This article seeks to explore how, why and under which conditions a move away from critique as a negative practice towards an -- educationally more valuable -- affirmative notion of critique is important in formulating pedagogies that might respond more productively to the challenges of the post-truth era. What is at stake here in reframing…

This article examines a number of teaching resources produced by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, the leading centre for character education in the UK, in the light of the claim advanced by Kristján Kristjánsson, the centre's deputy director, that various criticisms of character education are best regarded as 'myths'. The analysis…

This article argues that there is an urgent need to engage with a deeper analysis of the contemporary culture of "political depression" and its affective implications in human rights education (HRE). In particular, the article focuses on the following questions: How might a theorization of political depression be relevant to efforts that…

This article explores the effects of neoliberalism and performative educational cultures on secondary school drama classrooms. We consider the ways Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis and Butler's concept of gender performance enable us to chart the embodied, relational, spatial and affective energies that inhabit the often neoliberal and…

Public schools around the world have been hijacked and deformed beyond recognition by the forces of the economy over the past three decades. This paper provides an analysis and a way out of this miasma around the notion of the socially just school. While not another prescription, this orientation is argued to be the most hopeful possibility for…

This article is located in the debates concerning the continued problems underlying the cultural politics of English-speaking Western countries' Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) programmes and "Western" pedagogies. It examines two Saudi TESOL teachers' pedagogical enactments in their home teaching contexts after…

This article addresses the notion of "being critical" in the application of the theoretical approach of Pierre Bourdieu to educational policy research. It stems from a concern to avoid a kind of "critical ghetto", where educational research is reinterpreted in Bourdieusian terms, or metaphorised in his conceptual language,…