On October 26, 2011, a post appeared on the Occupy Wall Street Library blog titled "I would prefer not to." The constant refrain of Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" became one of Occupy's defining mottos, appearing on placards, T-shirts, and tote bags. The phrase became so symbolic that it was used on the posters…

The education research community, both within the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and beyond, could and should play a critical role in fundamentally transforming educational institutions and systems. Given its complexity, transformative change in education is best undertaken as a collective endeavor. Yet for researchers to be a…

At a time when educators are increasingly rising up within and beyond their unions to protect public education, it is vital to understand how activist educators become politicized and how their activist organizations contribute to such political education efforts. In this article, Maton and Stark examine the grassroots organizing work of three…

Racism impedes the health of communities of color and, more recently, has been declared a public health crisis. Social uprisings in response to the police brutalities in the summer of 2020 have further pushed public health as a discipline to recognize racism as a public health issue. We argue that, as a discipline, we must challenge ourselves to…

The neoliberal rationale in English higher education promotes institutional and individual competition for economic success, often at the cost of equity and universalism. Within such context, there is a tendency to formalise student voice, for example, through professionalisation of students' unions. This paper argues that neoliberalism and its…

Sit-in protests are occurring more frequently on college campuses and yet are viewed with greater disdain by university administration than more conventional protest actions. This grounded theory research study aims to explain the decision-making process of student activists who participate in a sit-in of a university space. Additionally, the…

Over 2015-2016, high school students in Brazil occupied hundreds of schools across the country. Students fought to keep public schools open, funded, and functional, against outsourcing and privatisation, and in solidarity with teachers' trade unions and strikes. The 'primavera secundarista' ('student spring') was the most significant school…

Education is a central aspect of social movements' ability to build individual and collective participation in political struggle. But, how do these processes of learning and consciousness take place? As Choudry (Choudry, A. 2015. Learning Activism: The intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements. University of Toronto Press) argues, it is…

Disciplinary pressures within academia often produce specialised and one-sided accounts of complex social processes. Convincing accounts of popular education regularly acknowledge the importance of social movements but without theorising them adequately -- and vice versa. This one-sidedness is compounded by a widespread tendency to generalise from…

This dissertation study explores a voluntary preservice teacher led club, LEARN (pseudonym) focused on urban education. The club meetings varied consisting of approximately 10-15 Preservice Teacher (PST) members each session. Members were predominantly White newcomer and oldcomer participants that met regularly (twice a month) to engage in various…

Environmental education in historically White schools of education has typically emphasized science, outdoor, or STEM education rather than environmental racism, environmental (in)justice, or the environmental justice movement. This focus often deemphasizes the role of structural injustice and state-sanctioned violence in environmental issues as…

By considering the position of education as a pharmakon, highlighting its potential positive and negative effects on societies by its technical unfolding, the article proposes to explore the political and pedagogical role that public and collective performances can have within the public sphere as political devices for promoting and enacting…

This paper advances Marxist Critical Policy Analysis (MCPA) -- a particular form of Critical Policy Analysis. I contrast it with 'Traditional Policy Analysis' (TPA) and with 'Critical Policy Analysis' (CPA), generally, and, with respect to Education, work by Michael W. Apple, Stephen J. Ball, and wider reformist, postmodern and…

Anchored on Mondlane's biological mother's advice that he ought to 'go to school in order to understand the witchcraft of the white man, thus being able to fight against him' and on the argument that what he learned as a child informed his learning as an adolescent and as an adult, this study developed a profile of Eduardo Mondlane as a lifelong…

Background/Context: The United States invests in STEM education, but this investment is racialized and political. The country wants to maintain global economic domination, but there are also calls to diversify the STEM workforce (Baber, 2015; Basile & Lopez, 2015; Vakil & Ayers, 2019). This context leaves Black and Brown people to navigate…