Despite the popularity of student voice initiatives, there is ample evidence that they fail to challenge power relations at school or help marginalized students make their voices heard. This paper presents a student voice project based on the Photovoice method. The project was implemented with marginalized youth in an urban high school in Israel.…

Thinking at the nexus of epistemic injustice, childhood studies, transgender studies, and gender and racial justice in literacy education, this article illustrates how curricular engagement with questions of age, gender, race, and power can simultaneously complicate and flatten knowledge about power relations. Drawing from a yearlong ethnography…

While 'student voice' is advocated as a means for school reform, studies of its enactment have noted how student voice can become a technology of governance. This article works with the perplexities of a four-year funded period of reform at one secondary school, where a 'student voice' initiative and a Positive Behaviour Interventions and Supports…

In the United States, schools are expected to navigate the political climate of anti-critical race theory and anti-LGBTQ + discrimination, where white identity politics herald white knowledge as the invisible standard against which racial, gender, and sexuality differences are constructed. State policies that facilitate the removal of diverse…

This paper thinks with the concept of intertextuality to consider the multiple intersecting power structures inside and outside of literary education in secondary schools that continue to dominate text selection policies and teaching practices. We draw on our research with in-service teachers to reconsider how intertextual networks circulate on…

This paper is about theorising with seven refugee-background youth, who have successfully completed their secondary studies in Australia. Using conversations-as-method, the focus is on how research partners theorise academic success, and on the reading I developed in response to their reflections. Inspired by the commonalities in Lugones' and…

To understand patterns of co-option and tension between discourses of creativity on the one hand, and discourses of school management and administration on the other, it is important to bring these discourses into contact with each other. This paper considers ideas of risk-taking, autonomy, novelty and flexibility, all of which are frequently…

This paper explores the rise of philanthropy and the influence corporate partnerships have on the practice of public schooling. We do this by focusing on one public school in Australia and its partnership with one global commercial actor. The paper proceeds by outlining new philanthropy in public schooling and in particular, how commercial…

Borders are constructs that shape our understandings of our societies, communities, and the world. Geospatial borders draw distinctions between neighborhoods and schools that are deemed 'worthy' and 'unworthy' of economic, social, and political investment. This paper employs the theoretical framework of 'discriminate biopower' to argue that…

Guided by the notion of 'flexible citizenship', as a strategy to accumulate and exchange different forms of capital across national borders, our ethnographic study followed eleven Chinese international secondary school students' transnational lives. This paper is focused on how instrumental goals of flexible citizenship cover over the emotional…

This article contributes to the discussion of gender inequality in schools with the central theme tracing ways that pedagogical affect im/mobilises agency. I argue that what I call "the schoolgirl affect," as distinctly gendered pedagogical practices in schools, constitute a schoolgirl body that refracts capacity for action in particular…

This article explores the use of critical and post-critical pedagogies in a rural Australian high school for the purposes of unsettling life-limiting gender beliefs and practices. The paper problematises two examples whereby site-specific knowledges, curriculum dictates, media texts and critical pedagogies were enmeshed to create politically…

Drawing on a study of education policy enactments in four English secondary schools, this paper argues that different "types" of policies call-up different forms of enactments, and that teachers and others who work in schools will have different orientations towards some of these possible ways of "doing" school. Through…

Like schools, curricula are socially constructed and constituted within broader social, political, and historical relations of power, powerfully shaping students' beliefs and attitudes about themselves and their relationship toward the world. In light of this, the importance of literature selection cannot be overstated. School-sanctioned texts…

Drawing on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and illustrating with examples from the English system, the paper addresses the hidden racist dimension to contemporary education reforms and argues that this is a predictable and recurrent theme at times of economic crisis. Derrick Bell's concept of "interest-convergence" argues that moments of…