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Issues of women’s education and empowerment of women have been incorporated in the framing of the role of women in international development from the 1970s, primarily as a response to the liberal feminist movement agenda of the time. This analysis examines the degree to which liberal feminism and liberal feminist theory is reflected in comparative education scholarship in the lead up to and beyond the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The analysis first explores the underpinnings of liberal feminism, which constitutes the ideal embedded in development education for girls and women. It follows up with a reflection on the literature in the field of comparative education that reference liberal feminism framework and feminist theory in exploring educational issues and ways in which the theory is located in the research. Illustration of examples that demonstrate the limits of liberal feminism as a theoretical framework and barriers to the use of liberal feminist theory as an ideological guide are captured in the findings. The search is limited to the six dominant scholarly outlets in the field of comparative education; namely Comparative Education Review (CER), Comparative Education (CE), Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education (Compare), Prospects: Quarterly Review of Comparative Education (Prospects), International Review of Education (IRE), and the International Journal of Educational Development (IJED). Only works that explicitly mention liberal feminism/liberal feminist perspectives are included in the analysis. This research contributes to the acknowledgement of the liberal feminist theory in development education and for the field of comparative education. It will also help with understanding the politics of ideology and representation in scholarship and development interventions.

This chapter will explore how different feminist theories and theorists have informed what counts as research, what is defined as a research issue, and methodological approaches to research in higher education. It will consider the theoretical and methodological tools feminist academics have mobilized in order to develop more powerful explanations of how gender and other forms of difference work in the relation to the positioning of the individual, higher education and the nation state within globalized economies. It pays particular regard to the feminist political project of social justice.

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the work of sociologists who laid the foundation for queer and crip approaches to disability and to address how queer and crip theory has and can help to re-conceptualize our understandings of health, illness, disability, and sexuality.

This paper is an examination of historical moments and prominent literature within medical sociology and sociology of disability. Sociological and popular understandings of disability and sexuality have often mirrored each other historically. Although this literature review focuses primarily on medical sociology and disability studies literature, some works of scholars specializing in gender studies, sexuality, literature, history, and queer studies are also included

In this paper, I argue that the medicalization and pathologization of human differences specifically as it pertains to sexuality and disability within the medical sociological literature have led to constructionist, social model, and feminist critiques. It is these critiques that then laid the foundation for the development of queer and crip theoretical approaches to both disability and sexuality.

Crip and queer approaches to disability provide a clear call for future sociological research. Few social science scholars have applied queer and crip approaches in empirical studies on disability. The majority of work in this area is located in the humanities and concerned with literary criticism. A broader array of empirical work on the intersection of sexuality and disability from queer/crip perspectives is needed both to refine these postmodern theoretical models and to examine their implications for the complex lived experience that lies at the intersection of sexuality and disability. In queering disability and cripping sexuality and gender, we may be able not only to more fully conceptualize disability, sexuality, and gender as individual social categories, but also to more fully understand the complex intersection of these social locations.

The text explores the feminist concept of intersectionality and its adoption within disability studies. The aim is to analyze how feminist and disability movements and theories have managed the issue of struggling against oppression and for equality while acknowledging internal diversity.

Literature review based on the concepts of intersectionality, disabled women, and disability and diversity seeking for explicit and implicit confluences and emerging implications at different levels: social movements, theoretical developments, and policymaking.

Intersectionality is a minor field within disability studies. However, diversity and multiple oppression issues have been addressed by the disability rights movement, after disabled women introduced feminist principles. This intersection of disability and feminist studies has transformed both fields, and at the same time fostered a new paradigm. It situates the claims on the similarities between disabled and nondisabled people, instead of focusing on identity politics.

The chapter acknowledges social movements as key actors in generating and developing significant debates, both in feminist and disability studies. Moreover, it seeks for conceptual tools that promote alliance-building strategies between oppressed groups in the struggle for social justice.

The chapter presents overall perspective of what intersectionality is and how the disability rights movement has addressed it, while seeking broader implications of the analysis of multiple inequalities.

This chapter explores issues related to building a globally conscious body of feminist gender knowledge and praxis, one that acknowledges the southern challenge to hegemonic western scholarship, develops means to hear subaltern voices on their own terms and takes lessons learned into account. Following the author’s positionality statement, the characteristics of feminist theory are briefly stated, and some current southern perspectives are reviewed. Recent published research is used to illustrate the place of gender issues in theory building, data collection, development efforts and pedagogy. The challenges related to and uneven progress toward the goal of a globally conscious body of feminist gender knowledge and praxis are acknowledged.

This chapter addresses growing concerns that, despite being a radically intentioned community, Critical Management Studies (CMS) lacks an orientation to achieve pragmatic change. In response I argue that the failure to address the continuing marginalisation of the subaltern is key to CMS being negatively represented as an elitist self-preoccupied endeavour. This state of affairs is linked to a legacy of the ‘postmodern’ turn, which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, as evidenced by the nature of contemporary debates continuing to reflect the stylistic fetishes of that time. I contend that the ghost of postmodernism is evident in the continuing predilection to produce signification discourses marked by symbolic absences, which politically confine such texts to the level of epistemology. The lack of integration of ontological concerns means that corporeal aspects of daily life are neglected, resulting in an abstracted ‘subjectless’ mode of representation. To address these limitations, a feminist activist version of post-structuralism (PSF) of the time is revisited, which through its distinctive attention to community concerns, enabled the linking of epistemological and ontological representations; thereby facilitating the creation of a framework for pragmatic change. As the chapter demonstrates, by drawing attention to the integral relationship between the modes of representation, power relations and subsequent social effects, poststructuralist feminists were able to achieve praxis outcomes. Accordingly, I argue this treasure house of ideas needs to be reclaimed and provides illustrations of the design principles proffered to support my contentions.

This chapter seeks to situate theoretically and comparatively the definitions and praxis of feminism by women activists of the Brazilian participatory state feminism in comparison to the current and emerging definitions in the theories and praxis of transnational feminisms. It analyzes the answers to attitudinal as well as behavior questions to a survey conducted in 2016 among delegates to National Conference for Policies for Women, representing over 150,000 women activists from all over the country and from a wide range of organizations and movements (women’s and feminist organizations, trade unions, political parties, black movements, environmental groups, LQBT organizations, etc.). The main research question addressed in this chapter is whether current Brazilian feminisms – constructed by several generations of women – have had a trajectory, convergent with those of the feminisms of the global north and the global south, moving from the “rights feminism” of the 1970s to the current intersectional and emancipatory feminism, which goes beyond the affirmation of women’s rights and gender equality, and moves on to use the broader concept of social justice to propose equality for the whole of society, not just for women.