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In this paper, the argument that we make is that public education emerges from when democracy is put into practice in education. For the purposes of this paper we use pedagogic rights as proposed by Basil Bernstein as a way to frame and support this 'putting into practice'. Democracy, we argue, has to be practiced in two senses: 1) it does not 'exist' but has to be continually renewed and brought to life between people, as such it is precarious and fleeting; 2) one might become better at democracy by trying to 'do it' more often and that education is where this 'trying' might occur. We draw on Rancière's work on democracy that focusses on democratic acts or moments; on the 'fracturing' of sense (what is sayable, seeable, thinkable) – when people whose only part (including in education) is none, take one. A process of 'becoming public', we suggest, is instituted in these events. To this end, our proposal for public education is adversarial to contemporary formations of education. Conceptualising public education in this way shows that it is rare, and becoming rarer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue explores past, present and potential future imaginaries of 'public' education in Europe and beyond. The special issue is located in a contemporary context of political turmoil, in which one in four European voters allegedly supports populist political parties, with the largest support for far-right forms of populism; it is also set against a historical background of several decades of significant change in the social, political and economic contexts of education, whereby schools and universities have been reimagined and reorganized so as to conform to the marketized and managerialist contours of the neoliberal imaginary; and it is set against the background of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to lockdowns and school closures in many countries and prompted many to question supposedly 'normal' ways of doing school and education in less turbulent times. For all these reasons, the special issue is topical and timely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a conceptual article arising from, and grounded in, research with a government-funded primary school serving high-poverty communities in Queensland, Australia. It is one response to the last 10 years of participatory research work led by the three authors of this article (the school principal and two academics). In this article, we write about three concepts that have emerged out of our joint work: (1) communities-in-formation, (2) emerging equalities, (3) material participation. We discuss how and why we have undertaken this kind of partnership and conceptual research and offer some suggestions for others who are interested in undertaking similar work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to examine the employment experiences of immigrants of African background in the Australian labor market. Drawing on the findings from a qualitative study conducted in South East Queensland, the paper identifies several barriers and challenges faced by Africans to meaningful employment and labor market success. The paper indicates the need to develop targeted policies to eliminate employment discrimination, reduce barriers to meaningful employment for good settlement and successful integration of African immigrants to Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we focus on the economic integration of black African immigrants settling in Queensland by examining their experiences and views on employment within Australia's labor market. The paper draws on findings from a qualitative study conducted in Southeast Queensland. The study examines how black African immigrants define their identity, socio-economic wellbeing and sense of belonging in white majority Australia. The findings suggest that settlement and integration policies in Australia need to be informed by immigrants' employment experiences. The paper contributes to the literature on the role of employment in the settlement and integration processes of racially and culturally different immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We come to this article as non-Indigenous teacher educators working as qualitative researchers in postcolonial/decolonial (Mignolo, 2000) times. We explore matters related to schooling in remote Australian Indigenous communities. In this article, we respond to Delamont’s invitation for qualitative researchers to revisit (Delamont and Hamilton, 1984) and think reflexively (Delamont, 2009) about our field work research methods. In doing so, attention is drawn to research processes involved with observing, narrating and writing lives and experiences. We highlight matters related to sequencing dilemmas (Delamont, 2009), the need to locate the self-as-researcher in the social (Delamont, 2007), and calling out ethical tensions associated with the ‘catch 22’ of confidentiality and acknowledgement (Delamont, 2007). Two separate researcher recounts of field notes are used to render visible our reflexive thinking as we attempt to negotiate Western educational research ethics policies and procedures and ways of knowing and being in Indigenous contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Basil Bernstein wrote extensively about official educational knowledge, pedagogic recontextualisation and pedagogic identities. However, his theoretical oeuvre tended to focus on the textual rather than the affective aspects of policy recontextualisation. In addition, his work on the realisation of official pedagogic identity positions at the level of schooling institutions remained in an embryonic form, not fully developed. In this paper, I elaborate on the affective dimensions of policy recontextualisation by exploring institutional defences, namely teacher anxieties, produced by data-driven performativity. I draw on data from two research partnership projects undertaken with schools servicing vulnerable, high poverty communities in Australia to develop my ideas. Firstly, I explore how institutions develop defensive structures to deal with the anxieties of staff working with young children living in poverty. Secondly, I explore the affective dimensions of dealing with data-driven performativity policies by a school leadership team over the period of two research projects (2009–2016). I examine the professional anxieties induced by data performativity in the early days, and then explore how a research intervention re-circulated affects and enabled the staff to develop more ambivalent relations to data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the potential for health promotion capacity building across boundaries in a place-based health promotion learning network generated as part of a recent Australian Research Council-funded project in Queensland, Australia. We emphasise in particular the potential of creating new 'at the boundary' spaces of knowing that encourage and enable health promotion workers to work in interdisciplinary and intersectoral ways. The article discusses the way that diverse health promotion workers from different disciplines and government and non-government organisations came together to learn 'how to do' in new or re-invigorated ways. For many network participants, this cross-boundary space of knowing and capacity building provided a welcome respite from their daily contexts of practice which may be limited by institutional, disciplinary or other boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to focus on the relations between theory and research methods in educational research by mapping out our own research journeys. The paper arises out of a plenary talk at a 'Theory Workshop' (13-15 May 2016) that the Australian Association for Educational Research facilitated with Griffith University in Brisbane. This introductory talk attempted to create the space for 'opening up' discussion about the complex relations between theory and methods, and to show how these complex relations have been realised in our own, very different, researcher trajectories. It was a 'contradictory-performance' - we conducted a dialogue, invited interruptions, meandered from the central issue of theory-method nexus, talked past one another, worked with a chaotic PowerPoint presentation (slides from which are included here) and so on. We wanted the talk to be messy and, in both its form and contents, to be an invitation to others to engage in similar ways during the weekend. We were also interested in connecting and disconnecting with some of the recent debates in education research, for example on experimental practices, performativity, new materiality, and postqualitative research. Drawing on these debates and on our own research work, we wanted to create the space for considering our research in terms of their disjunctive 'journeys' and in terms of the consequences (and therefore to think about the purposes of research, and relatedly the purposes of education) of this contradictory work. This article is a reworked version of this talk - but we have tried to keep its open 'feel' in the hope of inviting other conversations about, and connections with and between, theory and methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]