This paper is a reflection on "What is policy? Texts, Trajectories and Tool Boxes," which was first published in 1993, in "Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education." It looks back to what the 1993 paper was trying to do and at some of the developments of the ideas first sketched there in my later work, in…

Contemporary discussions of globalisation (in general) and postcolonialism (more specifically) have largely remained wed to critiques of the West, including around its outsized role in the proliferation of neoliberal economic logics. As Chen argues in "Asia as Method," these discussions have precluded other kinds of discussions about…

This article discusses the impact of second-wave feminism on educational research with a focus on developments in the USA. It expands on the themes raised in the other articles in this issue of "Discourse" by considering the political nature of feminist educational research questions beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the contemporary world.…

The women's movement in the 1970s and 1980s was a global phenomenon that achieved significant educational change. More analysis of how it developed and had an impact on education can inform our understanding of the possibilities for change today. This paper explores how the women's movement changed schooling in Vancouver in the 1970s, using a…

This article revisits the development of feminist research and policy in education in Australia in the mid-1970s to mid-1980s from the perspective of the present decade. The purpose is to give one insider's account of the specificities of that initial period, and to use that analysis to draw attention to changes evident in the context and agendas…

How has feminism mattered in the lives of particular academic feminists? Three scholars in education whose careers developed during the era of second-wave feminism describe how their personal and political stances were affected by theories, methodological advances, the milieus of academia as well as legal, and political events in the USA. The…

This paper contrasts two types of "autodidact" located in the UK in different historical periods, which utilised different learning/research technologies to different ends. From the 1920s to the 1960s some working-class activists committed to the Communist Party of Great Britain became "educated" in Marxism (and more) through…

This essay unearths the educational and socio-political implications of Edward W. Said's work for our understanding of what a secular humanism might mean in the highly charged atmosphere of the post-Cold War and September 11 discourses that have pervaded the USA and, to varying degrees, other parts of the world. It asks what it means to move…

Edward Said is deservedly well known for his literary insights on Orientalism. Yet, his work on the nature of the intellectual is equally important and particularly critical for navigating this moment of political, cultural, and economic retrenchment. In this essay I will explore the contours of Said's work on the intellectual. I argue that Said…

This paper seeks to reframe the idea of an educated public as construed by Alasdair MacIntyre in his lecture of 1985. Like MacIntyre, it locates the emergence of an educated public in the Scottish Enlightenment and its universities, but its focus is on aspects which are not brought into focus by MacIntyre's narrative. The paper argues, firstly,…