Programme full

Friday 17 April 2015 11:00 - 12:30
PAPER SESSION 7
Who is the Beast with Seven Heads? In-school Pregnancy in Mozambique as a Prism for Identity
Salvi, F.
(University of Sussex)
Who is the pregnant schoolgirl? Macleod (2003, 426) defines her an 'adult, but not adult, child, but not child, an
undecidable'. The United Nations associate in-school pregnancy with vicious cycles of poverty and deprivation, as
pregnancy generally prevents girls from acquiring skills they need in order to be successfully employed. Teenage
pregnancy is ultimately a 'beast with seven heads', contends a respondent from Mozambique, due to its complexity
which makes it hard to properly understand why it happens so often. Broadly, teenage pregnancy corresponds to a
breach of normative identity as sex is associated with adulthood. Moreover, by emphasising the forgone economic
productivity, pregnancy is constructed as a threat to the production of the modernising subject. This aspect is
particularly relevant for a developing country such as Mozambique.
Exploring in-school pregnancy becomes a means to revoke binaries such as childhood and adulthood, or tradition and
modernity. By engaging with young people's perspectives and attitudes about their own identity, this paper suggests
that individuals navigate different regulatory frameworks in order to make sense of their lives, and the context they live
in. The itineraries they construct in the interstices between heteronormativities constitute individual identities,
insomuch as they contribute to shifting discourses through processes of resignification. It is in this sense that in-school
pregnancy becomes a prism, in that it allows us to consider the multi-layered and diffracted connections between
individuals and discourses in the material contexts of their lives.
Sociology of Education 1
M137, GEORGE MOORE BUILDING
FEMINISM AND THE NEO-LIBERAL ACADEMY
This symposium assesses and reflects on the place and position of feminist and critical scholarship in neo-liberal
times. Its lens is the affective and embodied processes and consequences entailed in the conditions of one’s own
(insider and thus complicit) production. We share our insights so as to better grasp and challenge the hegemonic
neo-liberal economic rationality that governs much of (feminist) academic work. In our symposium, we review the
variously vested schemas of the academy; science as a willed ignoring of feminist querying of its norms (Morley);
doctoral training’s regulatory ambience and how a pleasurable sociality was crafted in its wake (Leaney and Webb);
whilst Foucault’s understanding of governmentality is put to work in scrutinising the prevailing conditions of production
of the PhD and thus the neo-liberal academic (Pryor); whilst (Hey) comments on the lures of the research excellence
framework and its potential to ‘contaminate’ the purpose and pleasures of writing and (Danvers) questions the
ubiquitous appeal of critical thinking decoded as more elusive than a competency model of transferable skills implies.
In neo-liberal times it is all too easy for pragmatic and strategic aims to structure our attention spans so we perform
our ‘relevancy’ but we can offer an alternative vision. Scholars placed in different stages of their careers (from ‘newer’
researchers to established academics) seek to develop a critical lexicon that meddles with the foreshortened
academic production cycle to present reflexively engaged analyses fit for the purpose of understanding and
challenging these current times.
Dissident Daughters? The Psychic Life of Academic Feminism
Hey, V.
(University of Sussex)
It is a conventional notion that feminist scholarship has been tolerated, rather than celebrated, in the Academy.
However, given that neo-liberal orthodoxy regulates what is to count as academic ‘merit’ and ‘performance’, the
precarious nature of feminist solidarity becomes much more evident. Has shamelessness replaced ‘solidarity’ in
academic feminism, under this intense competition for jobs, research posts, funds and outputs?
I explore the affective consequences of the routine performative cultures of higher education in terms of the ‘perverse
pleasures’ (Hey, 2004) and normative cruelties of feminist academic (identity) work. What can one say about
‘authenticity’ or ‘integrity’ as critical theory and research is cast as ‘resistance’ - what Bev Skeggs conceived as ‘a war
of conceptual attrition’ (Skeggs, 2008) and yet is unavoidably ‘reproductive’ – given our passionate attachments to our
work - an ambivalence Lauren Berlant, (2011) sees as unavoidable. However, does a model of identity as discursive
offer a particularly serviceable moral refuge aiding and abetting this accommodative rationality?
BSA Annual Conference 2015 278
Glasgow Caledonian University