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Algorithmic practices are becoming increasingly more central within educational governance. By focusing on the mechanisms of a particular algorithmic testing system in Denmark, this paper highlights how such practices are implicated in the emergence of new accountability infrastructures. It adopts an STS approach drawing specifically upon Michel Callon's concepts framing, overflowing, and re-framing. The paper examines how algorithmic adaptivity has become central in the framing of the Danish national test and traces the ways in which students, teachers, and schools respond to such proceduralized interactions. While algorithmic adaptivity was introduced as a way of providing students with an equal test experience, it also inscribes student adaptability into test practices, generating new student affectivities and teacher responsibilities in the process. The paper argues that this is a matter of adapting to the test and highlights how the mundane practices of testing situations also become a subject of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Borders are constructs that shape our understandings of our societies, communities, and the world. Geospatial borders draw distinctions between neighborhoods and schools that are deemed 'worthy' and 'unworthy' of economic, social, and political investment. This paper employs the theoretical framework of 'discriminate biopower' to argue that geospatial borders produce a 'socio-political invisibility' linked to race and racial inequality. Through focus group discussions with kindergarten – grade eight educators in the Chicago metropolitan area of the United States, this paper provides evidence of how understandings of race are spatially applied by teachers. Findings suggest that teachers located and conflated individuals and racial groups with physical locations, demonstrating how spatial borders and the practice of bordering function as a biopolitical and segregationist way to understand race and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper emerges from a set of questions about what it means pedagogically to undertake the paradoxical and difficult task of unlearning the emotional experience of imperialism. The analysis discusses the notion of 'emotional imperialism' and the various forms in might take; to do so, the author draws on concepts from affect theory (Reddy's notion of 'emotional regimes') and decolonial theory (Fanon's concept of 'affective ankylosis') to shed light on what emotional imperialism might involve in social and political life, including education. The analysis concludes with a discussion of the political, theoretical and pedagogical implications of 'unlearning emotional imperialism' in educational settings. It is argued that calls for undoing and unlearning emotional imperialism in education are an inseparable part of new onto-epistemological, affective and political imaginaries that aim to transform colonial violence into nonimperial ways of living in our common world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is interested in thinking more about sexuality education at school. As such, it is concerned with a mundane and unacknowledged feature of the sexuality classroom - the mapping of movement. While human movement is a familiar focus of educational research, the movement of things is not. With reference to Barad’s concept of intra-activity, the paper maps human-non-human movements and characterises these as a sexual choreography of schooling. Instead of asking what does movement mean or reveal about sexuality education, I attend to the event movement inaugurates. Predominantly theoretical, the paper weaves together ideas from conventionally disparate disciplinary fields. These include Edensor’s concept of rhythm from geography, Eggermont’s notion of the choreography of schooling from education, and Barad’s spacetimemattering from quantum physics. This theorisation enables a recognition of movement as a force in human-non-human classroom intra-actions implicated in the becoming of sexuality education as event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to understand the construction of teachers within one New South Wales education policy, querying this construction in relation to both local and international processes and factors. As such, it also looks to contribute to a growing body of international literature which grapples with the role and nature of neoliberal policy development in education more broadly. To accomplish this, the paper analyses Great Teaching, Inspired Learning (GTIL), a policy with wide-ranging and potentially significant ramifications for teachers. Ultimately it is argued that although aspects of neoliberal thinking are evident in the policy, particularities of context have mediated this push. It is suggested that this has led to a particular neoliberalisation of policy that variously targets and supports individual teachers and the systems and structures surrounding them, while the place of GTIL within both local state politics and the global imaginary is questioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the educative role of the farm in the development of relationships between young people and the homeplace they grew up on. The paper is based on qualitative interviews with a cohort of 30 Irish university students (15 men and 15 women) brought up on Irish family farms who would not become full-time farmers. The farm acts as an educational tool through which broader cultural and familial norms of land ownership, succession and affiliations with the land are transmitted to the next generation. This is manifested through, for example, the creation of foundational stories about their forebearers’ influence on the physical appearance of the farm. The resulting place attachments are of profound depth and serve a key role in the succession process in helping to build a sense of duty and responsibilisation into the next generation’s relationship with the landholding. