With the rise of authoritarian politics across the globe, echoes of a fascist past are with us once again signaling a looming and dangerous threat to education and democracy. This essay argues that is it crucial to engage fascism both as a language of white supremacy and a politics of disconnection. If fascism is to be addressed both politically…

Decades of neoliberal capitalism have had a corrosive effect on public education, with implications for both the fiscal realities of education systems and the ideological values guiding curriculum and pedagogy. While the culture of neoliberalism has often been studied, it is equally important to expand analyses of the shifting material conditions…

Law is an important part of Althusser's thought. He profoundly criticized the mechanism of capitalist law from the perspective of 'reproduction.' First, the law cannot be separated from the relations of production. In order to maintain capitalist relations of production, the law covers up the exploitation in the process of capitalist production.…

We explore social justice advocacy and education from the vantage point of elite theory as articulated in the works of Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto. Elite theory is applied here to re-appraise the explicit and implicit educational means and ends inspired by contemporary social justice along three inter-related dimensions: the place of…

This paper critically analyzes gap discourses in student learning, starting from the achievement gap, education debt, and opportunity gaps, applying the lens of coloniality, racial-capitalism, and modernity (CRCM). Gap discourses are the prevalent rationale behind educational policies and school reforms globally. Specifically in the United States,…

This paper contributes to research on lifelong learning (LL) by examining discourses of multilateral organisations through the lens of 'progressive neoliberalism', in which contradictory ideologies of social justice movements and capitalism are hybridised (Fraser 2017). LL has been interpreted as a means of upskilling to remain competitive in the…

College-educated white women across social classes support and uphold racism. Using narrative methods in a secondary analysis, we, as two white women, explored how white non-trans women make meaning of social class using the revised model of multiple dimensions of identity (RMMDI; Abes et al., 2007) as positioned within the context of white…

Critical discourses in intercultural communication (IC) scholarship continue to foreground the postcolonial malaise of Southern spaces. Intercultural communication education (ICE) may encounter some pedagogical challenges in its endeavour to reflect the complexity and depth of the discipline and its recent critical turn. This paper seeks to…

This article focuses on a particular group in capitalist society that is disabled, demeaned and denied by capitalism itself, through processes of economic exploitation, systematic and systemic class exclusion, and discrimination/ prejudice- that is- the working class. In doing so I recognise that the working class (defined as all those who sell…

In this article I will first address what decolonisation is with specific reference to the colonisation and enslavement (Nelson, 2006) of Indigenous peoples, specifically my own people, the Indigenous Amami of the former Ryukyu Kingdom. According to Laenui (2006), there were five steps of colonisation, many of which I suggest are not yet complete.…

There was not one, singular childhood in socialist Czechoslovakia, but many and diverse, plural, childhoods. Spanning over 40 years (1948-1989), the Czechoslovak communist governance produced diverse conceptualisations of childhoods that remain often invisible, unexplored, and the current analyses are at best sketchy and refer mostly to…

This paper explores power bases and power tensions among education bureaux, inspection offices, and schools in China. The six bases of social power were applied as the analytical framework to scrutinize 13 policy documents and eight interviews with inspectors. The study uncovered three types of power tensions: education bureau's informational…

The function of the university in serving the state is the reproduction and legitimization of state functions and behaviours. Theorized in this manner, the university is observed as an internal auxiliary agent of the state that is made subordinate to dominant class interests and not as an independent agent able to critically and selectively…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to engage some of the central themes of Gayatri Spivak's seminal essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak? (CSS)" In particular, her criticisms of post-structuralism's treatment of the "subject" as well as its privileging of "discourse" and micrological analyses of power vis-à-vis her…

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…