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In the last 30 years we have increasingly, as humans, been individualised and set in competition with each other in the quest for ever increasing productivity. Neoliberalism has exacerbated those very liberal humanist features that feminist poststructuralist theory set out to dismantle with its critique of binary thought and the ascendance of white, male, elite, western consciousness. While transferring the responsibility for individual survival to the individual, away from the social, it weakened our responsibility, our response-ability, to each other and to the earth and our earth others. In this paper I tease my way, through stories, and through new materialist concepts, to a sense of self as emergent, as process rather than (id)entity, as response-able and responsible in the mattering of the world.

In this article, I explore a range of concepts that enable those of us who work with children to break free from some of those enunciative regularities that function to hold the way things are, in place. The term "enunciative regularities" comes from Foucault, who advocated breaking open words and propositions to find what work they do, what systems they perpetuate. The way we speak the world into existence, and the ways we interpret that mode of speaking, can be taken for granted, by us, as the unquestionable truth of the world and of ourselves. We are, in general, not very accomplished at turning our reflexive gaze on the words and propositions that we are enmeshed in, and thus are not readily able to break them open. Turning our critical gaze on those enunciative regularities is vital, I suggest, if we want to bring about change in the way we order the world—and the ways the world orders us. The work of philosophy, in developing new concepts, enables us to look and to listen differently, and to creatively evolve beyond some of our unquestioned enunciative entrapments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early childhood schoolbooks designed to teach children to read, have been shown not only to shape gendered identities in a limiting, binary format, but to lend the written word the appearance of unquestionable, and restrictive truth about the way the world is. Texts written for adults, too, may similarly limit what can be known, reining in the world's emergent efflorescence. Extending the concept of emergent listening, this paper develops the concept of emergent reading, a form of reading that is intimately and diffractively related to emergent listening and emergent writing. Emergent reading is relational, intra-acting with the emergent efflorescence of written words and with the materiality of the human and more-than-human world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on memory stories told in a collective biography workshop about children's encounters with schooling, this paper experiments with re-imagining the child-student-subject as an 'emergent intracorporeal multiplicity' [Fritsch, K. 2015. "Desiring Disability Differently: Neoliberalism, Heterotopic Imagination and Intra-Corporeal Configurations." "Foucault Studies" 19: 43-66, 51]. From the feminist new materialist perspective that the authors work with, the child is configured not as an entity prior to, or separate from, encounters with education systems, but emergent with-in them. This paper focuses on difference in human relations, and in particular on the intersections of disability and gender. It does so not in terms of essential characteristics of individuals, but as emergent, in-the-moment, with others. In focussing on the detail of lives-in-their-making, the authors ask, with Barad [2007. "Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning." Durham: Duke University Press], if we are interested in justice, how we are to 'understand our role in helping constitute who and what come to matter?'

The movement towards inclusion comes together with a neoliberal audit mentality whereby individuals are held responsible for the transformations. The Special Educational Needs Coordinators (SENCOs) are seen as 'change agents' whose task it is, to support teachers in adapting their approach to optimise the chances for children with special needs in regular schools. In this paper, we want to problematise the 'responsibility-blame discourse' and look differently at agency. By using a diffractive methodology based on collaborative work, in which we have used material images of the workplace of the SENCO, and read-the-data-while-thinking-with-theory, we deconstruct the individualisation of agency. The SENCOs are no longer seen as separate individual humanist subjects where agency is solely lodged in the body of an individual agent [Barad, K. 2007. "Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning." Durham: Duke University Press] but the SENCOs are part of the intra-active entanglement of multiple agencies, of an assemblage. This re-conceptualisation of agency leads to a different approach to inclusion, in which the participants in any encounter can work as part of the assemblage to develop communities capable of re-thinking practice and transforming it into a place where children with special needs become legitimate members of the school.

This paper explores the relation between poststructuralist theorising and new materialism with a particular focus on the work of Barad. Tracing the lines of thought, particularly as they relate to ethics, through the works of Foucault, Butler, Cixous and Deleuze the paper finds a range of concepts that anticipate and link directly with Barad's work. Barad's emphasis on the agency of matter, and on how matter is made to matter, is found to be new. The different analytic work that can be done with these various philosophers is explored through three intra-active entanglements; first, among preschool children and a rock, second, between a girl and a chimp raised as her twin, and third, between humans and cows.

This article sketches out a philosophy and practice of open listening, linking open listening to Bergson's (1998) concept of creative evolution. I draw on examples of small children at play from a variety of sources, including Reggio-Emilia-inspired preschools in Sweden. The article offers a challenge to early childhood educators to listen and to think and act beyond the status quo.