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Science and Technology Studies (STS) has been surprisingly slow to become widely known and deployed in the field of education. Yet STS has a rich array of concepts and analytical methods to offer to studies of: knowledge practices and epistemic cultures; the interrelationship between states and knowledge; regulatory practices, governance and institutions; and classrooms, pedagogy, teaching and learning. Most importantly, it provides a fresh perspective on how power operates in ordering societies, disciplining actors and promoting ideas and practices. In this paper, we provide an introduction to STS and elaborate what it offers education scholars. Using examples from the emerging body of STS work in the field of education, and in particular from the papers in this special issue, we argue that STS is not only useful, but an exciting and generative form of critique - one that is especially suited to investigating contemporary issues in education policies and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper calls for systematic inquiry into the relationship between secular governing formations and education inequalities. We present a thematic analysis of existing scholarship on secularism, the secular and post-secular in education. Our review of 184 texts reveals a frequent implicit or explicit reliance on the liberal state to address religious inequalities in education, and to draw the line on the extent of public religious expression. Taking a critical sociological approach, we argue this reliance neglects the state’s regulation, as opposed to its elimination, of the violence of multiple education inequalities. Understanding state sovereignty as an assemblage of forces, we illustrate the need for a cohesive body of research into how secular sovereign power privatises and de-privatises religiosity through education, and how race, gender and sexuality are shaped as public or private concerns in the process. We conclude with key indicators for a Critical Secular Studies research and curriculum agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian Federal and state governments have been introducing neoliberal reforms to the governance of their education systems for a number of decades. One of the most recent programs of reform is the Western Australian Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative. Similar to decentralizing reforms around the world, the IPS program seeks greater school autonomy from the state education bureaucracy by providing selected principals and school communities with a range of responsibilities. This paper seeks to better understand the kind of post-welfare form of government IPS enacts. Using concepts from the governmentality literature, this paper analyses documents related to the program, and interview data collected from key government officials responsible for the initiative. It finds that while IPS renders operable a neoliberal critique of the public sector by implementing the processes of contractualization, it also diverges from the ideal schema of neoliberalism. Analysis reveals that a number of strategic, pragmatic and political concerns have resulted in what some may view as a contradictory rationality of “the system” being instituted as a key element in this autonomizing reform. The paper calls for attention to the actual operationalizing of neoliberal reform projects to gain a nuanced understanding of modern regimes of rule. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores two Australian school education policy documents and the inputs they describe to boost student achievement. The paper suggests that current reform efforts in schooling like others previously configure student achievement in input-output terms confining school education policy to predictable inputs that sideline broader influences on educational output including, for instance, school funding. The national policy documents that are the subject of the case study in this paper are the National Plan for School Improvement and the current Students First. Student achievement is explored as an object of study that can be worked on by policy, including for across-theboard national 'non-educational' purposes. The analysis, critical in outlook, suggests that current school education policy trades on a predictable set of evidence-based inputs as correctives to declining levels of student achievement without weaving into the student learning equation the complex mix of relations that frame the educational system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the use of Burnett, Merchant, Pahl and Rowsell's (im)materiality literacy analysis framework to explore online and offline literacies in the lives of globally mobile children. The voices of these children have been little explored in New Literacies research. Globally mobile 'third culture' children who attend International Schools are often foreigners where they live, yet have multiple sites of belonging, including digital worlds. In analysing the abundant data of a year-long multicase study, the theoretical lenses of spatiality, mediation, materiality, and embodiment, as proposed in Burnett el al.'s framework, provided a productive framework through which to explore the complicated intersections of literacy, identity, and digital worlds in these children's lives. The paper demonstrates how the framework might be applied, focusing on two of the children in the study. Prompted by insights provided by the (im)materiality framework, a contrapuntal metaphor is proposed as a way to understand allegiance and belonging in the lives of these globally mobile children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to extend existing theorisations around the notion of public narratives by analysing their regulatory effects under intensified market conditions. My analysis suggests that public narratives constitute a liminal space, one that it is not exclusively real or imaginary, factual or normative, but that simultaneously affects and is affected by vernacular practices and wider discursive structures. However, this paper argues that, under extreme conditions, these public narratives become a rigidifying space with homogenising/normalising effects. To do this I look at a set of ‘obligatory scenes’ captured in tales of success and struggle of teachers, parents and students in popular newspapers and fringe media in Chile. These accounts share a common ground: national assessment as a framework of intelligibility for the practices of parents, teachers and students. The central claim of this paper is that under intensified market conditions the scenes captured in these publicly available stories become ‘obligatory’ storylines, and their protagonists idealised policy subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper rethinks education’s reliance on knowing who queer and trans youth are. It suggests that both desires to ‘know’ who youth are and the processes by which curriculum, policy, and scholarship come to know what is thought to be known about youth flattens and diminishes youths’ life experiences and what they might be/come. By examining the ideas that are thought to be known about queer and trans youth, the paper explores how these ideas tend to excise the specifics of youths’ lives, particularly along racial lines. Moreover, this paper considers how queer and trans adults’ desires to place queer and trans youth within historical lineages, present-day conundrums, and future imaginings limits youths’ own explorations and determinations of their own gendered and sexual presentations, expressions, and identities. In total, this paper asks: how might we get to unknow queer and trans youth? