By using our site, you agree to our collection of information through the use of cookies. To learn more, view our Privacy Policy. To browse Academia. Dominant paradigms in academic research, theory and history of adult education are not explored enough in the current European academic discourse. Postmodern and feminist orientated researchers have questioned heteronormative tradition of knowing, but adult education theories still do not sufficiently tackle gender constructed concepts and approaches.
Adult education research suffered from slighting gender and women in three basic ways: deletion of women as individual subjects and as a notion from the history of research and philosophy of adult education, domination of androcentrism in epistemology and misunderstanding of gender perspective and overemphasizing heteronormative differences placing females in opposition to men in research methodology and data interpretation, which reproduces dualism and binary positions while underestimating social dimension of gender identities.
This issue of Studies in Adult Education and Learning explores gender and its implications in adult learning and education from different world perspectives. For Hearn and Collinson , p. Women and femininities, and men and masculinities, are seen as socially constructed, produced and reproduced, variable and changing across time and space, within societies, and through the life course. The notion of gender is local and global in nature but on the local level femininities and masculinities have to be understood within the context of culture, ethics, religion, space and language.
Despite legislation, policies and practice, and while some progress has been made in many countries, there are still no countries who have achieved a hundred per cent gender equality Gender Equality Index, EIGE, Over the years this has included several supranational agreements and mandatory regulations signed by countries such as the Convention of the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women CEDAW, , the Platform of Beijing , the Istanbul Convention , and more recently the UN Sustainable Development Goals , among others.
The failure of these initiatives indicate that gender inequality, discrimination and prejudice suffered by women are embedded in structural unequal power relations.
