Gender, Education, and Social Change: Power, Inequality, and Belonging

Gender occupies a complex and often contested position within contemporary education. While gender equality has become an important objective across many educational systems, questions of inequality, exclusion, recognition, participation, and belonging remain deeply embedded within educational institutions and everyday educational experiences. Rapid social transformations associated with digitalisation, artificial intelligence, migration, demographic change, geopolitical tensions, climate uncertainty, and widening social inequalities are reshaping the conditions under which educational opportunities, identities, aspirations, and social relationships are formed and negotiated.

These developments raise important questions for sociology of education. Educational institutions are increasingly confronted with competing expectations surrounding equality, diversity, inclusion, citizenship, care, and social responsibility. Debates concerning gender are no longer limited to issues of access and participation. They also involve broader questions about identity formation, social belonging, knowledge production, institutional change, and the distribution of opportunities and resources across different groups and contexts. Gender has therefore become an important lens through which to examine the relationship between education and wider processes of social transformation.

This session invites contributions that explore how gender is constituted, negotiated, governed, challenged, and reimagined across diverse educational settings and throughout different stages of the life course. We welcome empirical, theoretical, methodological, and comparative studies that examine the intersections between gender and contemporary educational change in local, national, transnational, and global contexts. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Gender, Power, and Educational Inequalities
• Identity, Recognition, and Belonging
• Digital Futures, Knowledge Production, and Educational Work
• Theorising Gender and Education in Times of Social Transformation