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using document analysis, this paper examines the historical emergence of the quantified child, revealing how the collection and use of data has become normalized through legitimizing discourses. First, following in the traditions of Foucault's genealogy and studies examining the sociology of numbers, this paper traces the evolution of data collection in a range of significant education policy documents. Second, a word count analysis was used to further substantiate the claim that data collection and use has been increasingly normalized through legitimizing discourses and routine actions in educational settings. These analyses provide evidence that the need to quantify educational practices has been justified over long periods of time through a variety of documents and that the extent to which data governs educators’ thoughts, discourses, and actions has dramatically increased during the past century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses teacher resistance to recognizing some perspectives of difficult histories. The paper focuses on the following question: How does affect contribute not only to the formation of teacher resistance, but also to its disruption in ways that enable the productive reclaiming of teachers’ engagement with traumatic histories? To address this question, the paper first revisits the notion of difficult knowledge, highlighting its affective dimensions and its relevance to teacher resistance. Then, it argues that the role of affect in resistance demands a different way of conceptualizing ‘teacher resistance’ to acknowledge how affect is entangled with both the micro- and macro-political dimensions of resistance. In the light of this reconceptualized notion of teacher resistance, the paper theorizes the notion of ‘affective disruption’ by using Judith Butler's social theory. Finally, the notion of ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ is revisited to demonstrate the new openings created by a reconceptualized notion of teacher resistance in the context of teacher professional learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to make a theoretical contribution to the current debate on intercultural education by focusing on the nature and limits of tolerance. Drawing on contemporary theorisations of the concept, it is suggested that while tolerance appears fundamental for confronting issues of difference, it has several caveats. The paper discusses the caveats in relation to differences that do not always co-exist harmoniously within the same society, and argues against the view that tolerance brings about automatically positive results to those who practise it. In the light of this argument, I propose that the ethics of hospitality, as elaborated by Derrida and Dufourmantelle, may provide a more viable approach to accommodating cultural difference. I conclude the paper with the implications for intercultural education. Specifically, I show that intercultural education has clung too long to the normative goals of modernity, and suggest that in order to go beyond these goals one must bring the ethical relation of responsibility for the other to the fore. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent decades, the field of language teaching has been increasingly recognised as having an important role in developing not only linguistic proficiency, but also a kind of 'interculturality' among students. Despite this 'intercultural turn' being evident in academic and policy documents, language teachers are at varying stages in their adaptation to such an approach. This paper draws on empirical data from a small-scale study conducted with teachers of Indonesian in Australian schools, to elucidate teachers' understandings of their role as 'intercultural' educators. In particular, the notion of 'culture' is examined, and the ways it is deployed around ideas of 'intercultural understanding' and language teaching pedagogy. This paper argues that despite the prevalence of 'interculturality' in educational policy, and a prevailing 'intercultural ethos' amongst teachers, confusion persists around the foundational idea of 'culture', which may affect teaching philosophy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in the education of young people to be ‘responsible global citizens’ has grown exponentially since the turn of the century, led by increasingly diverse networks of sectors, including government, community, business and philanthropy. These networks now have a significant influence on education policy and practice, indicative of wider changes in governance and processes of globalisation. Yet little of the academic literature on global citizenship education specifically examines the impact of these networks on the production of knowledge about young global citizens. This paper addresses this gap by analysing the discourses of global citizenship that underpin recent work by a youth organisation that works closely with a network of sectors in Australia. The paper finds that a particular kind of entrepreneurial global citizen is favoured, one that is simultaneously responsible for themselves, for the rights of others and for ensuring Australia's future economic prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Existing scholarship on knowledge mobilities tends to focus on the largest metropolitan centres as loci of education and employment and as desirable destinations for knowledge migrants. This paper draws attention to the ways in which the spaces of learning in non-metropolitan locations intersect with circulations of disciplinary knowledge and aspiration to generate opportunities for social and spatial mobility. It is premised on the idea that the experiences and situated knowledge of those engaged in women's studies in Tier II cities are apposite starting points for a critical reflection on non-metropolitan locations as brokers of student mobilities. Focusing on two government-funded Women's Studies Centres in universities in the state of Tamil Nadu, India, I explore the transformations catalysed by these mobilities and discuss the politics of the personal -- by rethinking the notions of home and alienation, and