Educational Gender Policies and Practices In Turbulent Times. Local and Global Strategies In the Face of the Anti-Gender Movement

In recent decades, gender-based education policies have been vigorously promoted “from the bottom up” (Gamba et al., 2024; Fuentes and Gamba, 2024; Caravaca et al., 2023), through assemblages that led to the creation of programs and laws to promote equal opportunities for girls, women and LGBTQI+ people in education. Currently, these assemblages (Fuentes, 2024) are being called into question. The strengthening of far-right alliances mobilizes understandings of education, the family, and childhood in which gender is presented as an evil that threatens social stability (Butler, 2024).

We are interested in understanding the symbolic and transnational dimensions of the anti-gender backlash, the ways in which these discourses are appropriated, translated, contested, or transformed in educational contexts. We seek to explore institutional mediations, the agency of local actors, and situated assemblages that produce strategies that are not only defensive but also capable of generating new articulations among actors, institutions, and educational agendas. We invite sociologists with empirical work that enables us to conduct reviews, raise new questions and envision alternative strategies for institutionalizing gender policies and practices in education.

What experiences, practices, and norms reinforce the progress made so far? What assemblages appear to be powerful enough to re-establish gender on the educational agenda or to sustain it during turbulent times? What tensions are resurfacing within the education-gender-sexuality framework in relation to institutions, families, academia, and local and global policy agendas? To what extent do actors in education policy have the agency to sustain or deepen the gender perspective in hostile contexts?