In a global context where children are increasingly exposed to hostile humour in cartoons like Adventure Time and Spongebob Squarepants, it is not surprising that we see this play out in school settings. More concerning, however, is how teachers can misuse their position of power to wield such forms of humour against students who dare to question…

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 paper takes up Judith Butler's calls to suspend the desire to completely know the other, and discusses these in relation to the pedagogic relationship in the classroom. It draws upon existing accounts of performative reinscription as a politics to disrupt exclusionary schooling practices and discusses these alongside Butler's theories of…

Drawing on post-structural and post-colonial conceptions of gender, this paper explores multiple student masculinities and femininities in the classrooms of four junior secondary schools in Botswana. These gendered identities, it is argued, are negotiated within broader institutional constraints that have been socio-historically produced. Such…

The concept of student voice is problematic. This paper considers two different traditions which theorise the notion of voice. The first is located within critical sociological studies of youth identity, drawing upon the notion of the often silenced voices of the marginalised, "Othered" or subordinated as a means of exposing oppressive…

Despite calls for a more nuanced approach to issues of gender and equity that recognizes how broader relations of gender and power continue to produce injustices for many females, essentialized accounts expressing concern about boys' poor educational performance remain the most common refrain in dominant equity discourses across Western contexts.…

This article traces the historicization of the "pedagogue" as a social function in Graeco-Roman antiquity. The article examines the position of the pedagogue as representative of a space or interval between the varying social authorities of the family and state, as well as the early Christian church, and asks how a pedagogue identified…