reflecting on the re-imagination of futures that Women's Studies (WS) has permitted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it has proved a useful concept during the past 20 years, the notion of ‘critical digital literacy’ requires rethinking in light of the fast-changing nature of young people's digital practices. This paper contrasts long-established notions of ‘critical digital literacy’ (based primarily around the critical consumption of digital forms) with the recent turn towards ‘digital design literacy’ (based around the production of digital forms). In doing so, three challenges emerge for the continued relevance of critical digital literacy: (1) the challenge of critiquing the ideological concerns with the digital without alienating the individual's personal affective response; (2) connecting collective concerns to do with social and educational inequalities to individual practices; and (3) cultivating a critical disposition in a context in which technical proficiency is prioritised. The paper then concludes by suggesting a model of ‘critical digital design’, offering a framework that might bridge the divide between critical literacy models and the more recent design-based literacy models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development'sProgram for International Student Assessment(PISA) as a public policy instrument, whose worldwide circulation is mediated by processes of reinterpretation, negotiation, and re-contextualization, where national, local, and international agencies intertwine. It is focused on the active reception of PISA in six European spaces (Francophone Belgium, France, Hungary, Portugal, Romania, and Scotland) along its first three cycles. The paper identifies two contrasting developments: the Program's divergent uses and its attractiveness in different social worlds. The paper gives particular attention to what is called the ‘update of reference societies’ in the context of national receptions of PISA. These ‘updates’ are analyzed as part of a composite process that involves domestic reasons, either related to current agendas for education or to deep historical factors, and injunctions related to PISA's rationale and PISA objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I look into the papers of Fannia Cohn, an immigrant labour organizer, who served the Education Department of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) between 1918 and 1962 and became one of its few women vice-presidents. As an internationally recognized figure in the history of workers' education, Cohn left a rich body of labour literature, wherein art is central in the ways she conceptualized, designed and organized women workers' educational programmes and curricula, as well as cultural activities for more than 50 years. For Cohn, however, art and politics were tightly interwoven in what I have called theartpolitics assemblageof women garment workers' life and work. It is entanglements between ethics, aesthetics and politics, considered in the light of the Rancièrian notion of ‘the distribution of the sensible’, that I discuss in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses a specific disjunctive policy space in Scotland involving the current key children's social and educational policy agenda,Getting it Right for Every Child(GIRFEC), and a recent national report on teacher education, the ‘Donaldson Report’. In four main parts, the paper first introduces and applies in policy review and analysis a capitals frame to identify the policy–practice discontinuities currently inherent in the ‘GIRFEC-child practitioner education’ policy space, exemplified by the Donaldson Report. Then, the same capitals frame is applied to examine the capitals resources demanded in the particular ‘child–child practitioner education’ policy space previously delineated. Next, examples of policy disconnects amongst current child practice and practitioner education policy production and implementation, which warrant a concerted integrative cross-sector project to ensure coherent social and intellectual capital relations at all levels, are discussed. Finally, the paper calls for the governing professional registration bodies and universities involved in the education of child-sector practitioners to engage in the redesign of university programmes underpinned by principles of transdisciplinarity and transprofessionalism. The methodology is policy sociology and policy text analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes as its subject the circulation of tolerance discourse within two pedagogical encounters in two Australian educational settings, and draws from the work of Wendy Brown on tolerance as a regulatory force. Brown argues that discourses of tolerance are produced within historical and cultural milieu that enable tolerance and aversion to exist simultaneously. This has significant implications for how we might come to understand the project of working towards a socially just educational system and the various struggles encountered within pedagogical sites. I also examine the pedagogical affects that are produced within different educational moments as we work to teach in or around difference and when we embody the Other in the classroom. I engage with how these experiences speak to the way in which tolerance as national ideal acts to both alleviate and circulate discourses of inequality such as sexism and homophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary politics has brought the figure of the 'uneducated' into glaring view, from Trump's 'love' of the 'poorly educated' to analyses suggesting a supposed 'uneducated populous' is responsible for the rise of far-right politics. In this paper I respond to this so-called 'post-truth' contemporary moment by considering how education underpins many 'progressive' or 'left' responses to rightist political impulses and flesh out the repercussions of such a stance. Specifically, I explore the ramifications for the notion of the 'educated' through a critical reading of political philosopher Jacques Ranciere. I suggest the need to understand the question of education (and 'poor education') within the context of capitalist political interests and the linking of educational institutions with elitism and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finding a place for oneself at school and a sense of membership with others, is important for all school students and vitally important for students of refugee experience. Developing a sense of belonging at school may assist students to settle in to their new country and to gain some control over their lives. This paper uses