Everyday Knowledge and Uncommon Truths: Women of the Academy is a thirteen chapter volume which draws on the life experience and varied backgrounds of academic women from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The book addresses a variety of issues pertaining to women’s home lives, education, teaching, research, writing, and activism. To provide diverse perspectives on women’s experiences of being and knowing in and outside the academy, contributors draw on a range of critical approaches derived from feminism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, critical education theory, discourse theory and analysis, narrative inquiry and life histories. Lately, there has been considerable interest by women in the academy in a discernment process involving an examination of the historically, politically and culturally situated nature of their knowledge of the world, their work in the academy and other activities in which they engage. These examinations, especially in the form of narrative inquiry, life histories and deconstructive language practices such as discourse analysis, figure prominently in breaking silences and giving voice to the many tensions that women experience in the academic workplace and other settings.

Popular fiction continues to be the object of both academic and political interest as educators seek to understand the role literacy plays in constructing the gender, class, race, ethnic, age, sexual and national subjectivites of youth. This book focuses on the role of teen romance fiction in the construction and reconstruction of femininity internationally. Developed in the United States amid the conservative political restoration of Reganism, teen romance fiction condenses and articulates the long standing fears and resentments of conservative groups regarding feminism and women's growing independence and political power. Drawing on multidisciplinary approaches from cultural studies and feminist theories, psychoanalysis, semiotics, reader research, and critical theory, these essays signal the complexity of the world wide teen romance novel phenomenon and the political character of women's literacy. The book is aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students of literacy, women's studies, sociology of education and cultural studies.

First Published in 1991. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.