The last decade has revealed a global (re)configuring of the relationships between the state, society and educational settings in the direction of systems of performance management. In this article, the authors conduct a critical feminist inquiry into this changing relationship in relation to the professionalisation of early childhood education…

A Physical Education Development Group (PEDG) was responsible for constructing a new school subject curriculum, Leaving Certificate Physical Education (LCPE), in Ireland. This paper provides an insight into this development group and explores the process of curriculum development, and the influence of roles and power-ratios within the group, in…

A major aim of this paper is to draw attention to the insidious manner in which the deficit discourse and practices associated with neoliberal reform are de- or re-professionalising educationists through an acculturation process. In the context of Ireland, as elsewhere, the author identifies how the three "technologies" of Market,…

In Ireland primary RE is a fractured, contested, complex and changing territory devoid of a common language and characterised by a proliferation of syllabi and curricula generated for increasingly diverse school types. For centuries the dynamic decolonising process has led to a questioning of former orthodoxies and an attempted de-linking of the…

This paper is set within the context of university change in the Republic of Ireland. Irish third-level institutions are increasingly situated, whilst situating themselves, in the global advance of the so-called "entrepreneurial" university model. This model promotes knowledge as utilitarian and performative that, in turn, informs new…

This article explores how power relations are constructed in the governance of higher education institutions. It examines and deconstructs, from a Foucauldian perspective, power relations and mechanisms in the relationship between the state and higher education institutions, and between academic and management staff. This research article…

Explores the nature and possible consequences of benign and detrimental aspects of defamiliarization occurring in Northern Ireland's schools. Recent legislation, although apparently sharing power, centralizes power by providing for curricular form and content, promoting a certain management ethic, and relocating some key control mechanisms in the…