What are adult education and research for? Researching (and) the feminist imaginary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As an academic teaching courses on critical theories of adult education, I employ artsbased teaching and research and facilitates community workshops worldwide. I argue that working across formal and nonformal spaces is a central part of the social responsibility of academics in adult education to work for change, and equally, stems from the conviction that theory and practice need one another. Theory enables us to see more deeply and clearly into what is taking place in the world or what we are being taught to see and to believe about the world. Theory guides both the why and how we educate, the context and intention of which is central and the diverse methods we use, which are elemental.I wish to ask the strategic question: What are adult education and research for? How participants and students answer this question, this essay argues, depends on where they stand and their perceptions of the world and of education and learning. Everything adult educators think, say, do and/or teach is done in context. My context as a feminist adult educator is our highly inequitably gendered world. Gender is understood as central to the web of assumptions behind dominant social imaginaries that hold certain conceptual frames in place. I maintain that the mesh of recent crises has brought to light a steady rise of a global patriarchal backlash of fundamentalist and fascist agendas across the globe, threatening the gains made by women and LGBTQIA communities. Asking what feminist adult education and research are forproduces a complex of answers, but for adult education and research the answer must be: for radicalgender and social justice change, for the disruption of patriarchal knowledge, for the fight against “epistemic injustice”, and for new imaginaries for women to make sense of and story the worlds they inhabit. Finally, the essay discusses the aims and methods of a 5-year international SSHRC project focused on feminist imaginary as a pedagogical tool for epistemic justice and change.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".