Barbara Pini
Biographic Data
| ID | 188541 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Barbara Pini |
| GIVEN NAMES | Barbara |
| FAMILY NAME | Pini |
| SIGNATURE | PINI B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Griffith University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8093-7017 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 89 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 626 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 85 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1957 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
The Aesthetics of the Feminisation of Finance: Examining Australian Women’s Financial Self-Help
This article applies a feminist multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) to 19 Australian women's financial self-help books (WFSH) published between 2004 and 2024 to examine how paratextual aesthetics feminise finance. Data are presented in three sections. First, book covers display spatial motifs and neoliberal postfeminist signifiers to appeal to a heterosexual, white, middle-class reader, promising that WFSH is fun, girly, and playful. Second, on t…
Settler colonialism, neoliberal feminism and the ‘white middle-class farming woman’ in Australia
The young Australian feminine property investor: Class, Whiteness and Heterosexuality
The financialisation of housing is associated with the emergence of new investor subjectivities but, to date, little has been said about how these subject positions are gendered. In contrast, this paper brings a feminist lens to the topic through a textual analysis of the Australian financial self-help book, Smashed Avocado by Nicole Haddow (Citation2019). By illuminating how Haddow's self-narrated arc (or makeover) from fiscal failure to a succe…
Visualising legitimacy: An analysis of medicinal cannabis images in Australian news
This paper reports on a visual framing analysis of Australian online news media images of medicinal cannabis (MC) from 2014 to 2021. It reports on two themes - people and place, and plant and place. The first theme reveals that images of MC users, including children, and familial caregivers were commonly emplaced within quotidian middle-class, suburban, domestic settings, thereby demarcating them from recreational cannabis users. The second theme…
Affective design and memetic qualities: Generating affect and political engagement through bushfire TikToks
This article explores the affective dimensions of social media platform TikTok, and its potential as a novel form of political participation among young people. It draws on data from a sample of 24 TikToks focused on the 2019/20 Australian bushfires, as well as seven interviews with young people who create, view and share TikToks. Building on Ash's notion of 'affective design', the article demonstrates how the memetic qualities of juxtaposition, …
The “White middle-class farming woman”: Instagram and settler colonialism in contemporary rural Australia
An agenda for Australian rural sociology: Troubling the white middle-class farming woman
In reflecting on the last two decades of publications by Australian rural studies scholars in three major disciplinary journals, this article argues that the field of Australian rural sociology has failed to address racial inequality and class difference. While we note a burgeoning of feminist rural research challenging the historical emphasis on the white male farmer, this too has tended to occlude class and race, as is demonstrated in our analy…
Fleshy citizenship: Representations of breastfeeding politicians in the Australian media
This paper takes up Chris Beasley and Carol Bacchi notion of “fleshy citizenship” to examine media texts of two instances in which Australian politicians breastfed in parliament. We identify the predominance of trivialising and sexualising discourses in the media texts about the breastfeeding women which worked to constrain maternal subjectivities and knowledges in legislative space. Following this, we illustrate how the presence of breastfeeding…
Beach body work: Australian women’s experiences
This article examines Australian women’s complex relationship with the beach through a focus on affect and on what bodies do. Interviews with ten participants of diverse backgrounds and of different ages reveal that women understand the beach as a mediated and surveilled space where their bodies are foregrounded. In this environment, there is an intersection of women’s knowledge of the popular constructions of the archetypal Australian beach body…
The emergence of the marketing professional in schools
The marketisation of schools has emerged as a defining feature of the education landscape. While the role of principals and lead teachers in carrying out marketing work was investigated in the late 1990s, there has been scant evidence of how the people and practices of marketing in schools have evolved into the twenty-first century. Expanding on existing literature on educational marketing practices in schools, and through in-depth interviews wit…
Disability and sexuality: Desires and pleasures
