In this essay, music education is conceptualized as a game or performance within The Game, the "pervasive atmosphere" (Fisher 2009) of neoliberal capitalism, which inevitably shapes scholarship, practice, and policy. Even people who strive to see music education for what it really might be (e.g., those researching and promoting social…

Deploying a Lacanian conceptual framework, this article interrogates the psychoanalytic underpinnings of Paulo Freire's dialogical method of critical pedagogy. The paper advances the claim that the transformative efficacy of Freirean dialogue is rooted in its unique ability to confront and engage the repressed element of trauma, or what Lacan…

This article studies the history of playgrounds in Finland and focuses on the emergence and implementation of the objectives of the international playground movement in the early twentieth century. Specifically, it examines the relations between supervised playgrounds, women's emancipation, child welfare policies, and political discussion on…

This paper considers what it could mean to say that epistemologies and methodologies are racially just or unjust. It has been argued that this has nothing to do with whether an individual researcher is racist: he or she could be anti-racist but still use an epistemology that is racially biased. To explore this issue, some pioneering research by…

In this paper I explore social justice and equity research in music education through the lens of capitalist realism and accompanying concepts. I look at Fisher's ideas on hauntology and its connection to classical liberalism and neoliberalism. Fisher noted how some electronic music and pop music of the early 21st century is structured by…

In light of the debates on the "feminisation of religion" that have animated historiography, during the Restoration one can distinguish two educational strategies towards the education of women. On the one hand, we can make out a symbolic system in which women, whether religious or married, fulfilled values that the male part of society…

Materialist approaches to aesthetics historicize our sensuous capacities, orientations, and objects by attending to their ongoing production. This article begins by articulating capital not as an "economic" system but as a broader perceptual ecology that produces particular correspondences between subjects and the world. In response to…

In this paper, we connect with Martin Thrupp's calls for class-based analysis in education policy by problematising the absence of social class in the refreshed New Zealand curriculum, "Te Mataiaho" (2023). To contextualise this absence, we locate this curriculum policy in a historical perspective and interpret its 'identity turn' as an…

In this article, we show how Ofsted operates as institutional language police, and how the inspectorate's attitudes about language maintain race-class inequalities under a guise of social justice, equality and evidence-based practice. Our research has repeatedly demonstrated how Ofsted reproduces long-standing, deficit-based and colonial logics…

Northern Ireland has a deeply divided education system with demarcation most notable along ethno/religious and social class lines. The former is largely attributable to the historical organisation of the schools estate based on religion, and the latter is associated with a system of academic selection that filters children into grammar and…

Drawing on interviews with 20 young Myanmar citizens from Yangon and Mawlamyine, this paper contrasts the educational experiences and perceptions of Burman and ethnic minority youth to illustrate Myanmar's citizenship crisis, which fuels the grievances of ethnic minorities through their restricted citizenship vis-à-vis the Burman majority's…

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…

Democratization of the South African education system was significantly advanced by the South African Schools Act (SASA) promulgated in 1996. SASA gave parents the power to direct the course and substance of their children's education in important ways. The circumstances of its origination, however, left in place crucial features of the country's…

In this chapter, intersectionality is used as an analytic tool to examine the connections between social class and leadership learning. We emphasize leadership identity, capacity, and efficacy and identify strategies that educators may use to center social class by incorporating intersectionality within culturally relevant leadership learning.

Recent research has contributed to developmental scientists' understanding of how children and adolescents reason about social class in relation to themselves, others, and their economic, social, and cultural world. To advance developmental intergroup perspectives on social class, in this article, we: (1) "define" social class; (2)…