student voice to illustrate possible facilitators and impediments to belonging for students of refugee experience. It argues that school belonging is not dependent upon English language learning alone and it recommends that changes be made in mainstream school, to offer a more inclusive, welcoming and social just experience for students of refugee experience. It suggests that the established patterns of culture, structure and practice in mainstream school may no longer provide appropriate responses to meet the needs of students with refugee experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore the various spaces and sites through which the figure of the parent is summoned to inhabit and perform market norms and practices in the field of education in England. Since the late 1970s successive governments have called on parents to enact certain duties and obligations in relation to the state. These duties include adopting and internalizing responsibility for all kinds of risks, liabilities and inequities formerly managed by the Keynesian welfare state. In this paper we examine how English parents are compelled to embody certain market norms and practices as they navigate the field of education. Adopting genealogical enquiry and policy discourse analysis as our methodology, we explore how parents across three policy sites or spaces are constructed as objects and purveyors of utility and ancillaries to marketization. This includes a focus on how parents are summoned as (1) consumers or choosers of education services; (2) governors and overseers of schools and (3) producers and founders of schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literacy policy and pedagogy in Aotearoa New Zealand have a strong discursive heritage of traditional literacies, which emphasise code breaking and meaning making with linguistic codes and conventions over other possible modes of communication. In a rapidly evolving landscape where changes in communication technologies give birth to new literacies that make use of all the codes we have available for design, we argue teachers need support to augment and (re)conceptualise their literacy conceptions and pedagogy. In this paper we draw on five years of literacy research in Aotearoa New Zealand that supported 34 primary and secondary teachers to critically examine their literacy practices. Foucauldian informed discourse analysis of interview transcripts identified slight shifts in literacy practices, overshadowed by a spectre of accountability that impeded large-scale shift. This work highlights the difficulty of supporting and sustaining change given the global landscape of policy discourses accentuating accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis in relation to student and teacher becomings and the way these are actualised within the neoliberal and heterosexually striated spaces of the secondary school assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari considered a narrow approach to education problematic and called for creativity as a site of ‘resistance’. Drama is one subject rich with potentiality for students to strengthen their creativity and ‘speak back’ against the neoliberal project. What our research revealed is how the drama classroom is an open, dynamic space where students can embody different identities at a critical time in their adolescent development. What is delimiting about this potentiality is the proclivity of teachers and students, as desiring machines, to conform to the dominant neoliberal culture of competitive performativity. The paper proposes that schizoanalysis offers new insights for mapping complex desire-flows and embodied identities through and against the dominant performative and heterosexist culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I argue that in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008–2009 young people, certain populations of young people in particular, are being made to bear a heavy burden, carry significant responsibilities for re-imagining their lives as a enterprise – an enterprise in which an investment in education and training and work increasingly looks like a mortgaging of an uncertain future. In mortgaging their future, many young people are confounded by the possibility of repaying this debt, or of leveraging it into a life that was promised them if only they stayed in education and training, if only they got a job, if only they studied and worked hard, and had an eye to the future. The paper will explore some of the characteristics of the self as enterprise, the challenges and opportunities that shape the fields of possibilities from which this self emerges, and which require us to practise our freedom in particular, always limited, ways and to carry responsibilities for more and more aspects of our lives, in circumstances that mostly escape our differing, individual abilities and capacities to shape these circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children and animals of all kinds are said to develop some degree of number sense. The search for 'number neurons' and neural correlates of computational thinking aims to identify biological primitives to explain the emergence of number sense. This work typically looks for the sources of number sense in organisms, but one might extend this search and study the possibility of a calculating matter more generally. Such a speculative project explores the implications of the non-human turn within the posthumanities. In this paper, I draw primarily on the work of Vicky Kirby and Gilles Deleuze in order to focus on becomingmonster through calculation. I show how calculation, as a machinic and empirical act that both serves and troubles images of mathematical truth, has always played a unique role in the production of mathematical monsters. I then discuss calculating children who participate in abacus clubs and annual abacus competitions, calculating at inhuman rates with imaginary abacuses. I argue that a new materialist philosophy of immanence demands a radically new approach to number sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alongside the influence of market-based reforms in education policy has been the growth of policy that has largely been overlooked – those that outline social contracts. This paper draws on policies that connect with equity as a way of illustrating this social contract turn in policy and develops a conceptualisation of social contracts as they apply to education policy. The argument provides three principles that underpin social contracts, including informed consent, negotiation and accountability. This paper applies these principles to three levels of social contract. At the first level are broad social contracts, which are associated with debates about the kinds of things that states should expect from its citizens, and the things that citizens could expect from governments and the state. The second level of social contract is an institutional or field-based social contract, which spells out the obligations and connections between a specific field and other fields. This level names a kind of social contract that is often exemplified in policies or statements by specific institutions. The third level of social contract deals with contract-like mechanisms embedded in fields that make tangible the obligations and expectations of citizens in fulfilling the expectations of fields. