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This chapter focuses on an early British female writer's course offered at Ripon College, a small liberal arts institution in Ripon, Wisconsin, USA. The course was first offered during the spring of 2017 as Donald J. Trump began his term as president of the United States. The students and instructor aimed to make their classroom a place for honest and open discussions about the difficult socio-political environment as they continually sought connections between their own social concerns and those of the early women writers they studied. The essay focuses specifically on the group's study of eighteenth-century British author Eliza Haywood, her novella Fantomina, and her periodical The Female Spectator. Through their study of these texts, the group came to understand how their own stories mattered. They saw that their creativity was a tool with which they could navigate and resist political change. This realization manifested itself in the creative capstone project for the course – a student-author periodical based on The Female Spectator. The essay explains the instructor's pedagogical approach toward this project and features samples of the students' writing from both the periodical and their end-of-term reflective writings.

This chapter explores the role of postmodern intertextuality in Neil Jordan’s 2012 vampire film Byzantium. This intertextuality serves to place the film in dialogue with earlier vampire fiction, in particular the 1970s cycle of British and European erotic vampire films such as Daughters of Darkness and The Vampire Lovers from Hammer Films. Byzantium recalls these earlier texts structurally and thematically, both through direct reference and more oblique allusions.

While Fredric Jameson characterizes postmodern intertextuality as mere nostalgia and the imitation of ‘dead styles’, feminist postmodern theorists such as Linda Hutcheon contend argue for the political potential of postmodernism. This chapter proposes that the postmodern intertextuality of Byzantium is a critical intertextuality, and that the foregrounding of storytelling, writing, and rewriting in the film draws attention to the ways in which the intertextuality of Byzantium is not merely a return to past forms but also a reworking of them.

Taking up the work of Linda Hutcheon and Catherine Constable, this chapter demonstrates the ways in which Byzantium critically reworks aspects of earlier vampire fiction in order to critique and expand the representation of the female vampire and through this explore issues relating to female subjectivity and community.

We've been living in a homogenous world, you know a world centered on and seen through the language perceptions of men. The consequences of this for everything that we take for granted, for all our assumptions are very deep. Feminism, in the sense I use it, is a radical complexity thought in the process of transforming itself. It is a kind of breaking open of not only the oversimplification but of the lies and the silence in which so much of human experience has been cloaked. Too much has been left out, too much has been unmentioned, too much has been made taboo. Too many connections have been disguised or denied. (Interview with Adrienne Rich, Christopher Street, Jan. 1977, pp. 9–16.)

This article represents an attempt to uncover a suitable method of sociological enquiry, which can best understand and explore the experiences of the older, working class women of my research. Noting the historical, frustrating sense of absence of women in dominant knowledge claims (for example Beauvoir, 1997; Woolf, 1993; Rowbotham, 1973), the article seeks to complement post‐modern critiques of the autonomy of reason with feminist accounts of knowledge or “epistemologies”. The article documents the dislocation between my own epistemological assumptions and the women’s ways of knowing, and their attempts to defend themselves against my middle class interpretations of their working class lives. It offers a reflexive account of my own ethnographic research experiences, in order to help resolve some of the practical dilemmas faced by feminist researchers (Ribbens and Edwards, 1988). The article highlights some of the pains and pleasures of the feminist research experience.

The Annual Review of Comparative and International Education (ARCIE) represents a forum and an opportunity for scholars worldwide to discuss and examine trends and directions in comparative/international education, highlighting relevant developments in these fields, related to educational contexts, climates, and reforms in these contexts. Changes and reforms within these contexts and areas can have significant impacts on various education stakeholders, agents, and societies. Given the need to identify and prepare for these changes, the objective of this chapter is to discuss recent trends and directions in the field of Comparative and International Education (CIE). The method employed to identify these trends was a meta-analysis of the 23 chapters published in the 2020 edition of ARCIE. The 23 chapters composed the corpus of texts analyzed in this study, with the support of an online platform for corpora processing. Results of the analysis were contrasted with relevant literature in the field and suggest that (among the three main missions of universities) teaching and research received more attention than outreach/services, considering the corpus analyzed. In addition, teachers and students received more attention than administrative staff. Therefore, we conclude that more attention is necessary toward these aspects (outreach and administrative staff) in the pursuit of social justice and UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs). Finally, the prevalence of topics related to language and sustainability suggests a need for more representativeness, in terms of regions and languages studied in the field of CIE.

The development of ‘desire’ in a working-class artist/academic is explored through an analysis of the reminiscences between the author and her mother. It is argued that the notion of cultural capital implies a deficit in working-class subjects that is deterministic and does not fully explain those who are successful in the art world and/or academia. Rather than thinking about works of art and art practice in terms of cultural capital, they are conceptualised as resources that can have existential significance for some people. This is because early interactions with the arts enable people to connect with the world and at the same time enable them to recognise their own desires and talents while learning to think critically about their lives. The findings of this study suggest a nuanced approach based on cultural assets and resources rather than cultural capital should be considered in educational policy and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to ask how forms of “performative” interventions can prompt processes of re-thinking, which can, in turn, instigate the critical production of public space. Most importantly, it also asks how this methodology can manifest within various cultural and political contexts. Today, public spaces tend to be controlled either by the state or by private corporations. Neoliberal policies promote commercial interests, which subsequently drives inequality and determines what can and cannot be accessed by the public. The public spaces that are currently present in the neoliberal cities are, in fact, “pseudo” public spaces.

In an attempt to form new understandings of this problem, the authors’ approach is rooted in feminist theories of performativity, which focus on how identities are persistently re-produced through performance. These theories consider how the “self” is always entangled within everyday life interactions and how it is shaped by both societal and bodily practices. Framing spaces as shapable, informed by the embodied dialectic relations between spaces and social relations, the study uses forms of performative methodology to create productive disruptions and “constructed situations” (Debord, 2012). This methodology consists of intervention within these spaces in order to produce alternative public space and forms of publicness. Based on research conducted at the Sheffield School of Architecture, as well as a four-day invited workshop at the Floating University Berlin, this study investigates applications of performative practice methodology in the cities of Amman and Berlin.

The paper will begin by exploring how the two cities are regulated through various political and planning policies that affect public spaces. This line of enquiry will also involve questioning physical, social and political access to public space in these contexts and analysing the various actants, performative actions and processes that were involved in producing performative interventions.

The paper will conclude by discussing the potential and limitations of applying and translating such approaches in public spaces within different cultural and political contexts. As such, the study proposes a new methodological framework for re-thinking and provoking the critical production of public space through forms of performative spatial practice.