The number of individuals undertaking IELTS has continued to grow in recent years, standing at approximately 3 million candidates per year in 2016. As a result, this high-stakes, high-pressure test has become firmly entrenched as a global gatekeeping institution, regulating the international flows of people for migration and academic study. This…

Queer youth of color are critical and conscious observers of society. Despite limited representation in research and within mainstream gay media, there exists a legacy of queer youth of color contributing acts of resistance in the form of grassroots organizing, storytelling, music, performance, and revision of kinship networks. This article…

For decades, social mobility has been the focus of governments across the political spectrum. But despite wide-ranging support for action, social mobility in Britain remains low, with poor performance across several social mobility measures, nationally and internationally. And although politicians have long referenced the ideas and issues…

Karl Emil Maximilian Weber (1864-1920), more widely known as Max Weber, is credited with numerous contributions to modern sociology and is considered one of the pillars of the discipline along with Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim. Marx (1818-1883) was an established predecessor from Germany whose study of the nineteenth-century European society was…

Bruno Latour famously asked, "Why has critique run out of steam?". In this paper we draw on his ideas to present some resources for "gathering"--for doing education policy research with others--which we term "critical-dissensual collaboration". We believe that our education policy research "critique from…

This article takes up the educational challenge of the framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Specifically, the author explores the question of: how can we talk about a universal conception of human rights in a way that both respects the need for cultural pluralism and the necessity to protect those rights and freedoms that all…

University rankers are the subject of much criticism, and yet they remain influential in the field of higher education. Drawing from a two-year field study of university ranking organizations, interviews with key correspondents in the sector, and an analysis of related documents, I introduce the concept of "weak expertise." This kind of…

Studies of europeanisation have made a significant contribution to knowledge about education and how it has respatialised since the turn of the 21st century. This line of inquiry initially historicised the 1990s as a means of researching the emerging European space of education, but then morphed into studies of governing through the field of…

This article argues that contemporary conceptual frameworks for understanding religion may not be adequate for the arena of religion and school choice. Successive published research suggests that people are choosing religious schools for reasons other than religion. But what if the reasons why people might be religious and their motivation for…

Why do adults seem to struggle more than children in learning a second language, despite being better at a range of other cognitive skills? The source of L1-L2 differences in language learning is one of the most debated topics in the study of language. One hypothesis is that L1-L2 differences are primarily experience-based, with language learning…

Whilst the impact of gender inequalities has been studied in relation to music education, especially in the UK, relatively little has been written about their impact on higher music education (HME). This article compares data on HME programs and courses, in the UK and Sweden, from 2010 to 2014. It looks at similarities and differences in the…

In this paper, I argue that the notion of 'reasonableness' that is, for many, at the heart of the Philosophy for Children (P4C) approach particularly and education for democratic citizenship more broadly, is constituted within the epistemology of 'white ignorance' and operates in such a way that it is unlikely to transgress the boundaries of white…

The purpose of this article is to advance a proposal for the analysis of how inclusive education policies in Ontario schools are adopted. In particular, I use the notion of "Policy Enactment" to re-conceptualize the processes of putting inclusive education policies into practice. The argument is that the traditional…

Edgar manages to invert the subordinate function of generally accepted objective indicators of membership of a particular national group--language, religion, common history, and territory--into the essential mode of imperative distinction shaping the unique national identity. In other words, it is the fresco and the value assigned to it that…

This is an interview with Frans de Waal who gave the Kohlberg Memorial Lecture at the AME Conference in St. Louis in November 2017. Frans de Waal's research with non-human primates documents that primates share our tendencies towards fairness, reciprocity, loyalty, self-sacrifice, caring for others, strategies for conflict avoidance and for…