In this essay, music education is conceptualized as a game or performance within The Game, the "pervasive atmosphere" (Fisher 2009) of neoliberal capitalism, which inevitably shapes scholarship, practice, and policy. Even people who strive to see music education for what it really might be (e.g., those researching and promoting social…

The paper examines the role of literature set in late 20th-century Kerala, India, at the intersections of class and gender, in establishing and propagating new ideals for children and childhood. During this period, Kerala gained recognition from the UN for its Kerala Model of Development, which positioned the state at the forefront of Human…

Deploying a Lacanian conceptual framework, this article interrogates the psychoanalytic underpinnings of Paulo Freire's dialogical method of critical pedagogy. The paper advances the claim that the transformative efficacy of Freirean dialogue is rooted in its unique ability to confront and engage the repressed element of trauma, or what Lacan…

This article studies the history of playgrounds in Finland and focuses on the emergence and implementation of the objectives of the international playground movement in the early twentieth century. Specifically, it examines the relations between supervised playgrounds, women's emancipation, child welfare policies, and political discussion on…

This paper considers what it could mean to say that epistemologies and methodologies are racially just or unjust. It has been argued that this has nothing to do with whether an individual researcher is racist: he or she could be anti-racist but still use an epistemology that is racially biased. To explore this issue, some pioneering research by…

In this paper I explore social justice and equity research in music education through the lens of capitalist realism and accompanying concepts. I look at Fisher's ideas on hauntology and its connection to classical liberalism and neoliberalism. Fisher noted how some electronic music and pop music of the early 21st century is structured by…

Internships have grown to become a crucial part of the graduate job market. Offering graduates an invaluable opportunity to gain hands-on experience, develop key skills, and build their networks, they can be formative experiences for those trying to kickstart their career. But our previous research has highlighted a persistent and pervasive…

I want to address the political element in the pedagogical engagement. Too often the business of teaching is presented as somehow independent of political influence or implication. When ERO talked about 'delivering the curriculum', the terminology reflected a very neo-liberal view that the curriculum was something different from the process of…

In light of the debates on the "feminisation of religion" that have animated historiography, during the Restoration one can distinguish two educational strategies towards the education of women. On the one hand, we can make out a symbolic system in which women, whether religious or married, fulfilled values that the male part of society…

Materialist approaches to aesthetics historicize our sensuous capacities, orientations, and objects by attending to their ongoing production. This article begins by articulating capital not as an "economic" system but as a broader perceptual ecology that produces particular correspondences between subjects and the world. In response to…

In this paper, we connect with Martin Thrupp's calls for class-based analysis in education policy by problematising the absence of social class in the refreshed New Zealand curriculum, "Te Mataiaho" (2023). To contextualise this absence, we locate this curriculum policy in a historical perspective and interpret its 'identity turn' as an…

In this article, we show how Ofsted operates as institutional language police, and how the inspectorate's attitudes about language maintain race-class inequalities under a guise of social justice, equality and evidence-based practice. Our research has repeatedly demonstrated how Ofsted reproduces long-standing, deficit-based and colonial logics…

This article looks at how institutional peer leadership roles in higher education reproduce social class inequalities. Through an ethnographic case study of Southern African Development Community (SADC) international students studying at Rhodes University in South Africa, I demonstrate how students from privileged class backgrounds possess the…

Northern Ireland has a deeply divided education system with demarcation most notable along ethno/religious and social class lines. The former is largely attributable to the historical organisation of the schools estate based on religion, and the latter is associated with a system of academic selection that filters children into grammar and…

Drawing on interviews with 20 young Myanmar citizens from Yangon and Mawlamyine, this paper contrasts the educational experiences and perceptions of Burman and ethnic minority youth to illustrate Myanmar's citizenship crisis, which fuels the grievances of ethnic minorities through their restricted citizenship vis-à-vis the Burman majority's…