This article explores how the concept of affective infrastructure might offer a productive vantage point from which to theorize the ways that affects condition education policy and politics in education. In particular, the article theorizes 'affective infrastructure' to discuss the potentialities that emerge in struggles to formulate and enact new…

The term "governance" is one of the most widely applied concepts in education policy and research. Yet its meaning has changed over space and time both analytically and normatively. This history is a complicated one marked by both shifts and continuations in the politics of language and the development of unique intellectual histories…

Right-wing populists have recurrently created moral panics internationally about the supposed need to 'protect free speech' in higher education (HE), and 'protect children' from progressive speech in schools. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of how such dynamics function with respect to race and faith equality in a national school…

The rise in support for Scottish independence between the 1970s and the 2010s has shaped Scottish politics and policy profoundly. The rise provokes a paradox: in this same period, the average educational level of people living in Scotland has also risen strongly, and yet, at each particular moment in time, higher levels of education have been…

This paper offers a brief yet evocative glimpse into marginalised pre-service teachers' (PST) experiences of teacher testing in Australia's High-stakes Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education Students (LANTITE). Utilising Critical Disability Theory (CDT)in particular, Goodley's (2016) concept of neoliberal-ableism, we problematise…

Learning Poverty (LP), the inability to read at age of 10 years has been the cynosure of concern and trigger for policy reform. Specifically, in India, the National Education Policy (NEP-2020) advocates several recommendations for epistemic justice and to thwart "learning poorness." This paper exposes that the proposals advocated by the…

The primary justification for school voucher programs in the United States has revolved around questions of efficacy, especially relative to student achievement outcomes. More recently, however, a series of studies revealed sizable negative impacts on students enrolled in voucher programs. Collectively, these studies presented an evidentiary…

International organisations' importance in education policy has been growing in recent years. They have been able to promote their role by providing data and interpreting it through international assessments and guidance, and by highlighting some countries or regions as benchmarks for global improvement, performance, and efficiency. International…

Data infrastructures exist in a variety of formats. This article draws on the insights of senior personnel involved in developing a new data dashboard in one state jurisdiction in Australia. While literature on dashboards often focuses on the teachers and learners influenced by them, there is less attention to those involved in their development…

Successive British Governments have promulgated policies and initiatives that have not only resulted in the marketisation of education but have, arguably, constructed a democratic deficit in relation to who represents the local in a neoliberal educational context. The article utilises a conceptual framework which encompasses notions of civility…

This article identifies new arrangements between the state and non-state actors in the public sector, one that extends current understandings of education privatisation, the transformation of public services 'by substitution' and, specifically theories of the 'shadow state'. Drawing on data from the Political Economy of Teacher Education (PETE)…

This study explores spillover effects between national security and education issues. I examine whether the rise of new foreign threats is correlated with education issues rising onto the congressional agenda and with the passage of education laws. To answer this question several data sources on military conflicts and congressional activity from…

The OECD's PISA is seen as a 'global yardstick' against which countries measure the quality of their education systems. In 2018 PISA included an assessment of global competence. This paper starts with the premise that in using a single global instrument to 'measure' this phenomenon, PISA claims standardisation over contextually rich data that can…

This article explores how teachers were discursively positioned in England following the formation of the Coalition government in 2010, using a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of 363 speeches produced by government ministers. Findings show that young teachers were privileged in post-2010 government discourse, constructed as valued and…

This paper examines the tensions between education policy's attachment to notions such as excellence and inclusion and its investments in managerial tropes of competition, continuous quality improvement, standards and accountability that are at odds with and which undermine its attachments. In order to explore these tensions, I draw on the…