There is an ongoing missing discourse of pleasure in studies of sexuality and disability, and considerations of sexual pleasures and sexual desire in the lives of people with disabilities play very little part in public discourse. This opening article analyzes some of the major theoretical influences and debates informing prevailing assumptions about disability and sexuality. An exposition of the theoretical and conceptual terrains that underpin …
Troubling representations of Black masculinity in the documentary film Raising Bertie
In this paper we undertake a critical reading of the documentary Raising Bertie (2016). Directed by Margaret Byrne, the film tells the story of three poor, young Black American males living in Bertie County. In the paratextual material associated with the film, Byrne demonstrates reflexivity about stereotyping, revealing she engaged authentically with participants over a period of six years. Further, she begins the film by signalling the critical…
Masculinity and fathering in the lives of rural men with a disability
On making disability in rural places more visible: Challenges and opportunities [Introduction to a special issue]
Narrations and practices of mobility and immobility in the maintenance of gender dualisms
This paper analyses the role of practices and representations of mobility in supporting particular kinds of gender orders. While scholarship has shown the various ways women are materially and symbolically ‘fixed’ in place, less attention has been paid to how discourses and practices of mobility interface with systems of gender differentiation more broadly. This work is based on a robust empirical base of 55 interviews, 90 h of participant observ…
Critical geographies of education: An Introduction
This special issue contributes to scholarship on critical geographies of education (Kraftl, 2013a) along with research that has emerged as a result of the spatial turn in educational studies (Gulson & Symes, 2007; Helfenbein & Taylor, 2009). Such research had proceeded through a variety of subdisciplinary lenses in human geography, including political, urban, social, and cultural geographies (see Holloway et al., 2010; Kraftl, 2014). Moreover, sc…
Introduction: Beyond Stock Photographs - Imagining, Experiencing, and Researching Rural Education
Editorial introductions to special issues have a number of generic features. They typically include a review of the literature, for example, and a discussion of areas requiring additional research. As we discussed these generic dimensions in preparing to write this paper, we agreed that they should be rightly bypassed in this instance as they have been comprehensively addressed in recent articles published elsewhere (e.g. Pini & Bhopal, 2017; Pin…
Representations of rural lesbian lives in young adult fiction
This paper examines representations of rural lesbian lives in three young adult novels. The novels analysed are Beauty of the broken by Tawni Waters (2014 Waters, T. (2014). Beauty of the broken. New York, NY: Simon Pulse. [Google Scholar]), Julie Anne Peters (2005 Peters, J. A. (2005). Pretend you love me. New York, NY: Little Brown. [Google Scholar]) Pretend you love me, and Forgive me if you’ve heard this one before by Karelia Stetz-Waters (20…
Reshaping Gender and Class in Rural Spaces
Visual Research Methods in Educational Research
This chapter seeks to problematise some of our assumptions about visual methods and their role in \nrelation to participatory design and ethics in educational research. We make use of abductive \nreasoning (Peirce, 1878; 1903) to explore the ways in which other researchers but most specifically \nwe have attributed causality and connection in this area. Our experience in exploring these \nassumptions to write this chapter suggests that the use of…
Young People and Work
This edited book brings together empirical studies of young people in paid employment from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and in different national settings. In the context of increasing youth labour market participation rates and debates about the value of early employment, it draws on multi-level analyses to reflect the complexity of the field. Each of the three sections of the book explores a key aspect of young people's employment: th…
Queering rurality: Reading The Miseducation of Cameron Post geographically
This paper contributes to research on geographies of queer rural youth through an analysis of an award-winning young adult novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Danforth (2012a. The Miseducation of Cameron Post. New York: Harper Collins). Three themes from the text are explored in this paper. The first is the well documented heterosexism of rural life. We note that the main protagonist, Cameron Post, experiences rural life on the margins, no…
Henri Lefebvre and education
Feminists have a long history of engaging and recalibrating theory to further the project of gender justice, even in instances when original conceptualizations have marginalized or overlooked the centrality of gender to inequitable social relations. In this book, Sue Middleton continues this project through the work of Henri Lefebvre. While Middleton does not situate her book as specifically feminist and writes for a broad audience of scholars in…
The global countryside: Peasant women negotiating, recalibrating and resisting rural change in Colombia