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper applies ideas that emanate from the Global North, concerning neoliberalism and neoliberal governmentality, to the case of marketisation in South Africa. It also attends to the limits of Northern ideas that are both intellectual undertakings and policy manifestations. In the first part of the paper, we identify how rationales for school choice, many of which have been introduced in countries like England, the USA, and Australia, have also been introduced in post-apartheid South Africa. Despite the introduction of markets to address apartheid era racial segregation, we suggest that in South Africa marketisation operates as part of racial neoliberalism. In the second part of the paper we explore in more detail how neoliberal governmentality operates in relation to education policy more generally, and specifically in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper draws on critical discourse analysis to examine and discuss some of the key developments in the governing of education in Scotland since the election of the Scottish National Party (SNP) government in May 2007. It analyses these developments, drawing on a study of key policy texts and suggests that discourse analysis has much to contribute to the understanding of the governing strategy of the minority SNP administration as reflected in its education policy. We suggest that there is a self-conscious strategy of 'crafting the narrative' of government that seeks to discursively re-position 'smarter Scotland' alongside small, social democratic states within the wider context of transnational pressures for conformity with global policy agendas. Thus the paper connects to current debates on the relationship between an emergent global education policy 'field' and the capacity of 'local' contexts to develop and sustain particular, embedded assumptions and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores internationally mobile global middle class families (GMCF) in terms of how they rationalise moving away from their home country, select schools and reimagine their young children's futures in an international setting. Building on Appadurai's notion of 'the future as a cultural fact' and Anagnost's concept of 'life-making in neoliberal times' we analyse how the search for escaping the past is dialectically related to seeking better futures. For GMCFs, the search for better futures within current neoliberal times leads to them discursively constructing spatial–temporal movements across international boundaries. The term 'futurescaping' is introduced and used to understand the act of imagining futures that are shaped by a person's past and present experience. We argue that futurescaping is more than simply transnational mobility, but is a multidimensional act, which is dynamic, culturally value-ladened, historically embedded, futuristic and provides a unique view into the everyday lives of internationally mobile GMCF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the increasing interest of Swedish schools to construct, analyze, assess and control the individual progression and social integration of students using biographical registers. I argue that this tendency - involving biography as a form of governance - can be seen as a revision of early 20th-century biographical research by the Chicago School of Sociology. In this paper I consider the theoretical, methodological and political background of the Chicago work in order to compare it to the Swedish use of student biographies. Their current use involves a twofold subjectification of students - as "objects" of assessment and as "relays" for assessment. Finally, this subjectivity is understood in relation to international initiatives in education restructuring where new ways of governing - often labeled as progressive - impose social control, heighten individual responsibility and, not least, create new forms of social exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has hitherto attracted scholarly attention and debate by both regional and international scholars working in area studies, such as international relations and Asia-Pacific/Southeast Asia studies. Confined to area studies, scholarly research on ASEAN is limiting because the parameters of research are invariably locked into issues related to economics, politics, security, and trade development in and around the region. Notably, education has been an under-researched topic. On the cusp of its 40th anniversary ASEAN envisages the formation of an ASEAN identity and socio-cultural community. As a point of departure from area studies, this paper engages in "regionalist thinking" about ASEAN, education and identity making. This "regionalist thinking" is, however, only thinkable and imaginable with reference to the "global," because as a region ASEAN, whether perceived in geographical or in spatial terms, is part of the global sphere in which it is embedded. I argue in this paper that while historically education and schooling are directly related to the imaginaries of nation building and national identity making, the call for the creation of an ASEAN identity and the formation of a socio-cultural community requires that nation states in the region deparochialize education and redesign pedagogies that "teach and learn beyond the nation." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the contribution to understanding educational inequalities offered by post-structural theories of power and the subject. The paper locates this consideration in the context of the ongoing endeavour in education studies to make sense of, and identify ways of interrupting, abiding educational exclusions and inequalities. The paper examines the potential of Judith Butler's work, in particular her engagement with Foucault's concepts of productive power and subjectivation, and the articulation of these ideas with the notion of the performative constitution of subjects, for making sense of the processes through which students come to be particular sorts of subjects of schooling. The paper argues that taking up these understandings not only enables us to better understand the endurance of particular configurations of educational inequalities, it also opens up new possibilities for interrupting these through a post-structural politics that seeks to displace prevailing discourses and constitute students differently through everyday practices of preformative reinscription. