Emily Danvers

Criticality's affective entanglements: rethinking emotion and critical thinking in higher education

ABSTRACT Critical thinking is often understood as a set of tangible, transferrable and measurable skills and competencies. Yet, it is also an intensely affective experience that is complex, contingent and contextualised. Using interview, focus group and observation data conducted with 15 first-year undergraduate social science students at a UK research-intensive university, this paper explores how students negotiate the complex knowledge practices that constitute critical thinking, particularly the affects of being and becoming critical. The theoretical tools offered by Karen Barad and Sara Ahmed allow a conceptualisation of critical thinking as a complex phenomenon of socio-material and affective practices. This paper turns to Barad and Ahmed to explore the potential of their clashing theorisations for thinking through the affective territories of critical thinking. It will argue that acknowledging the way(s) critical thinking feels (as well as what it is and what it is for) opens up new imaginaries for feminist scholarship about criticality.

Roma women’s higher education participation: whose responsibility?

ABSTRACT There are striking gaps between Roma and non-Roma higher education (HE) participation rates, with less than 1% of Roma possessing a tertiary-level qualification [United Nations Development Programme, World Bank and European Commission. 2011a. “The Situation of Roma in 11 EU Member States.” Accessed 3 April 2015. http://issuu.com/undp_in_europe_cis/docs/_roma_at_a_glance_web/1#download]. As the Decade of Roma Inclusion (2005–2015) closes, this renders the present a salient moment to reflect on Roma students’ HE experiences. Widening educational access for marginalised groups raises specific questions about where responsibility for doing so lies – with tensions between individualised articulations of raising aspiration and notions of collective responsibility framed in a social justice agenda. Drawing on interviews with five Roma women students, this paper unpacks the contradictions between desiring access to HE for individual self-betterment and concurrent pulls towards educating for the wider benefit of ‘improving’ Roma communities. Using Ahmed’s [2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press] work on institutional belonging, we explore the specifically gendered nature of these narratives in how ‘doubly’ marginalised bodies are positioned as outsiders, in receipt of an educational gift.

Power, pedagogy and the personal: Feminist ethics in facilitating a doctoral writing group

ABSTRACT The paper explores questions of power arising from feminist facilitators running a doctoral writing group at a UK university. Butler’s [2014. Re-thinking Vulnerability and Resistance. [Online]. Accessed September 12, 2017. http://www.institutofranklin.net/sites/default/files/files/Rethinking%20Vulnerability%20and%20Resistance%20Judith%20Butler.pdf] theorisation of precarity and vulnerability inspired us to re-think normative constructions of research writing and the academic identities and subjectivities this presupposed. Our doctoral writing group was imagined as a space to think collectively and reflexively about the thesis, the multi-faceted power-dynamics at work in its production, and our relations to the text as both writer and audience. This paper antagonises some of the pedagogic consequences of inviting seemingly ‘personal’ matters into the space of the writing space and, subsequently, the doctoral text itself. We speak back to discourses that position doctoral writing as always and only an individual, and individualising endeavour, that eschews encounters with the personal and relational. Indeed, we recognise that configurations and spaces for research writing are always ‘political’.

Who is the critical thinker in higher education? A feminist re-thinking

ABSTRACT Higher educations policy demands and pedagogical practices often take as their ‘desirable’ subject an unspecified body, failing to interrogate who the student is (and is not) in relation to differentiated access to power, privilege, and opportunity structures. This paper offers a feminist critique of such decontextualised theorisations of students and their critical thinking. Observation, focus group and interview data were collected with undergraduate social-science students at a UK university. This data revealed how students experience critical thinking as embodied, contingent and specifically gendered – with 90% of students naming a male when asked to describe a critical thinker. Consequently, this paper argues that who occupies a desirable position as a student critical thinker is not neutral or given, but intersects with students’ embodied characteristics and the (increasingly divisive) socio-political context in which criticality is performed. Access to this key intellectual premium is therefore differentiated, raising questions around epistemic inclusion.

Discerning critical hope in educational practices

complex business. As positioned in the book, quality enhancement is the other side of the quality coin. This two-side approach, of assurance and enhancement, is a simple structure that the book reproduces. It presents theory and practice, domestic (UK) and international perspectives, and problems and solutions. Part 3 by no means offers a prediction of where quality enhancement is headed (although this could have been useful), rather Land and Gordon leave us to think that the future will feature many surprises. The future may also tell us whether indeed ‘quality assurance has promised a lot, cost even more and delivered little’ quality enhancement (p. 15).