In the light of recent attempts to construct 'literature pedagogy' for cosmopolitan, 'globalizing', political ends, this article provides here some stark reminders about the educational, not to say political, risks of confining the aims and purposes of literature to the aims and purposes of politics, or using a literary-political aesthetic as…

This article extends recent attempts to think (post)qualitative research together with decolonial, postcolonial and other critiques -- as a frictional, fraught encounter. I review how the concept of voice has been used in past and present research with children and young people: from research speaking "about" children and young people,…

This article revisits the place of theory in social justice praxis. Using Du Bois' "Immortal Child," the author argues efforts for social justice in education are greatly aided by dedicating intellectual energies to the theorization of alternative futures. In particular, political theory has a significant place in critical educational…

The aim of this article is to explicate and critically assess the roles and impact of the two major societal forces currently driving the global education expansion project, namely the neoliberal economic revolution and the creed of human rights. The article provides a framework for the collection of articles following in this special issue in…

Out of all the states that have struggled to provide a quality public education over the past decade, perhaps none have seen as precipitous a decline as North Carolina. Once seen as a regional model of progressive education policy, a succession of unfortunate occurrences has severely damaged the public education system. Activists now fight against…

This article addresses the conceptual challenges of articulating the ethical-political limits of 'higher education as we know it', and the practical challenges of exploring alternative formations of higher education that are unimaginable from within the dominant imaginary of the higher education field. This article responds to the contemporary…

Feminist theorists critiqued classical liberalism for the gender binaries embedded in social, political and economic theory and everyday social relations. Neoliberalism economises the social and political based on autonomous individualism, equating equity with choice, naturalising the market as the mechanism to allocate social goods and education…

On a warm December evening in Anaheim, California, in 2015, an out-of-town lawyer stood for public comment at a local school-board meeting and urged members to deny a proposed charter school. Magnolia Public Schools, which operates 10 charters in California, was hoping to open a new science academy. The attorney, John Martin of Amsterdam &…

Background/Context: This article offers an analysis of the contemporary policy context surrounding teacher education in the United States. It lays out recent policy shifts that have come to frame the field, particularly university-based teacher preparation as "broken," and to fuel forward certain strands of disruptive innovation.…

In this article, we problematise the practice of appointing principals on the basis of comradeship instead of excellence, qualifications and competency. The appointment of principals in South Africa has, over the years, become politicised and unionised to the extent that it is contextualised within comradeship narratives, thereby negating the…

Memory for public events was compared across Chinese and U.S. participants to explore competing explanations for cultural differences in flashbulb memories. Participant recall of the canonical features of events was more detailed and more likely to include a specific time in the United States than in the Chinese reports. Vividness was positively…

This article explores how consumerism is impacting education, with a special focus on the 'student as consumer' model. I begin by exploring the distinctive features of consumerism and school commercialism. The tension between consumer and citizen leads into a discussion of the distinction between education as/for a public good versus as/for…

This study examines policy discourse surrounding a policy process to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, the most significant federal policy concerning higher education, a decade following the previous reauthorization. Guided by the theory of social construction and policy design, we draw on data from 14 hours of deliberation in a congressional…

The international education community has long recognized the unique and important contribution that American-style institutions, such as the American University in Beirut, play in the quality of education offered around the world (Bertelsen, 2012). Not as well recognized, however, are institutions across the globe that adopt American or Western…

This study aims to examine communist education in occupied Greece (1944-1945) in combination with anti-communist education in Greece in the Cold War era (1950-1967). It discusses, on the one hand, the intentions of the Popular Liberation Front/the Greek Communist Party in establishing Slavic-Macedonian schools and their features and, on the other,…