Table Of ContentPALGRAVE STUDIES IN GENDER AND EDUCATION
The Positioning
and Making of
Female Professors
Pushing Career Advancement Open
Edited by Rowena Murray · Denise Mifsud
Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education
Series Editor
Yvette Taylor
School of Education
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow, UK
This Series aims to provide a comprehensive space for an increasingly
diverse and complex area of interdisciplinary social science research:
gender and education. Because the field of women and gender studies is
developing rapidly and becoming ‘internationalised’ – as are traditional
social science disciplines such as sociology, educational studies, social
geography, and so on – there is a greater need for this dynamic, global
Series that plots emerging definitions and debates and monitors criti-
cal complexities of gender and education. This Series has an explicitly
feminist approach and orientation and attends to key theoretical and
methodological debates, ensuring a continued conversation and rele-
vance within the well-established, inter-disciplinary field of gender and
education.
The Series combines renewed and revitalised feminist research meth-
ods and theories with emergent and salient public policy issues. These
include pre-compulsory and post-compulsory education; ‘early years’
and ‘lifelong’ education; educational (dis)engagements of pupils, stu-
dents and staff; trajectories and intersectional inequalities including race,
class, sexuality, age and disability; policy and practice across educational
landscapes; diversity and difference, including institutional (schools,
colleges, universities), locational and embodied (in ‘teacher’–‘learner’
positions); varied global activism in and beyond the classroom and the
‘public university’; educational technologies and transitions and the (ir)
relevance of (in)formal educational settings; and emergent educational
mainstreams and margins. In using a critical approach to gender and
education, the Series recognises the importance of probing beyond the
boundaries of specific territorial-legislative domains in order to develop
a more international, intersectional focus. In addressing varied concep-
tual and methodological questions, the Series combines an intersectional
focus on competing – and sometimes colliding – strands of educational
provisioning and equality and ‘diversity’, and provides insightful reflec-
tions on the continuing critical shift of gender and feminism within
(and beyond) the academy.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14626
Rowena Murray · Denise Mifsud
Editors
The Positioning
and Making
of Female Professors
Pushing Career Advancement Open
Editors
Rowena Murray Denise Mifsud
School of Education Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Educational
University of the West of Scotland Research
Ayr, UK University of Malta
Msida, Malta
ISSN 2524-6445 ISSN 2524-6453 (electronic)
Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education
ISBN 978-3-030-26186-3 ISBN 978-3-030-26187-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26187-0
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
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Contents
1 Introduction: The Positioning and Making of Female
Academics—A Review of the Literature 1
Denise Mifsud
2 Being Tough, Being Humorous and Being Explicitly
Feminist—The “Intrinsically Disordered Nature”
of My Ways Around Academia 27
Isabel Menezes
3 ‘You Must Wait to Be Asked’: Career Advancement
and the Maternal Body 49
Caroline Gatrell
4 Babies Taught Me How to “Do” Academia: Crafting a
Career in an Institution That Was Not Built for Mothers 75
Catherine M. Mazak
5 Writing Myself into an Academic Career 89
Rowena Murray
v
vi Contents
6 Academic Fluidity? An Unconventional Route
to the Professoriate 113
Jackie Potter
7 My Personal Journey on the Pathway of Resilience 133
Sarah Skerratt
8 Actively Constructing Yourself as a Professor:
After Appointment 155
Beverley Anne Yamamoto
9 Mis-Making an Academic Career: Power, Discipline,
Structures, and Practices 177
Devorah Kalekin-Fishman
10 A Personal Journey of a Long and Winding Road
to Professorial Status: An Alternative Pathway
and the Challenges, Trials and Tribulations 201
Moira Lafferty
11 How to Fall into a Career Trap (Without Even Realising) 217
Inger Mewburn
12 Conclusion: The Process of Becoming a Woman
Professor and Unbecoming Gender Equality:
A Female Drama of Resistance 221
Denise Mifsud
Index 235
Notes on Contributors
Caroline Gatrell is Professor of Organization Studies, University
of Liverpool Management School, where she holds the position of
Associate Dean, Research. Caroline’s research centres on work, family
and health. From a sociocultural perspective, she examines how work-
ing parents (both fathers and mothers) manage boundaries between
paid work and their everyday lives. In so doing, she explores intercon-
nections between gender, bodies and employment, including the devel-
opment of the concepts ‘Pregnant Presenteeism’ and ‘Maternal Body
Work’.
Caroline is Co-Editor in Chief, International Journal of Management
Reviews and Past Chair of the Northern Advanced Research Training
Initiative (NARTI).