This article offers a critique of the individualisation and pathologisation that underpin most current working definitions of bullying. In lieu of this usual mode of thinking about bullying, this article draws on concepts from Foucault, Deleuze, Butler and Badiou, to re-cast bullying not as pathological, but as an excessive and misguided defence of a fixed and dominant normative moral order. A very different approach to dealing with school bullying is sketched out, where it is proposed that children learn a new form of "ethical relationality" in which they are open to difference and to their own ongoing creative evolution. This approach argues for the importance of the teachers working with children, rather than selecting out individuals as bullies and victims to be treated.

In this article the authors take up the invitation to respond to the previous articles in the special issue. They discuss why it is so difficult to speak and write about gender and sexuality, and difference more generally, in the neoliberalised university. They make the case that the neoliberal university engages and uses categorical difference, and the individuals inhabiting these, mainly for auditing purposes. The authors develop the argument that despite the enterprise university's official commitments to diversity and inclusion, it remains indifferent to difference, understood as openness to becoming different, to differenciation in a Deleuzian sense. Difference is privatised and depoliticised and is only acceptable if it is useful and exploitable in pre-specified ways and if it conforms to and facilitates neoliberal agendas. (Contains 1 note.)

This article undertakes a discursive analysis of the concepts of "inclusion" and "mastery" using memory stories generated in a collective biography workshop. The five authors analysed their memories from childhood and adolescence on two separate and competing concepts that currently inform educational practice: inclusion and mastery. These stories of mastery/non-mastery and inclusion/exclusion often exceeded or transgressed dominant normative discourses concerning the competent performance of autonomous selves. Drawing on the work of several theorists, they authors explored these transgressions. In so doing, their analysis extends Butler's theorising of the human subject as constituted through processes of exclusion and differentiation. (Contains 2 notes.)

In this paper the four authors explore the experience of school bullying, drawing on stories of bullying generated in a collective biography workshop and on fictional accounts of bullying. They counter the current trend of reading bullying as individual or family pathology with a post-structuralist analysis of subjectification and power.

This article examines the everyday practices of writing in the context of the technologies of audit, as they have been practised on and by the four authors in their capacity as students and researchers. It examines the activity of writing as governmentality, through which students and academics make themselves into appropriate subjects, and also exceed and disrupt the effects of government. (Contains 1 note.)

The discourses and practices of neoliberalism, including government policies for education and training, public debates regarding standards and changed funding regimes, have been at work on and in schools in capitalist societies since at least the 1980s. Yet we have been hard pressed to say what neoliberalism is, where it comes from and how it works on us and through us to establish the new moral order of schools and schooling, and to produce the new student/subject who is appropriate to (and appropriated by) the neoliberal economy. Beck (1997) refers to the current social order as the "new modernities" and he characterizes the changes bringing about the present forms of society as having been both surreptitious and unplanned, that is, as being invisible and difficult to make sense of. In eschewing a theory in which anyone or any group may have been planning and benefiting from the changes, he falls back on the idea of natural and inevitable development, and optimistically describes the changes of the last two to three decades as the inevitable outcome of the victories of capitalism. The authors' approach is not so optimistic, and they do not accept the idea of the natural inevitability of the changes. The approach that is taken in this issue is to examine neoliberalism at work through a close examination of the texts and talk through which neoliberal subjects and their schooling have been constituted over the last two decades. In this Introduction the authors provide their own take on the way the present social and political order has emerged as something that its subjects take to be inevitable. (Contains 2 notes.)

In this paper the authors analyse a university-school partnership that went awry. It was designed to develop a new set of philosophical principles to inform work with violent student behaviour in schools. The project brought together a team of researchers from the university and school sector with a strong record of examining and improving the management of behaviour in classrooms. The authors sought volunteer school-based educators to work with them as co-researchers. Despite the team's strong school-based research background, the mutual interest in developing a new approach to work with violence, and the strong collaborative base, they found themselves, as the initiating research team, unable to progress in the ways they had anticipated. This paper analyses the dynamics at work in that lack of progress. The analysis is put forward with the hope of enlivening discussion about what makes for successful collaborative projects between schools and universities. (Contains 5 notes.)

In this paper, we analyse the links between subjectivities as they are constructed through the intersecting discourses of gender and literacy, and we situate this analysis in the context of the current neo-liberal social and economic order. We begin with a discussion of the background to the gender and literacy debates. We then describe what neo-liberalism is and its implications for education, and provide an analysis of the ways in which gendered and literate subjectivities are formed. We introduce Certeau's concept of the scriptural economy and illustrate this with four stories about children writing. In the final section we discuss some of the research on gender and literacy in school and home settings. Our overall trajectory is to show the relations among literacy, gender and the economy and to show the intensification of gendered differences that is taking place despite the neo-liberal rhetoric that says such differences are no longer relevant.