This article utilises a gender lens to consider the notion of the ‘global countryside’ through a case study with four peasant Colombian women living in the mountain town of Toca, Boyacá. In seeking a bottom-up understanding of rural globalisation, as it is experienced in the everyday lives of peasant women in Colombia, we drew on a methodology that included participant observation and photo elicitation interviews. Data reveal the inflections and …
Explorations in policy enactment: Feminist thought experiments with Basil Bernstein’s code theory
This paper builds on feminist elaborations of Bernstein’s code theory to engage in a series of thought experiments with interview data produced during a co-inquiry design-based research intervention project. It presents three accounts of thinking/writing with data. Our purpose in presenting three different accounts of interview data is to demonstrate the relation between theory and empirical data. In the first two accounts, interview data are int…
Interviewing men: Gender and the collection and interpretation of qualitative data
This article describes the masculinities engaged by male leaders of an Australian agricultural organization, CANEGROWERS, during interviews with a young, female, doctoral student. The masculinities displayed involved the men emphasizing their heterosexuality, presenting themselves as powerful and busy, and positioning themselves as having expert and superior knowledge. It is argued that important in shaping the interview process was the gender fo…
The emotional geography of a mine closure: A study of the Ravensthorpe nickel mine in Western Australia
This paper engages with the literature on emotional geographies to report on a case study of the emotions surrounding the closure of a nickel mine in the shire of Ravensthorpe in the south-west of Western Australia in January 2009. Two themes from the affect-infused narratives of pre- and post-mine community members are outlined. The first, which challenges constructions of the closure as a purely industrial and economic concern, focuses on the i…
Gender, class and rurality: Australian case studies
Young people's aspirations for education, work, family and leisure
Young people are arguably facing more 'complex and contested' transitions to adulthood and an increasing array of 'non-linear' paths. Education and training have been extended, identity is increasingly shaped through leisure and consumerism and youth must navigate their life trajectories in highly individualised ways. The study utilises 819 short essays compiled by students aged 14-16 years from 19 schools in Australia. It examines how young peop…
On being a nice country girl and an academic feminist: Using reflexivity in rural social research
The 'Feminine Revolution in Mining: A Critique
This paper presents an analysis of media reports of Australian women in mine management. It argues that a dominant storyline in the texts is one of gender change; in fact, a 'feminine revolution' is said to have occurred in the mining industry and corporate Australia more generally. Despite this celebratory and transformative discourse the female mine managers interviewed in the media texts seek to distance themselves from women/female identity/f…
Masculinity and fathering in the lives of rural men with a disability
Experiencing and writing Indigeneity, rurality and gender: Australian reflections
The Australian Parliament: A Gendered Organisation
This study, drawing on interviews with 13 male and 15 female members of the Australian parliament, has two aims. The first is to contribute to knowledge about the nature of the Australian parliament, an institution which has seldom been subjected to gender analysis. This is particularly pertinent given the significant increase in women's representative status over the past decade. The second of the paper's aims is to demonstrate the efficacy of c…
The three Ds of welfare reform: Disability, disgust and deservingness
Public policy discourses on disability frequently reference emotions such as shame or pity to describe the lived experience of disabled people. While sociological research within the emotional realm is re-emerging as a growing area of interest, little work appears to have explored the relationship of emotions in articulating notions of deservingness that are a significant part of public policy discourses on disability. This is curious, considerin…
The Third Sex: Women Leaders in Australian Agriculture
This article uses data from interviews with 20 women involved in decision‐making positions in Australian farm organizations to explore the ways in which women actively create a subject position which locates them as both ‘agricultural leader’ and ‘woman’. This is a subject position one participant describes as ‘a third sex’. In negotiating their outsider status, the participants describe being engaged in a constant process of self‐monitoring and …
Focus groups, feminist research and farm women: Opportunities for empowerment in rural social research
Scary” heterosexualities in a rural Australian mining town
Always an outlaw: Daughters-in-law on Australian family farms
Q Methodology and Rural Research
