The reduction in local control and oversight of schooling represented by the growth of Multi Academy Trusts (MATs) in England raises critical issues for public policy. These include the articulation and exercise of power in the governance of MATs, the future of democratic governance of local services and accountability. Applying Foucault's…

This paper is a written dialogue among four activists from the Emancipa Popular Education Movement in Brazil, following the principles of Freirean pedagogy as a "circle of culture." It delves into how "popular knowledge can be experienced as popular power," narrating the history, struggles, and strategies employed by the…

In this article, we define and provide some history of "critical media literacy" (CML) in education. We then place critical media literacy in context of our current "post-truth" era. Next, we describe some of the consequences of adults' addiction to two decades of expanding, omnipresent new media to explain why we, like…

The introduction of school governing bodies in South African schools has largely been motivated by a democratic discourse of communal participation, belonging and accountability. How this has been interpreted has seemingly been limited to understandings of parental participation in the daily functioning of schools. In turn, research on school…

This paper argues that the Trump phenomenon is not an anomaly but rather a predictable stage of the waning of US power. The United States has enjoyed military and economic dominance of the world since the early twentieth century when it gained control of the massive Third World colonial regions of the world. We must regard education as the human…

The purpose of this contribution is to investigate the Standards and Accountability Movement, as it relates to the roles of administrators and the creation of school culture, against a broader neoliberal, historical context using a combination of historical evidence and critical theory. Employing a critical, comparative-historical analysis, this…

Turkey has become a powerful example of rising ethno-religious nationalism since the ruling Justice and Development Party allied with the Nationalist Movement Party in 2016. Conceptualising the political ideology in power as Islamic nationalism, I expose ways in which this ideology is articulated in the education reform discourse of 'new Turkey'…

Education commonly is positioned as central to developing citizens who can address so-called global challenges. Responses are identifiable in global citizenship education, which may recruit mathematics into interdisciplinary relationships, and within mathematics education itself. However, if notions of the global and local, the citizen,…

The core objective of this article is to evaluate the progress made in linguistic development over the past three decades, with a specific focus on the role of language and its philosophical underpinnings in reshaping and decolonising South African higher education landscape. Linguistic imperialism as a conceptual framework alongside the Framework…

In view of the importance and urgency of transformation within post-colonial educational settings, this article considers key concepts in relation to re-curriculation efforts. It specifically discusses how the concepts of development and decolonization are typically understood and how they can be reimagined through the realism provided by the…

In this essay, I first discuss where the article "Doing Things the 'Right' Way" that was published in this journal in 2005 fits into my corpus of work. In many ways, it represents a coming together of the various influences that have continued to form me over the nearly five decades I have been engaged in critically examining the…

This edited volume explores and deconstructs the possibilities of higher education beyond its initial purpose. The book contextualizes and argues for a more robust interrogation of persistent patterns of campus inequality driven by rapid demographic change, reduced public spending in higher education, and an increasingly polarized political…

This article discusses the recent expansion and democratization of Brazil's higher education system from the beginning of the twenty-first century to the present, concluding with its contemporary clash with the far-right government, which has placed universities and scientific knowledge under attack -- an experience had around the globe. In the…

Our scope is to show how democracy has been trivialized as a concept and, more worryingly, as a mystified practice of consented servitude, which supposedly would bring to its very end. In fact, for the emblematic occidental societies, democracy has, at the best, been reduced to a consumerist way of life, under the capitalist liberal order, and the…

This paper explores academics' interaction in an online forum, situated on the intranet of a South African university, where perceptions of racism within a larger discourse about transformation are shared and debated. The communicative model of democratic discourse directs the interpretation of an emancipatory discursive interaction, following a…