This article explores the likely impact that the Bologna Declaration will have on the field of women’s and gender studies in the UK. While the UK higher education sector as a whole has been slow to take up the opportunities and challenges presented by Bologna, this article argues that women’s and gender studies may gain particularly from a European reorientation. Women’s and gender studies currently has to struggle for both national resources and recognition, and so has little to lose and (...) much to gain from actively engaging in the process of Europeanization of degrees. The author advocates for UK women’s and gender studies practitioners to take a leading role in this process, in order to facilitate the potential benefits for the field. (shrink)

This article describes the place of Women's and Gender Studies programmes in Australian universities as a way of thinking about the place of feminism in the academy. It begins with a story of one such small programme at a time of stress and locates this story in an account of change in Australian universities over the last 20-plus years. The narrative traces a contradictory domain in which women, feminist scholarship and Women's and Gender Studies are enmeshed. The article draws on (...) feminist literature about Australian universities to argue that while neo-liberal university environments are clearly places where masculinist values prevail, the flows of power around individual Women's and Gender Studies programmes cannot be simply predicted. Women's and Gender Studies programmes are thriving in some universities (on a small scale). As well as institutional imperatives Women's and Gender Studies programmes are engaged by specific intellectual challenges and some of these are sketched with reference to the Australian context. Asserting the need for dedicated research and teaching that focuses on gender, the article concludes that Women's and Gender Studies programmes in Australian universities are energetic places for this to occur. It proposes an ambivalent optimism to describe its assessment of these programmes and their viability as future places of work for feminist scholars. (shrink)