engages with how some women successfully coordinate these intersecting themes to navigate their careers and achieve leadership positions within the contaminated and ruinous university environment. In doing so, we draw on the musical form of the fugue with its four themes that at different moments diverge, clash and, if successful, achieve resolution, to provide us with a way for analyzing the women's stories as “polyphony‐in‐action.” By using this musical approach to retool intersectionality, we are able to show how some women managed to bring all four themes of their lives into symbiosis and achieve value in the ruinous academic landscape.

Femme‐toring: Leveraging critical femininities and femme theory to cultivate alternative approaches to mentoring

“…This is so even for women who, by participating in the sexist culture, receive status benefits (Alonso & O'Neill, 2022). Locke et al (2021) found that women academics who were successful in leveraging opportunities in this neoliberal masculinist landscape, do so by reproducing "existing structures and inequalities in the university" (p. 1093). Indeed, as women advance in organizations into top positions, they become less (and not more) supportive of equal opportunity programs (Ng & Chiu, 2001).…”

Doing leadership differently as resistance: Care‐fully reworking Aotearoa New Zealand's research system

“…While movements exist to resist the research system and its institutions by attempting to topple them (see de Oliveira Andreotti et al, 2015), feminist modes of action work to destabilise and resist the system/institution from the inside out . For example, using the musical form of the fugue to think through the multi‐layered and textured academic lives of their participants, Locke et al (2021) discuss how their participants, women academics, ‘created a successful intersection between the ways they reshaped their discipline, used mobility to good effect, thought through their gendered relations and identities, and found moments of opportunity in university policies and structures. In some instances, they reproduced existing structures and inequalities in the university.…”

Music as Critical Social Theory: Developing Intersectional Feminist Praxis Through Music in Aotearoa (New Zealand)

“…Feminist care ethics, like affective vulnerability as part of exercising vigilance against white complicity, encourages researchers to find new, co-conspiratorial ways of relating, through collaboratively developing transformative ways of thinking about relationships and knowledge production in the first instance (Nagar, 2019;de Saxe & Ker, 2023;Locke, et al, 2021;Caputi, 2013).…”

“…It is not an easy feat to totally untether oneself from hegemonic neoliberalism in the university (Locke et al, 2021;Kidman, 2020;Connell, 2019). There is no endpoint for Pākehā settler academics working towards flipping the script in how we learn to see and understand the deep-rooted foundations which guarantee our advantage in university spaces, as well as all other parts of society (Kidman, 2020;cf.…”

“…Margaret, 2019;Seidl & Hancock, 2011). I perceive hope as integral to these ongoing collective efforts, which emerge through finding "small cracks" in the structures of neoliberal colonial institutions, such as the university, and prying open these cracks "to learn from each other and rekindle excitement about our collective capacity for generating new ideas and new critiques" (Locke et al, 2021(Locke et al, , p. 1083cf. Fraser, 2009).…”