Schools can be permanently closed for many reasons -- economic rationalisation, post-disaster relocations, population decline or educational failure. Research on permanent school closures reports mostly negative and long-lasting consequences, not just for the school's staff and students, but for the local community. After the 2010/2011 Canterbury…

In this paper, we place the issue of university activism in the context of constituent and constituted power. By this we mean the ever-present danger that activists' demands will be co-opted and concurrently deactivated. To mitigate this risk, we develop a set of conceptual tools that enables thinking about the activist university in terms of…

This paper addresses a dilemma of education's autonomy: if an educational goal is to be universal, how do people's current problems and concerns are supposed to be integrated or addressed in the educational work, and specifically in teaching the curriculum? The paper looks at this dilemma with a particular educational perspective and within a…

There is a considerable literature concerning divided societies and the role of education in such societies. In the case of Northern Ireland, education is characterised by a largely separate system of education for its two main communities. There is also a considerably smaller integrated schools sector, where the two communities learn together. A…

This paper presents a remarkable conversation with Carlos Alberto Torres about Global Citizenship Education (GCE) in relation to research, teaching, and learning in the USA. Torres is a Distinguished Professor of Education, UNESCO UCLA Chair on Global Learning and Global Citizenship Education, UCLA and Founding Director of the Paulo Freire…

This paper discusses human relationships with the natural world in Japanese educational policy. Based on two case studies, we argue that policy must recognize the cultural and spiritual ties that people in Japan have fostered in order to live well, which this paper considers to be part of "re-wilding education policy." We briefly review…

Perhaps more extensively and provocatively than any other contemporary theorist, Henry Giroux has theorized the relationship between youth and democratic public life. Beginning arguably with his first book, Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling (Temple University Press, 1981), and continuing across a number of critically acclaimed works…

This article emphasizes the complexity of the term flexibility and discusses its meanings and political dimensions, along with its expressions or realizations within the field of higher education. It proposes a new principle of flexibility that overcomes an understanding of flexibility within higher education as the mere ability or versatility to…

This article shows how universities, like education and social services in general, are increasingly pressured to adopt neoliberal principles that encourage privatization, entrepreneurship, standardization, assessment, and accountability. The authors examine recent efforts in the United States to develop measurement and accountability systems that…

Contemporary efforts to rethink the philosophical foundation of critical pedagogy are part of the ongoing project to make the field relevant to current struggles against oppression. Inherent to this project is an invitation to account for the plurality of ways and spaces in which privilege is performed in North American society and the troubling…

This article discusses academic entrepreneurship in the context of ongoing changes in university management and governance in European universities. The comparative perspective is provided by the European Union (EU) research project "European Universities for Entrepreneurship: Their Role in the Europe of Knowledge" (EUEREK) comprising…

This article discusses the implications and complexities of Canada's multicultural policies for aboriginal students in its post-secondary education systems. The author, a Pakistani-Canadian multicultural educator, interviewed an Aboriginal-Canadian multicultural educator, to discuss the cultural differences, divisions, and resistances between…

This article focuses on the author's applied anthropological work with the Ingham County Health Department between 1998 and 2001. Government administrators were reflexively aware that nobody had ever stepped back to assess the area's overall environmental health and rank the issues according to some criteria, such as by the "most urgent…

Public schooling has been kidnapped. The author examines how this happened--since we all know very well who did it. How did public schooling become a hostage of world's neo-rightist political processes? This article attempts to unveil some of those strategies that underpin the very core of the neo-rightist current triumphalistic posture. To…

The Chicago Public Schools, along with the city of Chicago itself, serve as an exemplary case of neoliberal reorganization, as corporate and governmental "leaders" remake Chicago into a global city meeting the needs of capitalism. As such, Chicago provides us with an example of "actually existing neoliberalism," in which…