Chair: Ciara Cremin
Helen Gremillion & Catherine Powell: Evaluating Efforts to Promote Diverse Sexuality and Gender Inclusivity at a Tertiary Institution
This presentation reports on findings from a mixed-method, utilisation-focused evaluation of an education workshop on diverse sexuality and gender (DSG) inclusivity offered at Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand. Workshop completion enables participants to make a public commitment to DSG inclusivity by joining Unitec’s ALLY Network. A questionnaire was designed to ascertain whether workshop participation achieves the following outcomes: increased awareness of systemic discrimination, and greater confidence to act in ways that promote DSG inclusion. The study also draws on findings from semi-structured interviews with current ALLY members. Data analysis included testing the statistical significance of differences between participants’ responses to pre-workshop questions and their responses to identical questions posed post workshop (these questions were answered using Likert scales). Narrative data were analysed thematically. Findings indicate that the ALLY workshop is effective in achieving its goals. Emergent themes highlight areas of significant learning and growth for workshop participants as well as particularly valuable workshop practices and conditions. This study addresses a gap in the literature on evaluations of DSG diversity education, and provides evidence supporting the continuation – and the informed, potential expansion – of a unique initiative within a New Zealand tertiary provider.
Craig Prichard: Putting ‘Dora’ in the business school; an outline of hysterical business education and research
Freud’s ‘Dora’ was, to put it colloquially, a real pain! In the famous case history of the anxious, seemingly suicidal, 18-year-old, ‘Dora’ undermines the wishes of her father, rebuffs the sexual advances of her father’s friend, and breaks off relations with her analyst, Freud, when it suits her. She refuses to play the sexualized, patriarchal game and leads all three men into intense feelings of helplessness. The hysterical subject that emerges is not ill. Rather, the hysteric is a function of the sexualized patriarchal relations, identities and knowledge of the time. In Seminar XVII (1970) Lacan systematizes the hysteric as one of two discourses of resistance that confront the discourses of the university and the master. Some would claim that much of current social science is driven by a hysterical subject whom continuously challenges contemporary sexualized patriarchal traditions, methods and assumptions. But the contrary can be easily demonstrated. Far from being the home of hysterical social science, contemporary universities, and particularly the university’s business schools, are home to the dull alienated servants of debt-based finance capitalism that backs the 1 percent and underwrites, what seems to be, inevitable environmental ruin. By way of a counterpoint, I present in this paper a form of hysterical business education, research and service work that not only, like ‘Dora’, generates intense (but productive!) feelings of helplessness among traditional managers and business school academics, but supports contending forms of engagement with contemporary economic and political relations and processes.
Alice Beban and Trudie Cain: Reflections on staff-student pedagogy
Designing and teaching courses through a partnership approach “remains countercultural in most institutions of higher education”, but it is a form of action that can affirm and empower those involved, foster a sense of belonging, support staff in generative reflection, and “contribute to the evolution of an institution into a place where members of the community feel a meaningful connection” (Cook-Sather, forthcoming; see also Jafar, 2016). This paper reflects on the presenters’ experiences co-designing an undergraduate course on gender with a group of staff, students and community members at Massey University. We consider the extent to which our practice of ‘staff-student pedagogy’ reflected feminist ideals of collaboration, partnership and reflexivity, and produced a course that better accounts for how people experience gender in their everyday worlds. But we also consider the challenges of partnering with a gender-diverse group of contributors in ways that creates space for all voices, fosters new knowledge, and produces coherence across the course.
Steve Scott: The Diary of an Hysteric: business education, the Self & other oxymorons
All writing is fiction. Organisations are also a fiction. I’m a fiction. Everything is just a collection of stories. My PhD is a fictional journal. It is also a work of narrative therapy. I am trying to work out why I want to drive a bulldozer through the business school. I am also trying to work out why I don’t fit within organisations – even though, on paper, I am their guy: the quintessential educated, white, middle-class male. I am, of course, Lacan’s hysteric. This puts me in an interesting position. I am in an overtly masculine department – Management. I am a heterosexual male. Yet, I feel compelled to write from the predominantly feminine position of the hysteric. By rejecting the dry, pseudo-scientific writing that has become the mainstay of business education and, instead, adopting hysterical, fictional prose, I believe, greater insights about business education, and the Self, can be achieved. This paper will not simply discuss this, it will demonstrate it through embodying this philosophy.
Each presentation will be allocated 20 minutes. Additional time for questions and discussion will be available in each stream.