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a personal view of the need for and uses of theory in educational research. It draws on the work of two exemplary theorists to point up the epistemological role of theory in making research possible and making it reflexive. The second section of the paper deploys some recent ideas and research from class theory and class analysis to suggest some of the limitations of the use of social class in current educational research and some ways of thinking differently about class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how prominent private schools in Australia are performing in a market context according to the tenets of performativity. From a discourse analysis of promotional materials that include prospectuses, advertisements, and school publications, it considers the "value-addedness" that these schools purport to offer. In this regard, ideas such as building self-esteem and emotional intelligence are not only being used for market advantage but are also being nicely conflated with religious principles to produce the "whole" child with market edge. This paper draws on a recent research study of 30 elite Australian schools. As new practices of identity formation and self-presentation are investigated, questions are raised about issues of fabrication in performativity-inspired practices of marketisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents elements of an ethnographic case study of a group of five male friends between the ages of six and eight years. The study sought to examine the ways in which the group's social dynamics interacted to define, regulate and maintain collective understandings of masculinity. Dominant peer culture was found to be particularly potent in championing a hegemonic masculinity embodying and cultivating physical domination, aggression and violence underpinned by constructions of females and femininity as the negative 'other'. These restrictive understandings were interpreted as normalised through the philosophies and practices of the boys' teachers and their principal. Here the naturalist assumptions underpinning dominant early childhood pedagogy constituted the boys as 'gender innocent' and were implicated in understandings of developmentally appropriate practice. Through illuminating clear parallels to associated research, this paper presents further warrant for abandoning these naturalist assumptions which continue to mitigate against gender equity in early childhood (MacNaughton, Rethinking Gender in Early Childhood Education, St Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 2000). In this regard, the paper signifies the importance of maintaining a focus on addressing issues of collective masculinity in early childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the UK, as in many parts of the world, educational policy is dominated by the 'standards agenda': the top-down drive to improve students' performance in examinations. Simultaneously, there is policy emphasis on (differing versions of) 'inclusive education', and mainstream schools are exhorted to remove barriers to learning and participation for students who would until recently have been educated separately in special schools. This paper examines one of the many tensions between these two policy imperatives. Using findings from an ethnographic study in one comprehensive girls' school in an English city, I identify three distinct versions of educational 'success'-'dominant', 'consolation' and 'really disabled'. This paper explores how students identified as having 'special educational needs' position themselves and are positioned by the three discourses, and suggests that the hierarchisation of what can count as 'success' is an important dimension in the enduring reproduction of educational and societal inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper probes the socioeconomic and political processes underlying the expansion of schooling in the Arab states. The paper, which does not report new data but rather critically reviews studies published so far, argues that both development and modernisation approaches, as well as class reproduction theories remain largely unable to account for the complex web of factors affecting educational expansion in the Arab states. These theories fail to point to the articulation of multi-level processes ultimately shaping the social and cultural underpinnings of educational expansion. Moreover, these theoretical approaches, beyond their paradigmatic differences, have confined Arab civil societies essentially to the structural outcome of state policies. Consequently, processes of civil dissent and resistance and their effects on educational expansion are naively conceptualised in terms of 'forces of tradition' versus 'forces of change'. The community-based, and conflict-laden power conjunctures shaping educational expansion in the Arab states have been largely left outside the analysis and the voices they represent often discarded. To probe the argument, first, the paper outlines the major macro-structural and historical factors affecting levels of literacy and access to educational resources in different Arab states. Secondly, published fieldwork research undertaken by others into community-based settings is examined in order to explore points of articulation between state policies, civil society processes and their sociopolitical and cultural effects on patterns of educational expansion. Thirdly, within the frame of a concluding discussion, the major implications are discussed and possible research paths are pointed to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically discusses MacIntyre's thesis that education is essentially a contested concept. In order to contextualise my discussion, I discuss both whether rival educational traditions of education found in MacIntyre's work – which I refer to as instrumental and non-instrumental justifications of education – can be rationally resolved using MacIntyre's framework, and whether a shared meaning of education is possible as a result. I conclude that