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This paper introduces the concept of infrastructure into discussions on climate change and education. We focus on the links between the increased use of digital data and the central role of data infrastructures in education, and the energy infrastructure needed to support their growing use in schools and school systems. We elaborate a need for a greater accounting of the climate and related social costs of these interwoven digital and energy infrastructures of schooling. We suggest this is part of the 'disposition' of the infrastructures of schooling that should be weighed into decisions on whether and how to continue with digital technologies in schools. By acknowledging the climate and environmental incommensurability of digital infrastructures, education leaders and young people can more fully understand their dispositions and their costs. We propose three implications for education governance that entail greater consideration of the limits of current school climate change infrastructures such as 'eco school' programs and EdTech 'AI for good' initiatives, pushes for 'computing within limits' without substantial changes, and current school governance practices which unnecessarily rely on digital infrastructures. Instead, what is needed may be a reversal of the extensive use of digital infrastructures by schools and education governance bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the history of a similarity measure—the Mahalanobis Distance Function—and its movement from colonial India into contemporary artificial intelligence technologies, including facial recognition, and its reapplication into postcolonial India. The article identifies how the creation of the Distance Function was connected to the colonial "problem" of caste and ethnic classification for British bureaucracy in 1920-1930s India. This article demonstrates that the Distance Function is a statistical method, originating to make anthropometric caste distinctions in India, that became both a technical standard and a mobile racialized technique, utilized in machine learning applications. The creation of the Distance Function as a measure of "similitude" at a particular period of colonial state-making helped to model wider categories of classification which have proliferated in facial recognition technology. Overall, we highlight how a measurement function that operates in recognition technologies today can be traced across time and space to other racialized contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how datafication is creating new topologies of education policy. Specifically, we analyse how the creation of data infrastructures that enable the generation, communication and representation of digital data are changing relations of power, including both centralised and dispersed forms, and space in education. The paper uses conceptual resources from cultural topology and infrastructure studies to provide a framework for analysing spatial relations between educational data, discourses, policies and practices in new governance configurations. The paper outlines a case study of an emergent data infrastructure in Australian schooling, the National Schools Interoperability Program, to provide empirical evidence of the movement, connection and enactment of digital data across policy spaces. Key aspects of this case include the ways that data infrastructure is: (i) enabling new private and public connections across policy topologies; (ii) creating a new role for technical standards in education policy and (iii) changing the topological spaces of education governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary education policy involves the integration of novel forms of data and the creation of new data platforms, in addition to the infusion of business principles into school governance networks, and intensification of socio-technical relations. In this paper, we examine how 'computational rationality' may be understood as intensifying of an instrumental set of logics in educational governance and decision making, and/or as opening up new explorations around the uncertainty and incompleteness of policy. We suggest that policy rationalities focused on prediction, transparency and data provide the conditions of possibility for Artificial Intelligence to be integrated into, and intensify aspects of, what we term 'computational education policy'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we problematize the establishment of an Africentric Alternative School in Toronto, Canada. We argue that policy, and race and racializations cannot be understood outside of, or immune to, neoliberalism. We contend that policy is a form of racial biopolitics, and race is now produced through neoliberal markets, in conjunction with earlier, liberal categories. We conclude that neoliberalism has produced new forms of racial biopolitics; whereas the state is much less overtly involved in producing and arranging racializations. Instead, neoliberal education policy has transferred or downloaded these forms of racial biopolitics onto populations which are now “free” and “empowered” to produce and maintain variable raciologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter aims to extend the repertoire of understandings about place and policy in place-based education with a focus on ideas of space, mobility, and belonging. The view provided by this extended perspective leads to the question: How does mobility challenge and provide new ways of thinking about place-based education? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the enduring traces of colonialism within the Australian nation-state and the ongoing challenges to Aboriginal peoples' rights, especially land rights. We try to make sense of contemporary federal government and New South Wales state, or provincial, government policy changes which connect land use, access and ownership to social welfare, and which target Aboriginal peoples in remote, or outback, areas and the inner city. We connect these two policy initiatives by pointing to the tension between social and planning policies, conceptions of landownership, and the notion of Aboriginal self-determination. We try to understand the rationale and enactment of these policies through the idea of policy incursions. We argue that policy incursions represent a constellation of settler nationalism, the enactment of a white national imaginary, and the exploitation of crisis that reinscribe Aboriginal people in 21st-century Australia as objects of state policy, while marginalising them as subjects of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the aims and scope of the journal "Research in Education." This include publishing difference and multiplicity in terms of conceptions of education; diverse approaches to research, rather than being dominated by work located within any single specific research tradition; and awareness of the pervasive politics and policy dimensions of education.

Fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity is growing in popularity in Australia, concurrent with the ascendancy of the new Christian school. This article examines the historical and policy landscapes that have given rise to this educational phenomenon and draws some links with other education systems, particularly the United States. It is argued that, in Australia, a propitious setting for the rise of new Christian schools has been created through the interplay of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity, Australia's Constitution, and an enabling neoliberal policy environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which discusses articles within the issue on topics including role of practitioner research in universities, and use of data in materialist work.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue including the relationship between education and religion, cases of social media activism and intersections of neoliberalism and race in a Canadian city.