This article suggests three orientations within sociology toward issues of morality and character development. The first stems from Durkheim, one where sociological tools diagnose the operation of any society and its constituent parts, including typifications of the individual. This tradition holds that sociologists can help diagnose…

We argue that the compelling critical perspective put forward by Michael Sandel in "The Tyranny of Merit" could benefit from the account of power that "Cut Loose" advanced in its earlier typology. First, the ways that principles of meritocracy serve the interests of particular social groups become clearer when we consider more…

Those who compete in the Gaokao, China's College Entrance Exam, are often referred to as Gaokao zhanshi, or warriors. Based on long-term ethnographic research, this article examines how Gaokao warriors combine two types of agency that are conventionally considered contradictory: the docile cultivation of virtue and the struggle against social…

This article considers how past and current research on the history of education has intersected with the histories of emotions, senses and experience. The article suggests that addressing these features and by drawing on approaches from a burgeoning field of research on the emotions and senses, as well as using methodologies from the 'new'…

The idea that children need to be exposed to stories of patriotic heroes has again surfaced in recent legislative activity surrounding education. Often, this impulse aligns with a conservative, moralizing vision of teaching history: the flaws of past historical figures should be minimized for the purposes of national pride and traditional virtues.…

Dissent has its own special place in art education. It has two stereotypical, polarized faces. The first is a classical institution modelled on Italian and French academies. As official places, they aimed at elevating art to the rank of science and making it an expression and instrument of power. The opposite image of the school is an oasis of…

This conceptual paper argues for the reconfiguring of Intercultural Communication Education (ICE) through a dialogical engagement with "Istina" (Truth) and "Pravda" (Truth in Justice). The paper argues that the field of ICE is predominantly characterised by normative conceptualisations of truth (e.g., characterised by fixed or…

Cheating, a form of academic dishonesty, is commonly regarded as a problem in science education. This inquiry theorizes cheating not as a moral failing on the part of students or a lack of surveillance by teachers but rather as a resistance to testing. Ethnographic data from a university physical science department, analyzed with Michel Foucault's…

Higher Education (HE) constitutes a space that calls urgently for new understandings in the contemporary political moment. One way of establishing such an understanding of HE is to consider more fully the work of political theorists in relation to questions of power in the modern nation-state, particularly as these impinge upon the key problem of…

The argument of this paper is that many texts of the Western literary canon rather than being vehicles of establishment values are critical of these values. Teaching these texts allows educators to challenge the interests of those who hold power in society as well as conventional sexual morality and gender stereotypes. Many important works of…

In this article Annie Schultz argues that engaging with narratives of resistance and empowerment in literary fiction makes for an important addition to the practice of political education. She is interested, in particular, in what can be gained from the thoughtful contemplation modeled by the inner monologues of literary narrators. Many writers of…

Over the past decade, scholars from a variety of epistemological and theoretical backgrounds have begun to engage more deeply with history as a form of difficult knowledge. It is difficult to comprehend and can be traumatic for different groups for different reasons. History as a school subject has largely been used as a tool of hegemony by…

This article aims to reject the assumption that philosophy causes children to reject authority. In this article, the authors take a different perspective on the issues of authority and moral order with regard to Philosophy for Children (P4C) in schools, presenting how the tension appeared in a specific classroom through data collected by the first…

The article analyses the term discourse and discourse analysis with reference to Foucault and other critics. Foucault used the role of discourses in wider social processes of legitimating power, and emphasizing the construction of current truths. The article argues that discourse analysis, as employed by Foucault, concentrated on analysing power…

It is widely documented that young children participating in research should be protected from harm and that ethical considerations should be applied throughout a research project. What this paper strives to assert, however, is that protecting these participants is insufficient. A research project into children's speech and language development,…