Abstracts: Gender and Educaon Associaon Conference 2015 Thursday 25 June 9.00-11.00 (William Morris Lecture Theatre) Gender, social jusce and educaon: North and South Gender Agendas: Resisng the conceptual simplificaon of gender in internaonal educaon policy and research. Convened by Charloe Nussey This symposium quesons the space which gender holds as a polical construct in shaping internaonal educaon policy and research agendas. Gender is firmly on the internaonal agenda, an integral part of the internaonal development lexicon in both the MDG and the post-2015 EFA and SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) frameworks, and is a key term for accessing research funding. But as a construct many commentators acknowledge that it is increasingly slippery, and can oſten become disassociated from feminist acvism and work towards social jusce on the ground. The symposium brings together four interconnected papers drawn from internaonal qualitave research into gender and educaon. These papers raise quesons around ways that gender agendas in policy shape what 'gender' can mean, and the various ways that it can be co-opted or deployed with or against the grain of feminist concerns. Educaon gender policies oſten 'target' women and girls, focusing on goals of increasing access and parcipaon; responsibility for equality thus becomes located with women and girls, which obscures structures of inequality, violence and misogyny, and can open the field for co- optaon. However, these processes can also produce ferle ground for new subject posions and resistances. This symposium will queson which forms of gender research or policy and programming might sink or swim in current climates, and how different actors are led into reproducing, constraining and/or resisng 'gender agendas'. Keywords: gender agenda; internaonal educaon; subjecvity; discourse; marginalisaon; social jusce Gender-without-feminism agendas: The discursive posioning of gender in internaonal academic feminism Emily F. Henderson, UCL, Instute of Educaon There are ongoing debates in academic feminism about the noon of ‘gender without feminism’ (Pereira, 2012; Henderson, forthcoming), where the concept of gender is used in both research and policy as an apolical construct. Although ‘gender’ is the term that alludes to the mainstreaming of feminist concerns in the internaonal educaon policy arena, ‘gender’ is also the term that is held as responsible for the emptying out of the feminist agenda. As such, so-called gender researchers oſten have an ambivalent relaonship with