She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the
British Academy of Management.
Devorah Kalekin-Fishman is a Senior Researcher in the Faculty of
Education, the University of Haifa. She has published widely on alien-
ation, the sociology of everyday life, the sociology of knowledge, sociol-
ogy of the senses, and problems in education. Authored and edited books
include: Ideology, Policy and Practice (Kalekin-Fishman, Kluwer, 2003),
vii
viii Notes on Contributors
Radicals in Spite of Themselves (Kalekin-Fishman and Schneider, Sense,
2007), From the Margins to New Ground (Hagoel and Kalekin-Fishman,
Sense, 2016), Practicing Social Science (Kalekin-Fishman, Routledge,
2017), Alienation and the Millennium (Langman, L. and Kalekin-
Fishman, D., eds., Krieger, 1996), Multiple Citizenship in Europe (Kalekin-
Fishman, D. and Pitkanen, P., eds., Peter Lang, 2007), The ISA Handbook
in Contemporary Sociology (Denis, A. and Kalekin-Fishman, D., eds.,
Sage, 2009), Everyday Life in Asia (Kalekin-Fishman, D. and Low, K. eds.,
Routledge, 2010), The Shape of Sociology for the 21st Century (Kalekin-
Fishman, D. and Denis, A. eds., Sage, 2012), Approaches to Educational
and Social Inclusion: An International Perspective (Verma, G. K. and
Kalekin-Fishman, D., eds., Routledge, 2016). Currently, she is involved
in a study of the implementation of her model for ‘Acquiring Literacy
in Participatory Citizenship’ (Kalekin-Fishman, D., Hagoel, L., et al., in
progress).
She serves on the editorial boards of several international journals, is
associate editor of Sociopedia, and was Vice-President for Publications in
the International Sociological Association (2006–2010).
Moira Lafferty is Professor of Applied Sport Psychology and Deputy
Head in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chester.
She is a Health and Care Professions Council registered sport and exer-
cise psychologist and Chief Supervisor for the Qualification in Sport
and Exercise Psychology for the British Psychological Society. With a
career in higher education spanning 25 years, she has held numerous
roles and positions at department and faculty level.
With a diverse portfolio of activity, she has expertise in applied prac-
tice, teaching and learning and academic management. Moira has been
in receipt of external grants to explore teaching and learning in higher
education and has written journal and book chapters exploring this. As
an applied sport psychologist, Moira has worked with numerous teams
and individuals at national and international level and has a wealth
of experience helping athletes maximise their potential. Currently,
she is part of a UK-wide research group exploring the supervision of
neophyte practitioners and has a strong interest in supervision within
both research and practice. Her research exemplifies her desire to help
Notes on Contributors ix
and support others and she is the principal investigator and leads on
the CHANGES programme, working in partnership with British
Universities and Colleges Sport.
Catherine M. Mazak is a tenured Full Professor at the University of
Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, where she specialises in translanguaging and
bilingual education. She blogs about academic writing at https://www.
cathymazak.com.
Isabel Menezes has a degree and a Ph.D. in Psychology and a habili-
tation in Educational Sciences from the University of Porto, where she
is a Full Professor in the Department of Educational Sciences. She is a
member of CIIE, a research centre in educational research and inter-
vention, and teaches in the fields of educational research, educational
and community intervention, political education and political psychol-
ogy. Her research deals with the civic and political participation of chil-
dren, young people and adults, with a special interest in groups at risk
of exclusion on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, disa-
bility and migrant status, and the ways formal and non-formal educa-
tion (including artistic) experiences can generate more complex ways of
relationship with the political. She coordinated several funded research
projects comprising the Portuguese participation in international pro-
jects such as IEA Civic Education Study, FP7 PIDOP and H2020
Catch-EyoU. More recent interests relate to doctoral education and
university social responsibility as a way to explore how universities can
creatively and proactively respond to societal challenges. Some recent
projects include Erasmus+ EU-USR, HE4U2, ESSA, ENGAGE and
SOLVINC. She is since 2017 the president of the SPCE (Portuguese
Educational Research Association).
Inger Mewburn has been working with Ph.D. students and early
career researchers to develop their professional skills since 2006. Aside
from editing and contributing to the Thesis Whisperer blog, she writes
scholarly papers, books and book chapters about research student expe-
riences, with a special interest in employability and social media use.
Dr. Denise Mifsud is the Gozo College Principal, besides being
an independent education researcher and consultant, and a Fellow