In this paper I explore the process of subjectification (sometimes also called subjectivation, or simply, subjection) through which one becomes a subject--a process that Butler describes in terms of simultaneous mastery and submission, entailing a necessary vulnerability to the other in order to be. I examine the conceptual work Butler has undertaken to extend the Foucauldian concept of subjectification, and I draw on some encounters between teachers and their students in order to make these processes of subjectification understandable in the context of education. I conclude the paper with some notes toward an ethics of classroom practice. (Contains 3 notes.)

The controlling strategies of neo-liberalism, designed to constitute academics as economic units supporting the designs of government, are contrasted here with the creative and transgressive elements of a more Deleuzian approach to writing that opens things up, that brings thought to life, that makes the familiar, predictable order tremble. The article suggests that neo-liberalism can never fully capture the creative and joyful subject that it thinks it is creating and controlling. The article is disruptive of the neo-liberal order--and a refusal of it. It plays with multiple layers of meaning making, using metaphor, images and imagined sounds from opera, a story from collective biography, and interviews with academics to create an engagement with women's place in academe that is at once intellectual and emotional. At its centre is a synopsis for an opera set in the halls of academe. The article does not negate emotion and embodiment, but rather opens the possibility of decomposing some aspects of our embodied history of inhabiting the male-female binary, as it is lodged in the structures and practices of the academy.

In this article we analyse the ways in which neo-liberalism is taken up in the discourses and practices of university life. In the "knowledge economy" it might be thought that intellectual work would flourish. Yet the neo-liberal technologies through which universities and individual academics are made into entrepreneurs and made "productive" are at risk of undermining the very source of knowledge production that they are intended to promote. In this article we explore the ways in which the discourses and practices of neo-liberal managerialism work to effectively forestall resistance to themselves. The forestalling of resistance is accomplished in part by persuading each individual academic to treat the effects of neo-liberalism as personal successes, responsibilities and failings rather than as a form of institutional practice in need of critique and transformation.

In this paper a critique of neoliberal regimes within universities is developed. Neoliberal discourse is deconstructed and the dangers of it for intellectual work are considered. Neoliberal subjects (those subjected through neoliberal discourses) are defined and guidelines for thinking about education within (and against) neoliberal regimes are developed.

The authors examine the concept of subjectification, using Judith Butler's theorizing of subjection to investigate their memories of being subjected in school settings and analyze subjectification. Their collective biography highlights aspects of the achievement of the individual appropriated schoolgirl subject who simultaneously constitutes herself and is constituted through discourse and looks at the ideal of autonomy. (SM)

Argues against a definition of poststructural theory as generating inaction and as antithetical to concepts such as "agency" and "choice." Suggests that poststructuralist theory may have implications for practice by examining the practices in regular schools and a school for "behaviorally disturbed" children. (CMK)

Sex discrimination in employment is analyzed based on definitions developed through antidiscrimination legislation in Australia. Experiences at one university are used to illustrate how discrimination manifests and perpetuates itself in a cycle of attitudes, acts, and outcomes. Substantial data on employment patterns and practices are presented. (MSE)

This paper re-turns to the concept of positioning, and to the thick tangles of spacetimemattering as they were at work in the paper "Positioning: the discursive production of selves" by Davies & Harré, published in 1990. In re-turning to the concept of positioning, and to its analysis, this paper asks what matters in scholarly work, and how it contributes to gendered, colonial relations of power. The paper explores the impact of the spacetimes scholars work in, on their thinking-in-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses how we become gendered through our culture and provides a classroom analysis of a teacher working with boys to get them to see themselves as literate in ways that are usually eschewed by boys who achieve hegemonic masculinity. Concludes with a definition of critical literacy that is considered relevant to the teaching of literacies to boys. (GR)

Analyzes A. Jones' exposition of the problems her students face in acquiring post-structuralist discourse and the aspects of that problem that Jones attributes to the writings of B. Davies. A focus is on the concept of the post-structuralist "subject." (SLD)

Examines the power of dominant discourses of gender to trap children within conventional meanings and modes of being. Presents findings of a study of children's reactions to feminist fairy tales. Concludes that patterns of desire reflected in preferred storylines give substance to inequitable social structures. (DK)

If the "I" of new materialism is, in Bennett's words, "Absorbent... continually ingressed, ensnared, and informed by an outside," what happens to that absorbent "I" when faces are hidden behind masks, as Denzin writes: anonymous, "hiding the truth of our presence," fearful of the Trickster, Covid-19, lurking everywhere? What sense can we make of the entanglement of masks/virus/humans? What are we, what have we become, what are we becoming behind our masks? We seek to protect ourselves and others from the virulent airborne particles and lose our humanity, and we leave our bare faces hanging out, and embrace the "outside." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is my response, from the heart, to the loss of Norm Denzin. The invitation to contribute to this special issue, focussing on remembering Norm, gave me a chance to find words to talk about what his loss meant to me, and to find words to say just how profound has been the contribution he made to the world—and will go on making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article to recoup 'experience' within the poststructuralist framework discusses particular experience that was developed at different points of time and in different context.