Higher Education policy researchers have highlighted the link between merit and privileged social background with respect to who is most likely to win merit-based scholarships in Universities. Yet little is known about how students from various social backgrounds may inhabit such a scholarship. In this paper, we draw on theorisations of the…

This article explores issues associated with schooling and political justice. Such issues are understood in light of the contention surrounding how Western schooling contexts might best represent marginalised groups--in ways that accord them a political voice. The significance of group identity politics is explored drawing on international debates…

This paper presents data from a study of secondary school for girls, the majority of whom identify as Indigenous Australian. "Gamarada" High School is located in a suburban area of Queensland (Australia) and was established to provide quality education for disadvantaged girls. The paper draws on student and teacher interview data from a…

This article focuses on the concerns expressed by three female Muslim educators who are support staff at an English comprehensive school. Consistent with the debates associated with multiculturalism, group rights and feminism, the article illuminates spaces of gender constraint and possibility within the discourses shaping these women's lives and…

This paper tracks the development of gender equity and schooling policy in Australia from the "National Policy on the Education of Girls in 1987", to current policy concerns with boys' educational underperformance. The paper's key focus is on the ways in which feminist informed equity policy has been undermined by broader imperatives of…

This paper provides a media analysis of three interrelated sets of newspaper articles dealing with youth, schooling and violence. Understanding the media as a dominant and powerful cultural text that creates the realities it describes, the paper takes a critical view of the 'standpoint' of recent media representations of the Cronulla (Sydney,…