This paper presents the results of a discourse analysis of the "Chronicle of Higher Education" publications about China in 2011 and 2012. Drawing on postcolonial appropriations of governmentality to frame the discussion of globalization as the context of the study, the author analyzes the stylistic, rhetorical, and semantic strategies…

I work selectively with poststructuralist theories in order to give an account of the subject of policy as a constitutive relationship between social policy and the embodied human subject. Drawing on theories of subjectivity, narrative and governmentality, I articulate possibilities for analysing narrated accounts of experience as a mode of…

This paper moves from a reading of processes that are transforming public services in ways that amount to a dismantling of the welfare state in the UK. In order to interrogate these processes, the paper focuses on "youth" and "youth services". Framed by an analysis of the aggressive disinvestment of "austerity", we…

This article offers a detailed analysis of two school board-level policies in British Columbia, Canada that address the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer and transgender, Two Spirit (LGBQ and TT) youth to demonstrate how the language of the policy holds meaning and re/produces particular knowledges. Rather than offer an analysis that…

This paper draws on theoretical insights from Michel de Certeau to formulate a response to questions of whether, and in what ways, poststructural policy analysis can "transcend critique to offer potential grounds for alternative social and political strategies in education". The paper offers a discussion of how Certeau's concern…

The recent critical turn toward post-secularism, particularly on behalf of theorists working from the perspective of Christian societies, has highlighted the difficulty of approaching the history of the Middle East through the binary of religion and secularism. This article argues that such terms are of little explanatory value in and of…

Educational policy-makers around the world are strongly committed to the notion of "scaling up". This can mean anything from encouraging more teachers to take up a pedagogical innovation, all the way through to system-wide efforts to implement "what works" across all schools. In this paper, I use Bourdieu's notions of…

Social emotional learning (SEL) is common in preschools and schools both in Europe and North America today. Programmes for socio-emotional training and the rise of what is labelled therapeutic education have dramatically increased during the first decade of the millennium. In this article, a manual-based programme used for SEL in a Swedish school…

Ability grouping in schools and classrooms constitutes something of a policy hiatus in the Australian context, in contrast to the conspicuous visibility of equity and quality as explicit policy goals. This article examines what I am calling the dialectics -- i.e. moments of negation that allow for creation -- and dilemmas inhering in the complex…

Harvey Graff in his 1979 study of literacy taught in common schools in mid-nineteenth century Canada, demonstrated that beliefs in the acquisition of literacy for upward mobility and economic success were a myth. Moreover, literacy instruction was promoted by educational reformers and manufacturers as a means of controlling the working class…

Internationally, "College for All" policies are creating new forms of vocational higher education (HE), and shifting relationships between HE and further education (FE) institutions. In this paper, we consider the way in which this is being implemented in England, drawing on a detailed qualitative case study of a regional HE-FE…

One of Canada's greatest public intellectuals, George Grant (1918-1988) studied history as an undergraduate, focusing on concepts and themes rather than minutiae. That same intellectual disposition surfaced later at Oxford, where he had gone on a Rhodes scholarship to study law. Returning to Oxford after the war, he left law to study…

Education for sustainable development represents a politically prioritized area of knowledge in contemporary Swedish education and as such it has acquired a prominent position among the governing values of educational policy. Insofar as education for sustainable development is directed at securing the future of human well-being, this article…

Growing consensus in popular and academic commentary suggests the lived reality of Western childhood differs considerably from its dominant cultural construction as an innocent period free from adult responsibilities. Sociologically, this disjuncture is conceptualised as adultification. Adopting a critical theoretical lens, we question if…

This article examines the educational activism of two Arab civil organizations in Israel: the Follow-Up Committee on Arab Education (FUCAE) and the Eqraa Association (Eqraa). On the one hand, it explores the possibilities and limitations of the involvement of the FUCAE in the state's Arab education system, as a secular organization that is…