In this paper, I ask: How can thinking with posthuman theories of affect in gender and education enable us to trouble current book banning efforts that work to reassert the gender order, namely by aligning heterosexuality with the notion of a 'core national culture'? And how do post[left right arrow]feminisms, as more-than-human political…

What form might truth take in a theoretical frame which precludes notions of origin and "telos?" Catherine Malabou's theory of 'plasticity' is such a frame, as it takes the accumulation of life and not the search for eternal truths to be a central premise of philosophy. I conduct a close reading of central texts of Malabou's to…

This article discusses how the critique of the monopoly of Western liberal thought through the decolonisation movement that was intended to increase the number of voices heard has been co-opted by nationalist politics in India and Russia. The debates in higher education in these countries reflect current key questions on the nature of the Indian…

A major reform of teacher training has been underway for the past three decades in French-speaking Belgium, in response to the low quality of teacher training and the consequences for school teaching and learning deemed to be in deep crises. Using a number of eclectic methods (metaphors, typologies, timelines, network maps), we map controversies…

This article puts in conversation Georges Bataille's contributions to critical theory of fascism with contemporary affect theory, and outlines some implications for antifascist education. The purpose is to critically engage with the role of affectivity in fascism and antifascist education and unpack the risks entailed in antifascist education as a…

Political knowledge and democratic attitudes are recognized in contemporary studies as important dimensions of democratic political culture. Furthermore, knowledge and attitudes can be seen as integral parts of political competence. Unlike other dimensions of political culture such as, for example, political participation, political interest,…

Since first airing on HBO in 2011, "Game of Thrones" (GOT) has proven to be a fruitful text for teaching and studying politics. In 2022 the prequal to GOT-House of The Dragon (HOTD) debuted on HBO. This paper conducts discourse analysis on the entire first season with two goals in mind. First, we demonstrate how pop culture is impacted…

In this ethnographic study, I present a single school's practice of registering and analysing absence from school. I show that teachers use various "dirty," interpretational contexts for understanding absence and make it classifiable in "clean" attendance categories -- a move that decontextualises the meaning of absence. When…

The intention of this article is to contribute to the debate about whether the voting age should be lowered to the age of 16, by examining quantitative and qualitative data collected in a local participation project with young people in Portugal: questionnaires (N = 961), interviews (N = 3), and focus group discussions (N = 15). Considering the…

In this literature synthesis, the three authors bring their embodied voices to collectively retrace the political-cultural-racialized-gendered topographies where key conceptualizations of language, mathematics, and the learner have emerged. Recognizing that they themselves have never been outside these landscapes as mere objective observers, the…

Discourse around school choice often is divisive. Less understood is the effect polarization has within advocate groups. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) approach offers a systematic approach to understanding how political actors use narratives to affect policy debates. Because NPF assumes bounded relativity, the approach requires a theory of…

In this article Julian Culp offers a new conceptualization of democratic citizenship education in light of the transformations of contemporary Western societies to which the use of digital technologies has contributed. His conceptualization adopts a deliberative understanding of democracy that provides a systemic perspective on society-wide…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore the link between upper secondary school students' experiences of school democracy and their future role as democratic citizens, focusing on a comparison between men and women. Design/methodology/approach: The data derives from a questionnaire conducted to all last year upper secondary school students…

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…

For decades, policymakers in the U.S. have leveraged accountability policy as a governing tool to lift school performance and close the achievement gap. Accountability become so widespread that it arguably became a "policy paradigm" with the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2002. Yet after just 13 years of…