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This article takes up Bonnie Honig's notion of 'public things' to conceptualise schools as sites of attachment and meaning that draw people into the relationships of care and concern that are crucial for democratic life. By linking this with Sara Ahmed's theorisation of affective relations and use, we develop Honig's idea that communities cultivate public things through their use of such things, at the same time as the things themselves shape the communities that care for them. Drawing on focus groups conducted with predominantly white Australian mothers, we examine how relational attachments and affective relations of care and concern circulate through the object of the school, shaping boundaries between self and Other, and experiences of community and public space. The article identifies two broad themes. First, it identifies white mothers' desires for alignment between themselves and the school, articulated as seeing oneself reflected in the values of the school and community. Second, it argues that mothers' affective relations with schooling were also expressed as racialised concerns about the potential risks of 'Other' communities attaching to the school, in ways that involved demarcating 'self' and 'Other'. We argue that the analytic lens of public things draws attention to the ways that schooling imbricates parents in relational and mutually constitutive affective environments that speak to the collective power of public things. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the diverse and, in some cases, contradictory ethical forms present in contemporary neoliberal policy frames. In particular, we analyse the demands of responsibility – as a form of ethical commitment – requested of parents by education policies in the contexts of Chile and Australia. Assuming neoliberalism as a contextualised and multivocal form of governing, we applied a policy sociology approach to study the ethical implications for parents of two recent educational reforms developed in the national contexts of this research. Our analyses show that the emerging demands on parents for responsibility in the educational field exceed univocal forms of individual responsibilisation, encompassing expressions of responsibility that respond to collective and public goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]