Paper short abstract:

Framed by discussion of negative capability the paper considers crises and forms of collaborative commitment to build inclusive institutions. Can data on gender equality and education be organised, presented and critiqued i to support connections between national, sub-national and cross national organisations? Work on the opening phase of the Bridging AGEE project is assessed.

Paper long abstract:

Working on gender data is a long established ambition of many governments and international organisations, and has significantly been influenced by work carried out through the UNDP Human Development Reports, gender reports produced by the World Bank, OECD and education data from UNESCO. But this work is not an easy task. Since approximately 2010 international organisations have remarked on a “growing backlash against gender equality and women’s rights … reversing progress and widening inequalities in many contexts” (TES, 2022). In recent years, a number of governments have evoked anti-feminist rhetoric to roll back rights, including access to education (Khan, Tant and Harper , 2023). Transnational movements, including those working among conservative and religious groups, have restricted education on sexuality and reproductive rights, LGBTQI+ rights and gender-based violence in a number of countries (OHCHR 2020; Zaremberg, Tabbush, & Friedman,2021; Velasco, 2023). These processes raise important questions about how to sustain progress made towards gender equality in education and generate the data needed to support institutions in trying to guard against the negative effects associated with intersecting inequalities, the growth of precarity and the overlapping impact of crises and injustices. Framed by a discussion of the concept of negative capability the paper considers how this may be useful in thinking about crises and forms of collaborative commitment to build and sustain institutions. The paper also considers how an understanding of conversion needs to go beyond listing particular groups of factors, and looks at the relationship between capabilities and contexts to understand forms of institution building, forms of deinstitutionalization and ideas about collaborative commitments and solidarity. To focus the discussion the analysis looks at data and its use as a particular facet of this issue. It poses questions regarding whether data on gender equality and education can be organised, presented and critiqued in ways that supports the creation of inclusive institutions and counters discourses of misogyny, often linked with setting different groups in opposition to each other. What lessons can be learned through using processes associated with generating these data as an aspect of trying to protect against the indifference and dehumanisation which contributes to processes that oppose gender equalities?

This paper documents and reflects critically on the process of collaborating to build a participatory process to audit, evaluate and supplement data to understand and monitor gender equality and education drawing together a partnership of international organisations, national governments and civil society through the AGEE (Accountability for Gender Equality in Education) project. The project is a partnership between academics at UCL and the University of Malawi and the UNESCO Section of Education for Inclusion and Gender. The project aims to address some of the difficulties of building connections across different ways of thinking about gender, and the practices associated with global, national and local processes for data generation and use in the area of gender, education and inclusion.

In critically reflecting on the opening phase of a new phase of work in AGEE in 2024 -Bridging AGEE -the paper looks at co-creation of data for describing and evaluating gender inequalities in education and the institutional architecture for measuring gender equality and education, engaging with discussions of solidarity in recent work on human development (Gasper and Gomez, 2023 2023), the concept of negative capability, outlined in earlier papers on education and data (Unterhalter, 2018) and gender and education (Khalid and Rose, 2023). The paper considers how negative capabilities might denote harmful practices, contextual relationships, and silenced voices. In reflecting on some difficult and sensitive issues in establishing Bridging AGEE at national, sub-national and cross national scales – the paper discusses how data and the process of participatory reflection on data can be used to better understand settings of negative capabilities and seek to change these.

References

Gasper, D., & Gómez, O. A. (2023). Solidarity and Human Insecurity: Interpreting and Extending the HDRO’s 2022 Special Report on Human Security. Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 1-11.

Khalid, A., & Rose, P. (2023). “We Look Ahead Where his Thoughts Never Reach”: Pakistani Mothers’ Agency to Expand Educational Opportunities for Their Daughters and the Theorisation of Negative Capability. Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 24(1), 98-117.

Khan, A., Tant, E., & Harper, C. (2023). Facing the backlash: what is fuelling anti-feminist and anti-democratic forces?. ALIGN Framing paper. London: ODI (www. alignplatform. org/resources/briefing-facing-backlash).

TES, 2022, Transforming Education Summit New York: United Nations

Unterhalter, E. (2020). Negative capability? Measuring the unmeasurable in education. In Unterhalter, E. ed. Measuring the Unmeasurable in Education (pp. 1-16). Abingdon: Routledge.

Zaremberg, G., Tabbush, C., & Friedman, E. J. (2021). Feminism (s) and anti-gender backlash: lessons from Latin America. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 23(4), 527-534.