Offered through a split-text, this article mounts/destabilises the argument that policy research that cites authors usually associated with post-structural thought and which is published in a mainstream education policy journal is overwhelmingly realist in its ontologising practices. It reminds the reader why that is problematic and calls for a…

This article presents the main terms of the racial contract, as they appear in the subcontracts of Mills' theory, such as the spatial, epistemological, cognitive subcontracts. It is important to keep in mind that these subcontracts are by no means separate and represent analytical moments of the main contract. Furthermore, other than its…

This article explores the relationship between commensuration and affect in various contexts of education policy. Commensuration is the process through which disparate qualities are transformed into a common metric and is central to the production of performance data. The rise of governance through numbers in education has resulted in a…

Currently, when there is a lot of political talk about the need for "evidence-based policy", and when public policy seeks to calibrate research quality and impact, there is a pressing need to reconsider the relationships between education/al research and education policy. This article seeks to do this, beginning with considerations of the…

With the launch of the "My School" website in 2010, Australia became a relative latecomer to the publication of national school performance comparisons. This paper primarily seeks to explore the school choice experience as framed by "My School" website, for participating middle-class families. We will draw on Bourdieusian theory of cultural…

In this paper I draw on ethnographic observation data taken from a school-based study of two groups of 12-13-year-old pupils identified as high achieving and popular to explore how relations between teachers and pupils are mediated and constituted through the spectre of neoliberal values and sensibilities--zero-sum thinking, individualism and…

This paper explores the culture of education policy making in Shanghai using the conceptual tool of a "global assemblage". A global assemblage is essentially a collection of ideas and practices that arise from the interplay between a global form and situated sociocultural elements. Focusing on the global form of curriculum reform, this paper…

In this paper, I trace three traditions and bodies of work: The Chicago School of Sociology, the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies and the New Sociology of Education. Each of these traditions evolved in distinct though overlapping ways. Taken together, they offer a productive set of resources for thinking through the complexities of popular…

School improvement depends upon mediating the cultural conditions of learning as young people journey between their parochial worlds and the public world of cosmopolitan society. Governing bodies have a crucial role in including or diminishing the representation of different cultural traditions and in enabling or frustrating the expression of…

It is the contention of this paper that schools are currently sandwiched between demands of the economy on one side and increasingly fundamentalist communities on the other; that schools need some degree of autonomy from each; that the greatest challenge of the century is how we can live together despite our differences; and that the only way of…

This paper begins from a position of critique of the dominant neo-liberal, human capital framing of education policy today. However, unlike most critiques of this kind, the paper argues that schooling's role in the preparation of workers and consumers is nonetheless important. Education does, of necessity, have economic purposes. To this end, the…

In this moment of tremendous change, investing in old ways of doing education is not the best way forward. In offering a Charter for Change we recognise that knowledge and learning will be pivotal to the social and personal transformations necessary to address the idiosyncratic challenges of our times. The transformed economic system emerging from…

Public schools around the world have been hijacked and deformed beyond recognition by the forces of the economy over the past three decades. This paper provides an analysis and a way out of this miasma around the notion of the socially just school. While not another prescription, this orientation is argued to be the most hopeful possibility for…

This paper seeks to challenge the view that there are no alternatives today to global neo-liberalism and its manifestation within schooling systems and educational practices, particularly as high stakes testing and reductive pedagogies and curricula. The paper challenges the fast and shallow learning endemic to these practices, arguing instead for…

The collective action predicaments of the time require citizens to participate in remaking the governance of civil society so that they can become engaged and cooperate together. Can citizens become makers of civil society? This article draws upon Hannah Arendt's "On Revolution" to provide a theory of remaking in which citizens come together to…