Dr Maddie Breeze
ABOUT
I am a sociologist with specialisms in gender & sexuality. Since 2010 I’ve researched and taught in the fields of queer feminist sociology, intersecting inequalities in education, public sociology and creative & participatory research methods. Here you can find my academic writing.
SERVICES
I am available for freelance work and offer a range of services including research consultancy, editorial services, academic mentoring, equality diversity & inclusion (EDI) evaluation and training, and imposter syndrome workshops.
CONTACT ME
If you’d like to work with me please get in touch to arrange an inital 30 minute conversation.
BOOKS
The Palgrave Handbook of Imposter Syndrome in Higher Education
This handbook explores feeling like an ‘imposter’ in higher education and what this tells us about contemporary educational inequalities. Asking why imposter syndrome matters now, we investigate experiences of imposter syndrome across social locations, institutional positions, and intersecting inequalities. Our collection queries advice to fit-in with the university, and authors reflect on (not)belonging in, with and against educational institutions. The collection advances understandings of imposter syndrome as socially situated, in relation to entrenched inequalities in higher education. Chapters combine creative methods and linger on the figure of the ‘imposter’ – wary of both individualising and celebrating imposters as lucky, misfits, fraudsters, or failures, and critically interrogating the idea of universaly depoliticised imposter syndrome.
Feminist Repetitions in Higher Education: Interrupting Career Categories
This book returns to established feminist strategies for taking up academic space, re-thinking how feminists inhabit the university and pushing back against institutional failures. The authors assert the academic career course as fundamental to understanding how feminist educational journeys, collaborations, cares and ways of knowing stretch across and reconstitute academic hierarchies, collectivising and politicising feminist career successes and failures. Prioritising interruptions, the book navigates through feminist methods of reflexivity, autoethnography and collective biography: in doing so, moving from feminist identity to feminist practice and repeating the potential of queer feminist interruptions to the university and ourselves.
Seriousness and Women’s Roller Derby: Gender, Organization, and Ambivalence
Winner of the 2016 British Soicological Assocaition’s Phillip Abram’s Memorial Prize
Shortlisted for the 2016 North American Society for the Sociology of Sport annual prize
This book explores seriousness in practice in the unique sports context of contemporary women’s flat track roller derby. The author presents a stimulating argument for a sociology of seriousness as a productive contribution to understandings of gender, organization and the mid-ranges of agency between dichotomies of voluntarism and determinism.
Time and Space in the Neoliberal University: Futures and Fractures in Higher Education
This book offers new interdisciplinary analyses of borders and blockages in higher education and how they can be inhabited and reworked. Amidst stratified inequalities of race, gender, class and sexuality, across time and space, contributors explore what alternative academic futures can be claimed. While higher education institutions are increasingly concerned with ‘internationalization’, ‘diversity’, and ‘widening access and participation’, the sector remains complicit in reproducing entrenched inequalities of access and outcomes among both students and staff: boundaries of who does and does not belong are continually drawn, enacted, contested and redrawn. This wide-ranging collection serves as a call to action for those concerned with the future of higher education, and how alternative futures can be reimagined.
ARTICLES
Breeze, M. Jamieson, L. Gorringe, H. & Rosie, M. (2021) Educational outcomes of political participation? Young first-time voters three years after the Scottish Independence Referendum. Youth Studies. 26:1, 61-79, DOI: 10.1080/13676261.2021.1980517
Taylor, Y. & Breeze, M. (2020) All Imposters in the university? Feminists striking (out) claims on academic Twitter. Women’s Studies International Forum. 81: 102367. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2020.102367
Breeze, M. & Taylor, Y. (2018). Feminist collaborations in higher education: stretched across career stages. Gender and Education 32(3), 412-428. DOI: 10.1080/09540253.2018.1471197
Breeze, M. Johnson, K. & Uytman, C. (2018). What (and who) works in widening participation? Supporting direct entrant students in transitions to higher education. Teaching in Higher Education (25)1, 18-35. DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2018.1536042
Breeze, M. Jamieson, L. Gorringe, H. & Rosie, M. (2017). Becoming independent: political participation and youth transitions in the Scottish Referendum. British Journal of Sociology 68(4): 754–774. DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.1228
Breeze, M. Jamieson, L. Gorringe, H. & Rosie, M. (2015). ‘Everybody’s Scottish at the end of the day’: nationalism and social justice amongst young Yes voters. Scottish Affairs 24(4): 419-431. DOI: 10.3366/scot.2015.0094.
Breeze, M. (2013). Analysing ‘seriousness’ in roller derby: speaking critically with the Serious Leisure Perspective. Sociological Research Online 18(4):1-13. https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.3236
Downes, J. Breeze, M. & Griffin, N. (2013) Researching DIY Cultures: Towards a situated ethical practice Graduate Journal of Social Science 10(2): 100-124.
Breeze, M (2010) ‘There’s No Balls in Derby’: Roller Derby as a Unique, Gendered Sports Context, The International Journal of Sport and Society 1(3): 121-133.
Special Issues
Breeze, M. (2020) Editorial. Higher Education: Ongoing Contestations. Gender and Education 32(7).
Breeze, M. & Taylor, Y. (2018). Introduction. Futures and fractures in feminist and queer higher education. Special issue of the Journal of Applied Social Theory 1(2) ISSN 2398-5836. Available at: https://socialtheoryapplied.com/journal/jast/article/view/62/64
Chapters in books
Breeze, M. & Taylor, Y. (forthcoming 2024) ‘Queer feminist teaching(s) in the university’ in Cornelia Bading & Petra Panenka (eds.) University – Power – Knowledge: Postcolonial, Feminist, and Participatory Perspectives in the Context of Academic Teaching. Springer.
Breeze, M. & Leigh, D. (2023) ‘Wages against inclusion! Full inclusion now! Towards a queer manifesto against LGBT+ inclusion in universities’in C. Mahn, Y. Taylor & M. Brim (eds.) Queer Sharing in the Marketized University. Routledge.
Breeze, M., Taylor, Y. & Addison, M. (2022). Imposter Agony Aunts: Ambivalent Feminist Advice. In Addison, M. Breeze, M. & Taylor, Y. (forthcoming 2021) Handbook of ‘Imposter Syndrome’ in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan.
Breeze, M., Addison, M., & Taylor, Y. (2022). Introduction: Situating Imposter Syndrome in Higher Education. In Addison, M. Breeze, M. & Taylor, Y. (forthcoming 2021) Handbook of ‘Imposter Syndrome’ in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan.
Breeze, M. Taylor, Y. & Costa, C. (2019). Introduction: Time and Space in the Neoliberal University. In M. Breeze, Y. Taylor, & C. Costa (eds.) Time and Space in the Neoliberal University: Educational Futures and Fractures (pp.1-14) Palgrave Macmillan.
Breeze, M. (2018). Imposter Syndrome as a Public Feeling. In Y. Taylor and K. Lahad (eds.) Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University: Feminist Flights, Fights and Failures (pp. 191-219). Palgrave Macmillan (Gender and Education Series) DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-64224-6_9
Breeze, M. (2018). Women’s roller derby as a unique gendered sports context. In C. Fogel (ed) Critical perspectives on gender and sport, (pp. 59-71). Champaign, IL: Common Ground (Sport and Society Series). (re-print).
Maddie Breeze 