Mervi Heikkinen

Promising Nordic practices in gender equality promotion: Developing teacher education dialogue, practice, and policy cycles on-line:

This case study examines a Nordic on-line course on gender equality promotion in education, in which principals, teachers, school staff and gender equality activists engaged in dialogue regarding contents and practices. The on-line course was designed with reference to promising practices identified in a previous Nordic network project. The article considers challenges appearing across localities in relation to diversity, in gender equality promotion practices, policies and pedagogies. Digitalisation enables educational collaboration among teacher education institutions between the distant Nordic countries and facilitates the dissemination of Nordic education and the gender equality model, but this raises questions about whether these forms of education and equality are globally ‘branded’; and whether an intersectional gender equality promotion approach can be contextually and locally specific. This paper focuses on the contradictions of gender/sex binary concepts impairing understandings of diversity, sexuality and identity, the consequences of the emergence of scepticism toward practice standardisation, discrepancies between norms of equal treatment and critical reflection, and the development of citizen-based actions initiating policy changes. It is shown that the results of the project will benefit Nordic collaboration on teacher education development.

Reconfigurings of Non-violence as a Matter of Sustainability and Response-ability

ABSTRACT In this paper, we explore non-violence and the responsibility for non-violence inspired by Karen Barad’s work on the material–discursive notion of response-ability. Our analysis, by way of thinking with theory, is based on a careful engagement with the life of one woman, Lena, as told by her in writing and interviews between the years 2007 and 2015. Based on her talk about violence and non-violence in her life, we produced three stories of non-violence “in-becoming”. Through these stories, our aim is to shed light on non-violence as relational; that is, how it is reconfigured in the complex entanglements of bodies, things, abstractions, and histories and how these different entanglements enable an ethically sustainable response for non-violence. In the end, by foregrounding relationality, response, and sustainability, we argue that nurturing sustainable non-violence could be enriched by expanding the focus from individual agency or collective action to the co-constituted conditions of possibilities for response-ability.