How can we build a path from the binary of gender to the unity of common humanity? What kind of difference can the "different voice" of feminism make as a "human voice?" In this article, Naoko Saito argues that the way we talk about the "difference" of a "different voice" needs to be radically transformed.…

There is fierce controversy in the United States over whether parents should be able to choose their children's schools and/or curriculum. To discuss the pedagogical arguments inherent in this question, Todd Alan Price and Ruprecht Mattig begin with the classical concept of "Bildung" as developed by Wilhelm von Humboldt around 1800.…

In this essay, Michalinos Zembylas revisits the tension between decolonization and other social justice projects in education scholarship, focusing in particular on the arguments for and against the notion of decolonization as land return. While different colonized communities are justifiably projecting their own political priorities in struggles…

In this article, F. Tony Carusi considers the politics of instrumentalism performed between educational policy and research that figures the teacher as the primary means to raise student achievement. By reducing teachers to a means toward an end, policy and research work together to collapse what teachers are into what teachers are for, and in…

This article gives a historical-philosophical overview of three generations of pragmatist thinking centered around the question of democracy. It serves as an introduction and contextualization to the papers that develop a third generation pragmatic point of view in the remainder of the special issue. The perspective is from one American-trained…

This article explores the erosion of public education as a project of democratization. It locates this erosion in the neoliberal world order that has redefined our understanding of schooling the democratic citizen in terms of developing market assets. In it, Carl Anders Säfström investigates specifically how this shift is apparent in the ways in…

"Collaboration" is frequently urged on students, who are praised for being "good collaborators." Yet collaboration has two senses: a positive sense of autonomously undertaken joint endeavor, but also a sinister implication of treacherous cooperation with enemies. In this article, Amy Shuffelton probes the uses and misuses of…

Michalinos Zembylas examines how history education can be reconceived in terms of Jacques Derrida's notion of "hauntology," that is, as an ongoing conversation with the "ghost"--in the case of this essay, the ghosts of disappeared victims of war and dictatorship. Here, Zembylas uses hauntology as both metaphor and pedagogical methodology for…

In this essay, P. Taylor Webb and Kalervo N. Gulson argue that educational policy is a spatial process and that implementation processes in particular produce crucial emergent geographies for policy research. Webb and Gulson describe how emergent geographies are produced when policy "folds" actors through senses and enactments of policy. The idea…

In this article Sarah Stitzlein highlights an educational right that has been largely unacknowledged in the past but has recently gained significance given renewed citizen participation in displays of public outcry on our streets and in our town halls. Dissent is typically conceived of as a negative right--a liberty that guarantees that the…

Educational theorists frequently invoke rights claims to express their views about educational justice and authority. But the unyielding nature of rights claims presents a significant quandary in democratic contexts, given the tension between rights claims and majoritarian democracy. Educational theorists have given limited attention to this…

In this essay David Labaree explores the historical and sociological elements that have made educational researchers dependent on statistics. He shows that educational research as a domain, with its focus on a radically soft and thoroughly applied form of knowledge and with its low academic standing, fits the pattern in which weak professions have…

In this essay, Michalinos Zembylas examines how the work of mourning can evoke public and school pedagogies that provide an alternative way of relating to otherness and trauma--not through remaining fixated on simply representing the other's or one's own trauma, but in the insistence on remaining inconsolable before suffering. A major concern is…

In our increasingly instrumentalist culture, debates over the privatization of schooling may be beside the point. Whether we hatch some new plan for chartering or funding schools, or retain the traditional model of government-run schools, the ongoing instrumentalization of education threatens the very possibility of public education. Indeed, in…

Encouraging debate on inclusion and equity can meet with awkward silences, particularly across disciplinary boundaries. In disability studies, for example, it can be difficult to build dialogue with other disciplines; as a consequence, the different disciplinary groups within the field of education often end up working in their own "equity" silos.…