Education as a right has been integral to a more than a century-long struggle by women for liberation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The region is vast and diverse in its history, culture, politics, language, and religion. Therefore, in the study of women and education in the MENA region, it is imperative to consider particularities of each nation’s different historical and political formation in tandem with universal forces, conditions, and structures that shape the success or failure of women’s access to and participation in education. Historically, the greatest leap forward in women’s education began from the mid-20th century onward. The political, social, and economic ebb and flow of the first two decades of the 21st century is reflected on women’s education. Thus, the analysis of the current conditions should be situated in the context of the past and the provision for the future. It is crucial to make references to earlier periods, especially where relevant, to anticolonial and national liberation struggles as well as modern nation-building and the women’s rights movements.
The empirical evidence aptly demonstrates that in most of the countries in the region, women’s participation in secondary and higher education is surpassing that of men. However, neither their status nor their social mobility have been positively affected. Women’s demand for “bread, work, democracy, and justice” is tied to education in several ways. First, education is a site of social and political struggle. Second, it is an institution integral to the formation and expansion of capitalist imperialism in the MENA region. Last, education is constituted through, not separated from, economic and political relations. The absence of some themes in the study of women and education reflects this structural predicament. Topics less studied are women as teachers and educators; women and teachers’ union; women and religious education and seminaries; women and the missionary schools; women in vocational education; women and the study abroad programs; girls in early childhood education; women and mother tongue education; women and the education of minorities; women and continuing education; women and academic freedom; and women and securitization of education. To study these themes also requires a range of critical methodological approaches. Some examples are ethnographical studies of classrooms, institutional ethnographies of teachers’ unions, analysis of memoirs of teachers and students, and critical ethnography of students’ movements. The proposed theoretical and methodological renewal is to contest the tendency in the study of education in the MENA region that renders patriarchal state and capitalism invisible.
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Women and Education in the Middle East and North Africa
Shahrzad Mojab
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“Globalization,” Coloniality, and Decolonial Love in STEM Education
Miwa A. Takeuchi and Ananda Marin
From the era of European empire to the global trades escalated after the World Wars, technological advancement, one of the key underlying conditions of globalization, has been closely linked with the production and reproduction of the colonizer/colonized. The rhetoric of modernity characterized by “salvation,” “rationality,” “development,” and nature-society or nature-culture divides underlies dominant perspectives on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education that have historically positioned economic development and national security as its core values. Such rhetoric inevitably and implicitly generates the logic of oppression and exploitation. Against the backdrop of nationalist and militaristic discourse representing modernity or coloniality, counter-voices have also arisen to envision a future of STEM education that is more humane and socioecologically just. Such bodies of critiques have interrogated interlocking colonial domains that shape the realm of STEM education: (a) settler colonialism, (b) paternalism, genderism, and coloniality, and (c) militarism and aggression and violence against the geopolitical Other. Our ways of knowing and being with STEM disciplines have been inexorably changed in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which powerfully showed us how we live in the global chain of contagion. What kinds of portrayal can we depict if we dismantle colonial imaginaries of STEM education and instead center decolonial love—love that resists the nature-culture or nature-society divide, love to know our responsibilities and enact them in ways that give back, love that does not neglect historical oppression and violence yet carries us through? STEM education that posits decolonial love at its core will be inevitably and critically transdisciplinary, expanding the epistemological and ontological boundaries to embrace those who had been colonized and disciplined through racialized, gendered, and classist disciplinary practices of STEM.
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Water and Gender
Martina Angela Caretta and Brandon Anthony Rothrock
Water relations are gendered, and there are various, differential socio-ecological and power dynamics that reify those relations at different spatial scales. There are multiple examples across the Global North and Global South that pinpoint the diverse productive and reproductive uses of water by men and women. Women, for instance, are more likely to be excluded from water management and decision making, while men are in control of water for agricultural production. Neoliberal framings of water in economic terms may exacerbate gender inequalities as neoliberal policies are often blind to the complex politics and power embedded in gender relations and water. Emerging literature on embodiment and emotions in waterscapes confronts neoliberal framings of water by theorizing the everyday lived experience of disenfranchised groups excluded from water management. Gendered studies of water relations focus largely on women, with limited attention to men. Male usage of water is often presented in relation to their role in water infrastructure management and design and water for leisure. As climate change becomes a more pressing issue in general society, existing uneven gendered relations of water resource use will be further exacerbated. With prevalent literature on gender relations focusing on women, future research needs to further incorporate studies of masculinity in gender relations to better inform adaptation and mitigation strategies. An understanding of gender and education would be insufficient without an understanding of both gender differentials in access to water and the gendered implications of climate change.
