Search

Hélène Cixous is perhaps best known for her paper, 'The Laugh of the Medusa' (1976) and her literary contributions outside academia. In this paper, we pick up a lesser known Cixous text, 'Le Sexe ou la tête?' that offers an interesting and provocative perspective on the traps associated with being feminine in a masculine environment. As we converse with Cixous, weaving our own words and experiences with hers, we link her work more closely with the feminine in modern-day academia. We suggest that Cixous's remarks on decapitation and voice offer a way forward for academic women to be; to speak; to recognise the double jeopardy of decapitation in the university; and to use laughter as a strategic, powerful, political act of resistance and subversion against oppressive masculine power structures. We draw on and seek to enact Cixous's notion of "écriture feminine"--a disruptive style of writing that provides a mode of being, speaking, and writing that subverts the power of masculine norms in order to be heard and to bring possibilities for change.

We offer here a metaphor of the university as an "infinite game" in which we bring to life insight, imagination, and radical inclusion; and resist the "finite games" that can lead us astray. We suggest that keeping the infinite game alive within universities is a much-needed form of academic activism. We offer four vignettes that explore this further: our responsibility to be "critic and conscience of society" and how that responsibility must also turn inwards onto our own institution, the dilemmas of being a woman with leadership responsibilities in an institution that proudly shows off its "top girls," the opportunities we have as teachers to "teach the university" and be taught by our students, and the contradictions we face as activist scholars in our relentlessly audited research personas. We draw on the infinite/finite game metaphor, our own affective experiences as tenured academics, and feminist critiques.

Video ethics in educational research involving children is a recent topic that has arisen since the increase in the use of visual mediums in research (such as photovoice and video) especially with the development of new and ubiquitous internet technologies and social media. This paper emerged as an expressed concerned by a group of scholars associated with the new Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy (Brill) that was established in 2016. The paper is the result of a collective writing process over a period of a few months that discusses visual studies in education and visual ethics in relation to qualitative research in education, and as it applies to children. The article also uses the newly established convention of open review, publishing the results with the paper.

Peer review is central to academic publishing. Yet for many it is a mysterious and contentious practice, which can cause distress for both reviewers, and those whose work is reviewed. This paper, produced by the Editors' Collective, examines the past and future of peer review in academic publishing. The first sections consider how peer review has been defined and practised in changing academic contexts, and its educational significance in the development of scholarship. The paper then explores major historical and contemporary issues around identity, diversity, anonymity, and the review process, and the related power of editors versus reviewers in academic publishing. Finally, the paper discusses the case of new scholars as reviewers engaging in neoliberal labour, before concluding with some brief recommendations based on our analysis.

This article results from a collaborative investigation into Antipodean theory in education by members of the Editors' Collective (www.editorscollective.org.nz). The Prologue contains a brief personal account of the South Project (www.southernperspectives.net), as an example of the contemporary projects and activities falling under the banner of "Antipodean" ways of working and thinking. The Introduction briefly reviews the history of (mainly Western) ideas about the Antipodes, from classical Greek philosophy through to the contemporary globalised era. This is followed by a synopsis of the motivations, purposes and benefits of Antipodean theory, with more detailed examinations of equality, indigeneity, replication and creation as some of its central elements. We consider the role of Antipodean thinking as a located critical theory for education, and a way to defend our aspirations for equality and social justice against the incursions of neoliberalism, today and in the future.

Bob Davis is Editor of the "Journal of Philosophy of Education" and is Head of School and Professor of Religious and Cultural Education in the School of Education Administration at the University of Glasgow. In this interview Davis provides his insight on topics such as the role of learned societies in philosophy of education, engagements with new publishing formats in a digital age, and the future relevance of philosophy of education.

This paper explores the continuing relevance to education of ideas about art and resistance that Jean-François Lyotard signalled in his curated exhibition in 1985 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris entitled "Les Immatériaux." The exhibition was for Lyotard the "staging" of a resistance at the dawning of an information age that challenged the prioritisation of computerised "data" through the very deconstruction of data as presented in artistic form. While the implications of this event for art exhibitions are still being theorised and debated, it is the insight "Les Immat?ériaux" provides as pedagogical encounter that is the focus of this article. The paper explores the exhibition in the context of the immateriality of art and develops this argument towards a notion of artistic testimony that then culminates in an analysis for the pedagogical significance of the exhibition in the information drenched, highly networked context of contemporary education.

