Policy borrowing and policy travelling are words that are often used to mean the same process to different policy practitioners across the globe. Nevertheless, these ideas are also riddled with both ethical as well as political undertones, such that interchanging them becomes problematic. In reflecting on and responding to some of these debates,…

Policy for young children in South Africa is now receiving high-level government support through the ANC's renewed commitment to redress poverty and inequity and creating "a better life for all" as promised before the 1994 election. In this article, I explore the power relations, knowledge hierarchies and discourses of childhood, family…

This article undertakes a critique of the aims and objectives of "Thinking Skills", one of the most widely and internationally used curricula in the teaching of thinking, offered by the University of Cambridge International Examinations. By engaging in a critical discourse analysis of how political and class biases are (re-)produced in the forms…

This paper is motivated by the premise that little is known about the use of requestive strategies in request emails in Chinese English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) context. Specifically, the paper examines and compares requestive strategies in request emails between two groups of university students, namely English majors (EM) and non-English…

This essay examines control discourse in and out of educational settings, arguing that illusions of control are among the means by which governance is accomplished in domains far from schools. The tactical productivity of such illusions in non-school settings "necessitates" and explicates their prevalence in education. The first installment of…

Educators are inclined to think that the words they use in their discourses about policy, research, and practice mean what they mean them to mean. It is just as clear, however, that such discourses ideologically produce and reproduce relations of power that benefit some and disadvantage others. This essay begins an argument that educators need to…

In this paper I employ Foucault's notion of governmentality to reflect on a debate that occurred in the pages of this journal some 10 years ago. I argue that their exchanges indicate ways in which various positions are engaged in a struggle for dominance in this field, and how particular strategies are used to legitimate and maintain these…

The intent of this article is to explore how No Child Left Behind (NCLB) emerges from a discursive frame that is also used in relation to neoliberal corporate conquests and, significantly, America's war on terror. The article first demonstrates through reference to online resistance discourses and NCLB, how NCLB is a product of and reproduces the…

Workplace literacy discourses have become institutionalized and are not critically examined. Workplace literacy has been socially constructed into a dominant discourse that offers limited understanding of work and literacy and strengthens existing power relations. (SK)

Applies and tests Foucault's theories about local centers of power and knowledge by rhetorically analyzing a Minnesota Midwifery Study Advisory Group. Illustrates how knowledge may be produced/suppressed and how a rhetor may become empowered by projecting negative traits upon the "other." Demonstrates how some traditional midwives…

Critically examines community development assumptions through historical analysis and mapping of political discourse. Using the methods of Foucault, Said, and Gramsci, demonstrates how participatory research, concerned with releasing people's knowledge through transformation, can expose and resist dominant discourses. (SK)

This article introduces the topic of this special issue of the journal. Explains the separate worlds hypothesis, discusses feminist critiques of separate worlds, and introduces children's gender indexing and considerations of culture, context, and power. (Author/VWL)

Applies M. Foucault's account of power-discourse and its relationship to its owners to aspects of late 19th/early 20th centuries, when new technologies have multiplied the capacity of power-discourse to intervene in lives. Identifies industrial urban crowd as a target for discourse; considers this conjunction in light of Foucault's theories.…

Responds to two articles in the same issue of this journal regarding a controversy over the African Burial Ground in New York City. Raises a third set of questions, arguing that investigations of rhetorics of controversy can also include investigations of the rhetorics of incommensurability, investigating the development of logics and…

Because true diversity challenges dominant discourses, those in power attempt to assimilate competing discourses in the name of diversity. An example is the judging of qualitative research proposals by the rules of quantitative research, which inevitably disadvantages qualitative research. (Contains 21 references. Includes commentary by Dawn…