Traditionally, rural scholarship has been limited in its methodological approach. This has begun to change in recent years as rural researchers have embraced a range of different methodological tools. The aim of this article is to contribute to greater methodological pluralism in rural sociology by introducing readers to a method of research that is rarely engaged in the field, that is, Q methodology. The article describes the defining features o…
Education and the global rural: Feminist perspectives
AcknowledgementsWe would like to acknowledge the wonderful assistance we have been given by Helen Rowlands throughout all stages of putting this issue together
Organizational rhetoric in the prospectuses of elite private schools: Unpacking strategies of persuasion
The way in which private schools use rhetoric in their communications offers important insights into how these organizational sites persuade audiences and leverage marketplace advantage in the context of contemporary educational platforms. Through systemic analysis of rhetorical strategies employed in 65 ‘elite’ school prospectuses in Australia, this paper contributes to understandings of the ways schools’ communications draw on broader cultural …
Class Contestations and Australia's Resource Boom: The Emergence of the 'Cashed-up Bogan
This article examines the figure of the 'Cashed-up Bogan' or 'Cub' in Australian media from 2006 to 2009. It explains that 'Bogan', like that of 'Chav' in Britain, is a widely engaged negative descriptor for the white working-class poor. In contrast, 'Cubs' have economic capital. This capital, and the Cub's emergence, is linked to Australia's resource boom of recent decades when the need for skilled labour allowed for a highly demarcated segment …
Continuity or Change? Disability Policy and the Rudd Government
This article reports on shifts and continuities in policy relating to disabled people and the administrative apparatus of federal disability policy under the Rudd government (2007–10). It begins with a brief historical overview of disability policy in Australia. It then gives particular attention to highlighting the contentious and dramatic changes to disability policy which were instigated by the Howard government (1996–2007). Following this, at…
Gender, emotions and fly‐in fly‐out work
This paper explores the emotional life of fly‐in fly‐out (FIFO) workers and their families, through an analysis of more than 500 postings made on an online chat forum for mining families. Building on literature on fly‐in fly‐out workers and understandings of emotions as socially constructed, analysis shows how posters to the forum, typically women whose male partners are FIFO workers, construct gendered emotional identities for their partners (so…
A critique of ‘new’ rural local governance: The case of gender in a rural Australian setting
Beyond Stereotypes: An Exploratory Profile of Australian Women Mayors
Women continue to be under-represented in senior positions in local government. This study draws on interviews with 19 women mayors who held office in the Australian state of Queensland during the period 2000–2004. The paper finds that the profiles of women in these positions has markedly changed over the last decade, and concludes that if the local government sector is to remain robust and viable in these changing social and economic times there…
Farm women and femocracy
While rural and farm women have a long history of interaction with the Australian state, it is only recently that Commonwealth government departments have established specifically dedicated policy machinery to address their needs. What is notable is that this has occurred at a time when other gender equity infrastructure is being disbanded. This article examines this anomaly. To begin, it documents the material and discursive changes in terms of …
On making disability in rural places more visible: Challenges and opportunities [Introduction to a special issue]
Critical geographies of education: An Introduction
This special issue contributes to scholarship on critical geographies of education (Kraftl, 2013a) along with research that has emerged as a result of the spatial turn in educational studies (Gulson & Symes, 2007; Helfenbein & Taylor, 2009). Such research had proceeded through a variety of subdisciplinary lenses in human geography, including political, urban, social, and cultural geographies (see Holloway et al., 2010; Kraftl, 2014). Moreover, sc…
Proposed Report on Educational Qualifications and Functions of Public Health Educators
Not Just Another Dose: The BridgIT Response to Rural and Remote Internet Training
This paper examines the issue of rural women’s training in the use of information technology using the experience gained from a collaborative project conducted in 1996–1997 in Queensland, Enhancing Rural Women’s Access to Interactive Communication Technologies.1 The Rural Women and Interactive Communication Technologies Project was an Australian Research Council Collaborative Research Project based at Queensland University of Technology in Brisba…
Constraints to women’s involvement in agricultural leadership
This paper uses data from a survey of women in the Australian sugar industry to examine why women are absent in decision‐making positions within the agri‐political organization Canegrowers. Canegrowers represents the interests of over 6,000 cane farming families in Australia, but no woman holds any of the 181 positions of elected leadership within the organization. Factor analysis of the 233 returned survey responses revealed that there are five …
