Feminism, gender and global higher education: women's learning lives

In this invited commentary, I offer a critique of two lacunae in the emerging field. I consider how aspects of research on the transformations of global higher education constitute an emergent sociology of higher education, and I also review how the dominant tendencies occlude gender and feminist perspectives. By way of enticing readers to consider these absences, I present research evidence from a feminist and sociological perspective about the innovative and refreshing critiques of transformations in HE and the future of universities. I also contend that women's learning lives on in feminist scholarship and emergent new knowledge that may contribute to the university of the future. First, I present some recent feminist and sociological research that was published in a special issue of a new Routledge journal for the UK's Academy of Social Sciences, Contemporary Social Science, which drew on a seminar series about Imagining the University of the Future. All the contributors presented critiques of the current dominant perspectives in research on global higher education. They also presented narratives that constitute new knowledge created with new methodologies and gendered or feminist frames of reference. Second, I present evidence from another Routledge journal, but this time the long-standing British Journal of Sociology of Education, to develop a sociology of higher education through a recent virtual special issue which brings together articles over the last five years. This demonstrates the rich theoretical diversity of sociological studies of the transformations of global higher education, including from a gender and feminist perspective. Finally, I conclude with offering a comment about the vitality and vibrancy of women's learning across their lives, especially through the contributions of generations of feminist scholars to these new fields of endeavour. Feminist knowledge and scholarship are important to understanding global HE and the university of the future.