On October 26, 2011, a post appeared on the Occupy Wall Street Library blog titled "I would prefer not to." The constant refrain of Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" became one of Occupy's defining mottos, appearing on placards, T-shirts, and tote bags. The phrase became so symbolic that it was used on the posters…

At a time when educators are increasingly rising up within and beyond their unions to protect public education, it is vital to understand how activist educators become politicized and how their activist organizations contribute to such political education efforts. In this article, Maton and Stark examine the grassroots organizing work of three…

In this short article, we pose six key questions that we argue as essential to critically problem-pose in achieving teaching for justice-based environmental sustainability (JBES) in higher education (HE). We will be critically posing these questions to all the authors of an upcoming Teaching in Higher Education special issue 'Higher Education…

Culture is increasingly mentioned as an influence on sexuality education amongst scholars, policymakers, and sexuality education practitioners. Yet there are conflicting and sometimes unclear conceptualisations of how exactly culture affects sexuality education. Based on a systematic literature review of articles on culture and sexuality education…

This article suggests that, as a field of study, we have accumulated too many routinised ways to legitimate our academic identity; that it is time to step away from comfortable clichés about our past; and to notice that the future is, at least metaphorically, now and urgent. However, while it is easy to illustrate the banalities we use to define…

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 article examines English language teaching (ELT) policy, textbooks, and pedagogy in the neo-nationalist era that followed 9/11 in Muslim-majority Bangladesh. Informed by the Douglas Fir Group's transdisciplinary framework of second language learning, the examination substantiates the ideologies of "economization,"…

This paper seeks to revisit the concept of "pedagogy of discomfort" through the combined lenses of Lauren Berlant's work on "inconvenience" and recent theorization of "affective infrastructure" to clarify how an infrastructural understanding of "discomfort-as-inconvenience" might provide deeper insights…

This investigation focused on two types of charter schools. The first is classical charter schools. These schools identify and market themselves as such, often including the word "classical" in the school's name. The second type of school offers a "back to basics" curriculum without necessarily identifying the curriculum as…

Access to menstrual products is important to support adolescent health. Advocacy to increase access to menstrual products in schools is growing; however, ideal access requires policies that will require schools to support the menstrual health of menstruating students. We conducted a legislative review on the existence and status of state…

Education is a central aspect of social movements' ability to build individual and collective participation in political struggle. But, how do these processes of learning and consciousness take place? As Choudry (Choudry, A. 2015. Learning Activism: The intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements. University of Toronto Press) argues, it is…

Disciplinary pressures within academia often produce specialised and one-sided accounts of complex social processes. Convincing accounts of popular education regularly acknowledge the importance of social movements but without theorising them adequately -- and vice versa. This one-sidedness is compounded by a widespread tendency to generalise from…

In recent years, as evidenced in the transnational proliferation of codified competence frameworks for teacher education purposes, we have seen the increased politicisation and regulation of the task of teaching and what it means to be a teacher. Making the case for an ethico-political conceptualisation of teacher identity and, using a…

This article uses white emotionality to critically conceptualize recent legislative efforts to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT). This undertaking is theoretically motivated by immunitary whiteness and is methodologically informed by Black whiteness studies, particularly the importance of W. E. B Du Bois' reflections on education.…

In recent years, there has been an emerging theory of "student identity politics," which focuses on student activism based on race, gender, and sexual identity. Thus far, scholars have not yet systematically extended the analysis of student identity politics to those student activism relating to territorial identity. The student-led…