Focus groups, feminist research and farm women: Opportunities for empowerment in rural social research
The exclusion of women from agri- political leadership: A case study of the Australian sugar industry
This paper draws on data from a case study of the agri-political group CANEGROWERS which represents the interests of over 6000 cane farm owners in Australia. The key focus is on the electoral system of the organisation. Using interviews with fifteen elected members, document analysis and participant observation the author examines the way in which women's lack of representation in any of the 181 positions of organisational leadership is explained…
Sheep, Shadows and Silly Saints: Constructing Women in Agricultural Leadership
In recent years a considerable Australian literature has emerged on the subject of farm women’s leadership. This paper addresses three questions in relation to this literature. The first is, how has the literature represented farm women? The second is, what assumptions about gender and leadership are inherent in this particular representation of farm women and leadership? The third is, what does this way of writing and talking about farm women an…
On being a nice country girl and an academic feminist: Using reflexivity in rural social research
Evaluating ‘Australian Women in Agriculture’: 1992–2002
Australian Women in Agriculture (AWiA) will be 10 years old this year. This paper draws on 20 interviews with members of AWiA to describe the changing nature of the group over this period and to examine its achievements and future in terms of its five stated goals. The group has been most successful in achieving its first aim: raising the profile of women in agriculture. AWiA has achieved its second aim: securing local, regional and international…
Rural telework: Case studies from the Australian outback
This paper examines the effects of infrastructure and isolation on rural telework, and the potential of telework for rural communities. It draws on findings from two Australian case studies: a government initiative and a community‐initiated training project. Differences between the experiences of rural and urban teleworkers are highlighted
The Question of 'the Italians' and Women's Representation in Leadership in the Australian Sugar Industry
This paper reports on a doctoral study which investigated why women are absent in positions of leadership within the Australian sugar industry's agri-political group CANE-GROWERS. Its purpose is to confront and unsettle the explanation that this is a result of 'the Italians' in the industry. The paper begins by highlighting the pervasiveness of this claim and the way in which it was so often presented during the research as a known and unproblema…
Feminist Methodology and Rural Research: Reflections on a Study of an Australian Agricultural Organisation
This paper describes a feminist doctoral research project undertaken to examine women's leadership in the Australian sugar industry. My purpose is three-fold. Firstly, I seek to bridge the theoretical and the practical by documenting the 'what' and 'how' of a feminist research project within rural sociology. To do so, I explore five principles which guided my approach to undertaking a feminist study. These were: focusing on gender, valuing women'…
We Could have had the Old Girl Out in the Paddock Years Ago: Widowed Women, Farming and Agricultural Leadership
This article describes the experiences of 10 widowed women involved in the Australian sugar industry. These women- farming in their own right and involving themselves in the public world of agriculture – represent an anomaly. They are of particular sociological interest because the often-invisible gender dimensions of farming are illuminated in the absence of a male partner. The article explores the reasons why the women decide to continue farmin…
Politics and Identity in Cyberspace
This paper reports on an exploratory study of the use of new technologies by the rural women's group Australian Women in Agriculture (AWiA). Data from interviews with twenty members of AWiA and an analysis of organizational documents, including a number of messages posted on the group's discussion list, are used to examine the extent to which cyberspace offers a new space for political engagement for women's activism. The experiences of AWiA memb…
Women‐only networks as a strategy for change? A case study from local government
Across both the private and public sectors one strategy that has been used to support women in leadership roles and to increase women's participation in leadership positions has been to establish formal female specific networks. This paper examines the efficacy of such a strategy through a case study of one such group – the Australian Local Government Women's Association. Data for the paper are drawn from interviews with the 19 female mayors in t…
Managerial Masculinities in the Australian Sugar Industry
This paper examines the gendered identity work undertaken by managerial men in the agri-political group CANEGROWERS. It is argued that the most common form of managerial masculinity practised by men in the organisation is that of paternalism. When this style of leadership is ineffective, male managers deploy a more authoritarian form of managerial masculinity. A range of illustrations of the way these gendered masculine identities manifest themse…
