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Outstanding education is a high-level policy narrative in England rehearsed by school leaders, politicians, policy-makers and inspectors alike. The 'legitimacy' of knowledge, performativity and discourse-based analysis are mobilised to examine outstanding. The paper explores how informants in the English state secondary education sector described and experienced outstanding. From examining policy documents and empirical data, the paper suggests that outstanding has become a performative tool 'hijacked' by inspection regimes. It concludes that, despite the informants' best efforts, the neoliberal and performative policy discourses which surround outstanding appear to increasingly wield a disproportionate, even tyrannical, influence upon the English education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to open up a re-examination of the relationship between thought and language by reference to two philosophers: John Austin and Jacques Derrida. While in traditional philosophical terms these thinkers stand far apart, recent work in the philosophy of education has highlighted the importance of Austin’s work in a way that has begun to bridge the philosophical divide. This article seeks to continue the renewed interest in Austin in educational research, yet also take it in new direction by exploring Austin’s wider philosophical concern within the William James Lectures with the nature of language. The significance of the philosophical turn to language has entered the agenda of a number of philosophers of education in recent years. The main aim of this article will be to present, as a starting point for further work, an account of language that does justice to the way language actually operates. The article will argue that Austin’s account of the performative opens up new possibilities in this regard and yet—for reasons that will be made clear—also fails in the final instance to carry these through. By illustrating the way Derrida’s philosophy works, contrastingly, to take these possibilities to their full conclusion, I will argue that Derrida succeeds in bringing a radically new conception of language to the fore. The article will end by pointing towards some of the implications of the initial exploration conducted here to be developed elsewhere—particularly for the ways we think about thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, I examine the politics of performativity that Judith Butler develops in Excitable Speech. In particular, I assess the usefulness of Butler's talk of performativity for describing discursive events involving victimised subjects. I propose that performativity's descriptive purchase is best gauged by foregrounding its presuppositions, and that these last include a Peircean conception of semiosis and a rhetorical postulate of genre. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Speech act theory was developed in the twentieth century by the philosophers J. L. Austin and John Searle. This paper provides a brief introduction to the theory and then explores some aspects of it that seem relevant to concepts in archival science, particularly connections between speech act theory and a conceptualisation of records as persistent representations. The paper focuses on ideas about the role of representation in the performance of speech acts, the potential impact of speech act theory on perceptions of the record, and the importance of societal conventions in understanding the affinities of records to human action. It argues that records have performative characteristics and that, by potentially offering a middle way between the extremes of objectivist and interpretivist views, speech act theory can help us to comprehend relations between records, actions and events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter focuses on The Erotics of Gossip, a radio piece by Hazel Smith and Roger Dean commissioned in 2001 for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Listening Room programme. The piece explores the positive and negative ways in which gossip is viewed in western and non-western cultures, and suggests that it can be creative or destructive, ethical or unethical, depending on its cultural context. The Erotics of Gossip is a sound technodrama, a hybrid and discontinuous form that mixes performance, sound, technology, and different genres writing. The chapter argues that The Erotics of Gossip explores the contradictory faces of gossip through the superimposition of different contemporary writing environments, from poetry, fiction, and drama to digital transformations of words and voice in 'voicescapes'. It also proposes that The Erotics of Gossip comprises a distinct genre 'performative fictocritism'. Fictocriticism juxtaposes creative and academic writing environments and breaks down their separation and autonomy. The Erotics of Gossip is fictocritical because it draws on the academic literature about gossip arising out of the disciplines of history, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, communications theory, cultural theory, and literature, and juxtaposes or merges allusions to that academic literature with creative writing. It is performative because it is an off-the-page work with dramatic and technological elements designed for radio, rather than an on-the-page work designed only for reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the everyday by considering how certain media images in Barnardo's recent advertising campaigns in the U.K. have ‘cut through’ the daily ‘media clutter’ to cause extensive public protest and discussion. Drawing on Eve K. Sedgwick's and Silvan Tomkins' work on affect as embodied in everyday experience, as well as J. L. Austin's speech act theory, I argue for sustaining investment in, if not the photograph's truth status, then in its capacity to draw attention to public rationalisations for (mass) suffering. Specifically, I discuss how the ordinary (everyday) slippage between indexical and iconic aspects of any photograph enables organisations, such as charities or even governments, to deploy the shame affect to sustain or extend divisions between people, as well as its own ‘established power’. The final section considers these ideas in relation to an Australian example, the ‘children overboard’ photographs in 2001 which instigated a public scandal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the debate among theorists of performativity as to whether this concept is founded in an ethical relation. I argue that recent theorisations of the performative, which ground the development of the performative subject within sociality, necessarily make ethics intrinsic to any understanding of performativity. Using the case of serial killer Karla Homolka, I explore four aspects of ethical relations—identity, otherness, responsibility and response—demonstrating that at each moment, performative theory encompasses, and indeed relies upon, an ethical foundation. I contend that this is particularly evident when we consider the role of narrative in exploring each of these aspects. The paper explores four different narratives of Karla Homolka's experience, developed in Lynn Crosbie's book on Karla Homolka's murderous partnership with Paul Bernardo, Paul's Case . Each “story” presents a performative relation, which clearly relies upon intersubjectivity, and thus upon an ethical relation to others. This narrative performativity allows for social contextualisation and an addressee/addresser relation that exceeds the individual self, while preserving the fragmented and contingent nature of the subject, which is the hallmark of performative theory of subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of performativity has become a significant means of understanding the construction of sexual and gendered identities. Ironically, the same concept has posed certain problems for theatre studies because of the definitional tensions between performativity and theatricality. The following study of Genet's The Maids as both playtext and production proposes that, in this example, theatricality is the vehicle for the expression of performativity and that Genet's drama prefigures contemporary strands of cultural thought and theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]