Keynote Speakers

Sandra is Professor Emerita at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.  She has worked in the United States, Britain, and Canada as a sociologist of education, with particular interests in gender and education, teachers’ work, and higher education.  Sandra has conducted studies of doctoral students, academics and academic administrators.  Her current research focuses on the ways in which academics in the contemporary university are being regulated or ‘disciplined’ and the impact on their identities.  Her most recent book (as co-editor with Anne Wagner and Kimine Mayuzumi) is Whose University Is It, Anyway? Power and Privilege on Gendered Terrain (Sumach Press, 2008).

Keynote title & abstract
Academic passion: Thoughts on careers, cultures, contrasts and change

Eva is currently Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Previously, she worked in Danish and other Australian universities. She has undertaken poststructural ethnography of university cultures for over a decade and is particularly interested in the formation of academic subjectivities, also as they are traversed by constructions of gender and by neoliberal discourse. She is deeply interested in what post-realist research and scholarship might look like and has experimented with what could be called new forms of representation.

Keynote title & abstract
Monsters astray in the flesh: A layered exploration of the im/possibilities of resistance-work in the neoliberalised university

Melinda (Ngati Whakaue, Ngapuhi, Pākehā) is currently a full time researcher on the Starpath Project at the University of Auckland. She is also a lecturer, post-graduate research supervisor, a researcher in the Te Ara a Ihenga, a research consortium that examines Māori student success in her tribal area of Rotorua, and a student of Te Puawananga o Te Arawa. Melinda’s research interests focus on racial-ethnic identity construction, ethnic hybridity and Māori concepts of giftedness. In 2008, Melinda had a book published by NZCER called Walking the space between: Identity and Māori/Pākehā.

Keynote title & abstract
Edgewalking: The multiple selves and realities of a Māori researcher