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Drawing upon a long-term study of venture philanthropy and public schools in Australia, this paper focuses on Teach For Australia (TFA) as a major component of a venture philanthropic network, one that builds critical infrastructures and connections between non-government organisations and the state, creating a product pipeline into public schools. Utilising interviews with staff from Teach For Australia and venture philanthropic organisations, comprehensive and rigorous financial data, reviews, reports and website data, the analysis aims to identify the major philanthropic funders, individual actors and private foundations that leverage Teach For Australia, illustrating how this network develops for-profit pathways into public schools. In pushing a deficit framing of public schools, these networks incur privatisation effects, including flows of money, resources and key decision-making. They compromise the democratic principles upon which public schools are ideally based, in that the most disadvantaged public schools are opened up to 'entrepreneurial' and risk-taking corporate behaviour to test out teachers, products and services. By examining streams of revenue, partnerships and networks, we show how the purportedly non-profit Teach For Australia develops for-profit opportunities and business partnerships nested in corporate philanthropy, resulting in a privatisation effect on public schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From January 2017 until January 2020, the Stormont assembly in Northern Ireland was suspended, with the Irish language being cited as the main stumbling block to the restoration of government. The continued debate around the necessity of an Irish Language Act (ILA) for Northern Ireland is bound up with more general divisions in society surrounding national identity, and as such, it divided political parties and the nationalist and unionist communities from which they draw their support. Through the analysis of ethnographic interviews conducted in various language learning centres across Belfast, I explore how this debate around legislating for the language impacted on the engagement of learners with the language in the city. By considering the role played by the media in the engagement of interview participants with the Irish language in Belfast, I aim to examine how the policy delay and political discourse affects those engaging with the language. This paper aims to address changing attitudes to the Irish language in Belfast in a period of political crisis, and what it means for those who use the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed the outsourcing of immigration and border controls to economically struggling states. Infrastructural projects around controlling migration are transforming localities in the Global South: from shifting legal and political economic systems to altering socialities between migrant and local populations. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the Republic of Nauru, this paper considers how past and present infrastructural forms give shape to the ways that (in)justices are created. Nauru, the world's smallest island state, was almost entirely economically dependent on the phosphate industry in the twentieth century. After the wealth it derived from phosphate extraction was depleted in the 1990s, the sovereign state resurged on the back of the refugee industry by importing Australia's maritime asylum seeking populations. In this paper, I examine the material life of infrastructure around managing migration in Nauru's 21 km2 locality, including the toxic interrelationships between phosphate and refugee processing, the industries' built environments, and the people who live and work in them. I explore how Nauru's refugee project has reconfigured colonial infrastructural forms, practices of dependency, and socio-legal affiliations as the country is refashioned as a company town in line with new forms of human production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the processes of assemblage as an important aspect in studies of contemporary Australian settler colonialism. I explore how, what I am calling the Indigenous development assemblage, is made up of various government policies, actors, discourse, knowledge, legal frameworks and institutions, intersect and cohere with each other. I also explore how this assemblage affects not only material outcomes but also generates an atmosphere that affects aspirations, hope and possibility for change. Through examining various processes of the assemblage underway in the town of Kununurra, I argue that settler colonialism is different to the totalitarian form it often is described as. Through understanding the processes of assemblage, incoherence, disruption and emergence was also observed which opens up possibilities of the destabilisation of the assemblage itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]