MacIntyre's synthesis account is problematic because the whole notion that there arerationally negotiableways in which to compromise or harmonise opposing justifications of education found in instrumental and non-instrumental forms of education is troubling – the reason being that these are cultural disagreements about human flourishing that are not neutral-free, and due to a lack of care distinguishing between the common uses of the term ‘education’, and its looser usages to mean something like school learning that embraces a range of aims and goals that are often incompatible. In this light, it is argued that the contestability card has been unnecessarily overemphasised, and brings to our attention the complex ways in which we interpret education and what it means to be educated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this paper is to consider the ways in which Arendt's writings on totalitarianism act as a warning sign for political and miseducational circumstances in the USA. Because the term totalitarianism has been used imprudently (largely in the mass media) to express repressive conditions in so-called models of democracy, this paper seeks to both clarify and raise questions concerning its meaning as a form of nation-state-sanctioned power and/or economic-technological force. This analysis draws largely from Arendt's definition of totalitarianism expressed as an antipolitical phenomenon characterized by terror-ruled ideological indoctrination which destroys both the public realm and the private identities. I contend that analyses of twentieth-century totalitarianism are significant to today's unprecedented questions and circumstances germinating in and having significance beyond the USA. I also describe the difficulty of action under extreme conditions. In the last analysis, I deliberate on the site of education as a totalitarian coercion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

School prospectuses and promotional videos appeal to parents by presenting idealised images of the education a school provides. These educational idealisations visually realise the form of discipline a school is expected to provide, depending on the social habitus of the parents. This paper presents a content analysis of the images used in 33 sets of marketing materials from a maximally diverse sample of schools from the state of Victoria. These images are interpreted using the lenses of Bernstein's control and Bourdieu's habitus and cultural capital. The promotional images are found to vary systematically in terms of content and form depending on the perceived social class of the students which the schools attract. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Asian whiz kids' perfect test scores.' 'Selective schools and tiger parents.' These types of headlines highlight the increased visibility of academically successful students from Asian migrant backgrounds, in Australia and other Western countries. They also point to anxiety about the perceived aggressive 'tiger' parenting often associated with Asian academic success. This paper focuses on the forms of everyday multiculturalism found in and around high-performing selective schools and classes in Sydney, Australia, almost all of which are dominated by Asian-Australian students. Drawing on interviews with parents and students from Anglo- and Asian-Australian backgrounds, it documents the different positionalities adopted by participants within these culturally diverse settings, including anger, aspiration and cosmopolitanism. This potentially volatile combination of approaches to diversity reveals some of the social consequences of neoliberal migration and education policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist theorists critiqued classical liberalism for the gender binaries embedded in social, political and economic theory and everyday social relations. Neoliberalism economises the social and political based on autonomous individualism, equating equity with choice, naturalising the market as the mechanism to allocate social goods and education while disregarding constraining discursive and material contexts. Neoliberalism also co-opts the feminist desire for agency through notions of choice. The paper tracks the historical conditions in Anglophile states that nurtured neoliberalism's uptake with its focus on human capital theory, rethinking the dominant educational discourse of twenty-first-century skills using Yeatman's democratic framing of social liberalism and Nussbaum's capability approach. Feminists argue for a just and civil democratic society that dissolves binary thinking and focuses on relationality, rights and responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent development in English teaching in Russia is the emergence of private online language-tutoring schools, which offer one-on-one lessons by means of audio/videoconferencing. It remains unclear: (1) how these new providers of educational services are presenting themselves to the potential learners; (2) what ideology they tend to drawn on and (3) whether there is sufficient similarity to conceptualise these websites as exemplars of the same genre. This paper employs the tools of critical discourse analysis (CDA), Genre Theory and Appraisal within the Systemic Functional Linguistics to study the language of 17 websites of private online language schools. The study aims to investigate whether the websites exhibit similar discourse and ideology and whether they might belong to the same ‘genre prototype’. The analysis reveals a considerable thematic, structural and rhetorical similarity between the websites and a high presence of neoliberal ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reflects on historical homophobia within educational practice and administration as an effort to consider how we might promote dialogue around the queer past of schooling. Along the way, it provides some discussion of the significance of archival knowledge in helping us to develop an understanding of the past while also providing resources for making sense of the contemporary moment. To develop my argument, I illustrate some examples of historical homophobia, through a brief discussion of some education administration practices in Australia, I then move on to briefly consider some of the implications of historical homophobia, and its effects in relation to educational research, practice and administration today. In the final section of the paper, I discuss some of the ways in which we might address the queer past of education through a cultural politics of queer reparation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]