UMaine Faculty Member Honored for Scholarship
Contact: Kay Hyatt at (207) 581-2761
ORONO, Maine — Elizabeth Allan, assistant professor of Educational Leadership, was honored recently by the American Educational Research Association for her article “Constructing Women’s Status: Policy Discourses of University Women’s Commissions.” Allan is one of two recipients to receive the 2005 Outstanding Publication Award. The awards were announced April 13 at a reception held in connection with the 2005 AERA conference in Montreal.
The national award recognizes publications for making a substantial contribution to the literature and/or practice of higher education — scholarship that extensively revises knowledge and understanding of a particular problem in the study of higher education or looks at it in a new way.
In her article, published in the Harvard Educational Review in Spring 2003, Allan explores how discourses — language and images — embedded in university women’s commission reports position women as victims, outsiders to the structure and culture of the institution, and as being in need of professional development.
Her research analyzes the text of 21 commission reports issued at four research universities from 1971 to 1996 and illustrates how discussions of femininity, access and professionalism contribute to constructing women’s status in complex ways and may have the unintended consequence of undermining the achievement of gender equity.
For example, such reports often refer to “women’s issues, concerns and needs,” but the perspective from which they are viewed and resulting language and images tend to come from the experiences of women who hold the most advantageous positions of power on a mixed-group committee. Ironically, Allan says, all women get subsumed and homogenized under these blanket terms. “Predominant women’s issues,” as defined by faculty and professional women, sometimes leave out or marginalize the concerns of the majority of women — staff members and students — according to Allan’s research.
“We should question discourse,” Allan says, “because it can limit our thinking and viable solutions to social problems.”