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Changing Global Gender Involvement in Higher Education Participation
Miriam E. David
The global expansion of higher education since the last quarter of the 20th century reflects political and socioeconomic developments, including opening up economic opportunities and addressing neoliberal agendas such as corporatization, digitization, individualization, and marketization. This process of the so-called massification of higher education has also been called academic capitalism, whereby business models predominate what was once considered a public good and a form of liberal arts education. These transformations have implications for questions of equal opportunity and social justice in regard to gender and sexuality linked to diversity, race, and social class, or intersectionality. Transformations include involvement and participation for students, academics, faculty, and researchers. From a feminist perspective, the various transformations have not increased equality or equity but have instead reinforced notions of male power, misogyny and patriarchy, and social class and privilege, despite the massive increase in involvement of women as students and academics through policies of widening access or participation. The new models of global higher education exacerbate rather than erode inequalities of power and prestige between regions, institutions, and gendered, classed, and raced individuals.
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Diasporic Transnationalism, Gender, and Education
Kimberly Williams Brown
Transnationalism, gender, and education are bound together through a global need for cheap, replaceable labor. Women work for less (cheap labor) and often travel globally for work. Education has not been exempt from this phenomenon and teachers’ roles in transnational and global knowledge production and teaching have not always been documented. Despite this, women have been resisting the exploitation of their labor through diasporic transnational networks; one such example is Afro-Caribbean women teachers who demonstrate how a politics of refusal, diasporic transnationalism, and liberation are bound together in interlocking ways. Diasporic transnationalism allows marginalized people to resist a world created on inequities that tells them they are not capable of agency and their own definitions of liberation.
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Gender Equity in Global Education Policy
Karen Monkman
Since the 1990s gender has become a prominent priority in global education policy. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs, 2000–2015) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, which replaced the MDGs) influence the educational planning of most low- and middle-income countries, along with the work of the various actors in the field. The historical antecedents to this era of gender and education policy include international development research beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, the Women’s Conferences in Mexico City (1985) and Beijing (1995), and increasingly nuanced academic research on gender and international development in the early decades of the 2000s. What began as calls to include girls in schooling and women in international development programs has become a much more complex attempt to ensure gender equity in education and in life. A wide variety of key policy actors are involved in these processes and in shaping policy, including the World Bank, the UN agencies (primarily UNICEF and UNESCO), governments (both donors and recipients of international assistance), nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), corporations and private entities, and consultants. Partnerships among various actors have been common in the late 20th century and early 21st century.
Persistent issues in the early 21st century include (a) the tension between striving to attend to quality concerns while increasing efforts to measure progress, (b) gender-based violence (GBV), and (c) education for adolescents and adolescence. These challenges are closely linked to how key concepts are conceptualized. How “gender” is understood (distinct from or conflated with sex categories) leads to particular ways of thinking about policy and practice, from counting girls and boys in classrooms (prioritizing sex categories and numerical patterns), toward a more complex understanding of gender as a social construction (and so presents options for curricular strategies to influence gendered social norms). Men and boys are acknowledged, mostly when they are perceived to be disadvantaged, and less often to challenge hypermasculinity or male privilege. Sexuality and gender identity are just beginning to emerge in formal policy in the early 21st century. Gender relations and patriarchy remain on the periphery of official policy language. Equity (fairness) is often reduced to equality (equal treatment despite differences in needs or interests). Although empowerment is theorized in research, in policy it is used inconsistently, sometimes falling short of the theoretical framings. Two broader concepts are also important to consider in global education policy, namely, intersectionality and neoliberalism. Engaging intersectionality more robustly could make policy more relevant locally; as of 2020, this concept has not made its way into global policy discourses. Neoliberalism, on the other hand, is a strong influence in shaping policy in gender and education globally, yet it is seldom made explicit. Building policy on a stronger conceptual foundation would enrich gender and education policy.
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Reforming South Korean Higher Education for Female Marriage Migrants
Ji-Yeon O. Jo and Minseung Jung
South Korea has experienced a surge of foreign immigration since 1990, and one of the major migrant groups is female marriage migrants. Although the South Korean government has implemented a variety of policies to reform its education system in order to accommodate the growing multicultural population, it has been mainly focused on K–12 education for children of migrants. In addition, the issues of access to and quality of higher education for female marriage migrants in South Korea are seldom discussed in academic and public spheres. Although female marriage migrants have a great degree of motivation to pursue higher education, they face multilayered hurdles before, during, and after receiving their higher education in South Korea. Narratives of female marriage migrants in higher education not only challenge the common stereotype of “global hypergamy” and gender stereotypes related to female marriage migrants but also provide chances to reexamine the current status of higher education in South Korea and the notion of global citizenship. Their stories highlight the changes in self-perception, familial relationships, and social engagement and underscore female marriage migrants’ process of embracing global citizenship. Their narratives articulate how gender, migration, and higher education intersect in their daily lives, how their lives are connected to the globalizing world, and how these reveal two essential components of the sense of global citizenship—dignity and compassion.
