For many educators who lead cross-racial discussions, creating "safe" spaces in which students can express their views is a familiar goal. Yet what constitutes safety is rarely defined or contextualized. In the absence of this contextualization, the goal of safety is most often driven by White participants who complain that they are (or…

In undertaking a critical discourse analysis of the professed aims and objectives of one of the most influential curricula in the teaching of thinking, this article foregrounds issues of power and ideology latent in curricular discourses of rationality. Specifically, it documents the subtle but powerful ways in which political and class…

This article draws on the theoretical concepts of Pierre Bourdieu to provide an explanatory account of how socialisation and the hidden curriculum within coaching practice contribute toward the formation of social identities and powerful schemes of internalised dispositions. Drawing on a 10 month ethnography within professional football, the…

The experiences of female sports fans have been largely marginalised in academic research to date and little research has examined the formative sporting experiences of female spectators. This article draws on 51 semi-structured interviews with three generations of female fans of one (men's) professional football club (Leicester City), to…

Neoliberal ideologies and policies have transformed how we think about the economy, education, and the environment. Economics is presented as objective and quantifiable, best left to distant experts who develop algorithms regarding different monetary relations in our stead. This same kind of thinking--technical, numerical, decontextualized, and…

This paper challenges the celebratory uptake of human rights education (HRE) in postcolonial contexts by making visible the ideological and political entanglements of the discourse with neoliberal assumptions of citizenship. I draw evidence from, and critically reflect on, a specific HRE programme--a series of summer camps for girls entitled,…

Although the concept of multi-agency working has been pursued and adopted as the most appropriate way to improve childcare provision and health workforces in recent years, both in the UK and more globally, research suggests that participation in such work can be problematic. This article examines current developments in inter-professional…

Special Education 2000 (SE2000), New Zealand's first official special education policy, declared the aim of achieving a "world class inclusive education system". It would seem that, by implication at least, the intention of the policy was to achieve full inclusion of all disabled children in mainstream educational settings and thus,…

Sex education is a politically contentious issue in many countries, and there are numerous, competing ideologies relating to the most appropriate methods to teach young people about sexual and reproductive health. This paper examines policy and practice in Uganda in light of two contrasting ideologies, namely morally conservative and comprehensive…

This article uses curriculum-making frameworks to analyse and reconstruct the Chinese curriculum-making model and unpack the dynamics, complexity and constraints of China's curriculum reform since the early 1990s. It argues that curriculum reform is China's main human capital development strategy for coping with the challenges of the…

My work in the area of spirituality and religion builds on our profession's proud history of expanding diversity to include previously marginalized groups. Each iteration of diversity, however, has been met with critiques implicitly designed to affirm the status quo. In this article, I respond to criticisms that have been leveled against my…

The study reported in this article concerns the beginnings of higher education for women in the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) enclave in Israel. Haredi Jews are a self-secluded fundamentalist group committed to particularly strict interpretation of Jewish religious law. In recent years, they have been compelled by poverty and other factors to allow…

Much of the rhetoric opposing managerialism in higher education can be ascribed to philosophical and political objections to the neo-liberal ideology which is alleged to underlie the phenomenon. This paper approaches managerialism from a different direction, addressing it within a neo-liberal framework. The paper argues that there is no intrinsic…

When actualised in a concrete school, the official discourse of inclusion and equity often encounters a series of obstacles that research strives to identify and address under the imperative to eliminate them. Through the exploration of classroom episodes, teacher interviews and field notes from a German secondary school, we take failure not as a…

Maligned and revered, exemplified or reviled, almost every discussion about charter schools involves a tangle of differing histories, theories, values, and facts. Worse, many times the parties to the discussion aren't even aware they're operating on different planes of discourse. A sort of mental gridlock often results. But by separating…