Counting them in, not out: Surveying Farm Women about Agricultural Leadership
This paper examines the efficacy of the survey method to investigate questions relating to women and agricultural leadership. I begin by reviewing the feminist critique of the survey using examples from the literature on farming women. I then describe two particular difficulties I encountered in surveying farm women about agricultural leadership in the Australian sugar industry. The first difficulty is the problem of constructing a sample of farm…
Farm women and femocracy
While rural and farm women have a long history of interaction with the Australian state, it is only recently that Commonwealth government departments have established specifically dedicated policy machinery to address their needs. What is notable is that this has occurred at a time when other gender equity infrastructure is being disbanded. This article examines this anomaly. To begin, it documents the material and discursive changes in terms of …
The Third Sex: Women Leaders in Australian Agriculture
This article uses data from interviews with 20 women involved in decision‐making positions in Australian farm organizations to explore the ways in which women actively create a subject position which locates them as both ‘agricultural leader’ and ‘woman’. This is a subject position one participant describes as ‘a third sex’. In negotiating their outsider status, the participants describe being engaged in a constant process of self‐monitoring and …
This beats a cake stall: Farm women's shifting encounters with the Australian state
English The mid-1990s saw Australian farm women benefit from affirmative government policies at both state and federal levels. Numerous avenues developed for the increased recognition and participation of women in rural industries and policy circles. This article traces the subsequent decade, noting the political and gender relations that have seen the policy climate cool. It analyses the discursive shift in policy from affirmative action to main…
Beyond Stereotypes: An Exploratory Profile of Australian Women Mayors
Women continue to be under-represented in senior positions in local government. This study draws on interviews with 19 women mayors who held office in the Australian state of Queensland during the period 2000–2004. The paper finds that the profiles of women in these positions has markedly changed over the last decade, and concludes that if the local government sector is to remain robust and viable in these changing social and economic times there…
Interviewing men: Gender and the collection and interpretation of qualitative data
This article describes the masculinities engaged by male leaders of an Australian agricultural organization, CANEGROWERS, during interviews with a young, female, doctoral student. The masculinities displayed involved the men emphasizing their heterosexuality, presenting themselves as powerful and busy, and positioning themselves as having expert and superior knowledge. It is argued that important in shaping the interview process was the gender fo…
Gender Equality in Agriculture: Examining State Intervention in Australia and Northern Ireland
This paper is concerned with the extent to which the state offers potential for furthering farm women's status and rights. Using case studies of Australia and Northern Ireland, it examines the extent to which the state has intervened to address gender inequality in the agricultural sector. These two locations provide a particularly rich scope for analysis because while Australia has a long history of state feminism and an extensive legislative fr…
Creating Collaborative Living History The Case of the Victorian Women on Farms Gathering Heritage Collection
The recognition and conservation of contemporary history is a growing interest of both professional and lay communities. In creating archives and cultural collections of local and wider interest, collaborative partnerships can produce rich and innovative constructions of history. This paper outlines the development of the Victorian Women on Farms Gathering Heritage Collection which involves a collaborative partnership committed to the appropriate…
Modestly staffed and modestly resourced: An exploratory critique of women’s entry to rural and regional governance
In Australia, a significant shift has occurred in regional governance arrangements with the emergence of new forums for the practising of regional leadership. In this paper we provide a critical reading of a recent report on the representation of women in governance in rural and regional Australia as well as a textual analysis of the language in use around the entities reviewed in the report. We first consider women’s representation in regional l…
A critique of ‘new’ rural local governance: The case of gender in a rural Australian setting
Sociology (72 works) · Political science (70 works) · Gender Studies (46 works) · Law (41 works) · Rural development and sustainability (37 works) · Gender Studies (35 works) · Law (29 works) · Geography (27 works) · Politics (27 works) · Social science (27 works)