This paper outlines the personal transformation that occurred when three university educators from very different fields (education, midwifery, and oral health) and world views, established a common understanding of their research topic and subsequent development of a research question to improve health educators' capability when teaching interprofessional practice. Most health educators entering higher education are specialists in their clinical practice foremost, and therefore, the health researchers engaged with an education specialist to develop a project scope. Through an eight-month process of challenging, learning, reflecting, and actively testing the meaning of ideas and statements, a consensus was achieved on a research aim and proposal that would guide the research process. This paper presents the collaborative journey to achieve this consensus. The individual stories of two of the researchers' journeys were analysed, identifying that a shift in the understanding of ontology and pedagogy takes time and effort, and change is reliant on a collective working together towards a positive outcome where consensus is arrived at through challenge and dialogue. There was an action learning phase that pre-empted the researchers' capacity to collectively envision the research aim when working across professions, providing a practical knowing that is explored in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hélène Cixous is perhaps best known for her paper, 'The Laugh of the Medusa' (1976) and her literary contributions outside academia. In this paper, we pick up a lesser known Cixous text, 'Le Sexe ou la tête?' that offers an interesting and provocative perspective on the traps associated with being feminine in a masculine environment. As we converse with Cixous, weaving our own words and experiences with hers, we link her work more closely with the feminine in modern-day academia. We suggest that Cixous's remarks on decapitation and voice offer a way forward for academic women to be; to speak; to recognise the double jeopardy of decapitation in the university; and to use laughter as a strategic, powerful, political act of resistance and subversion against oppressive masculine power structures. We draw on and seek to enact Cixous's notion of écriture feminine—a disruptive style of writing that provides a mode of being, speaking, and writing that subverts the power of masculine norms in order to be heard and to bring possibilities for change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with developing a philosophical approach to a number of significant changes to academic publishing, and specifically the global journal knowledge system wrought by a range of new digital technologies that herald the third age of the journal as an electronic, interactive and mixed-media form of scientific communication. The paper emerges from an Editors' Collective, a small New Zealand-based organisation comprised of editors and reviewers of academic journals mostly in the fields of education and philosophy. The paper is the result of a collective writing process.

This article explores Lyotard's notion of performativity through an engagement with McKenzie's analysis of performance as a "formation of knowledge and power" that has displaced the notion of discipline as the tool for social evaluation. Through conditions of "performance" capitalism, education is to conform to a logic of performativity that ensures not only the efficient operation of the state in the world market, but also the continuation of a global culture of performance. I further trace Lyotard's postmodern aesthetic of experimentation through performance as an "event" in an analogous attempt to track the process of cultural production in terms that acknowledge the temporality of the event so as not to reduce the artwork to a commodity, knowledge to information, and "performance" to be managed. Where this has critical traction is in education, a site that deals with the intersection of politics, art, theory, philosophy and history--in short, a site where all aspects of "performance" are fully realized. This article engages with the key ideas of these thinkers' approaches to notions of performance, and assesses their relevance for an understanding of the ambiguities of "performance" in contemporary education institutions.

Inspired by a new teaching initiative that involved a redesign of conventional classroom spaces at the University of Auckland's Epsom Campus, this article considers the relationship between architecture, the built environment and education. It characterises the teaching space of the Epsom Campus as the embodiment of educational policy following its inception in the early 1970s. Heralded as a modernist work of architecture juxtaposing material and textural combinations, the Epsom Campus emerged as a metaphorical vanguard of teaching pedagogy that stood as a symbol of a more progressive and culturally inclusive style of education. With consideration for a different kind of architectural space and pedagogy at the city-based business school, the article extends an understanding of spatiality and learning, and argues the structural architectonics of the teaching space and the built environment confer their own pedagogical value. By drawing on the critical stance of Nietzsche's genealogical methodology for reading history, strands of historical discourse and "vibrant materialities" are considered so that the "built pedagogy" of both contexts can be activated and explored.

This paper utilises the conceptual lens of intersectionality to explore gendered academic career trajectory in the context of one participant's challenge to a normative reading of the link between her private life and its relation to a "successful" academic career. The paper then charts the recalibrations that needed to take place to ensure certain sociocultural categories and intersections were not privileged over others. Finally, the paper then utilises the concept of intersectionality as a metaphor with which to view the intersecting and reflexive relationship between the interviewer, the interviewee and the performative event of the interview process.