In this cross-cultural exploration of the comparative experiences of Asian and Western women in higher education management, leading feminist theorist Carmen Luke constructs a provocative framework that situates her own standpoint and experiences alongside those of Asian women she studied over a three-year period. She conveys some of the complexity of global sweeps and trends in education and feminist discourse as they intersect with local cultural variations but also dovetail into patterns of regional similarities.
Western feminist research has established that relatively few women hold senior positions in universities and colleges. Using the now common metaphor of the "glass ceiling," this research has developed a range of social, cultural, and institutional explanations for women's underrepresentation in academic life. International studies show that women in non-Western countries are also underrepresented in higher education. Yet do Western explanations and strategies for change hold for academic women working in non-Western universities? The very diversity among women's experiences calls into question many of the analytic tools, terms, claims, and solutions formulated by Western feminism. This is the first study to show how cultural differences figure into the institutional dynamics of "glass ceilings." It raises important theoretical and practical, strategic, and tactical questions about issues of cultural difference and institutional power.

First Published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor and Francis, an informa company.

Men and women come into the classroom with radically different expectations and take away from it radically different experiences. Men are inclined to see the classroom as an open forum for their views, whereas women often find themselves marginalised in the education process.
Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy centres around the theoretical effort to construct a feminist pedagogy which will democratize gender relations in the classroom. It emphasises the themes of voice, representation and empowerment and discusses practical efforts to implement a truly feminist pedagogy that simultaneously makes men conscious of their positions of power and privilege in education. The book concludes with personal reflections from its distinguished contributors on their own struggles for equality within the academy.

Beginning from a poststructuralist position, "Constructing the Child Viewer" examines three decades of U.S. research on television and children. The book concludes that historical concepts of the child television viewer are products of discourse and cannot be taken to reflect objective, scientific truths about the child viewer. Widely disseminated constructs of the passive viewer, the active viewer, the interactive viewer, and the media literate viewer are seen as problematic. Nearly all academic studies published from 1948 to 1979 on the subject are included in this volume. Each receives close textual analysis, making this a useful bibliographic resource and reference book. Methodologically and theoretically, this is the first text of its kind to read the history of research on television and children as an archaeology of knowledge.

"Constructing the Child Viewer" is an extensive bibliographical resource, a preliminary introduction to Foucault's discourse theory, and an experimental application of that theory to one major strand of the discourse of mass communications research. Students of educational psychology, sociology, and communications/media will find this work invaluable.