The aim of this paper is to place Derrida's and Foucault's ideas on friendship in conversation and then discuss how those ideas provide a pedagogical space in which critical educators in conflict-troubled societies can promote new modes of being and living with others. In particular, the notion of critical pedagogies of friendship is…

Until recently the dominant critique of "student participation" projects was one based on the theoretical assumptions of critical theory in the form of critical pedagogy. Over the last decade, we have witnessed the emergence of a critical education discourse that theorises and critically analyses such projects using Foucault's…

The "Australian Curriculum: History" has emerged out of a neoliberal federal education policy landscape. This is a policy landscape where pragmatic and performative, rather than pedagogic concerns are clearly foregrounded, and this has implications for curriculum development and implementation. A useful way to conceptualise the features,…

This paper explores the storylines of four student ballet dancers who attend a specialist performing arts secondary school and who, in differing ways, envisage futures which "look straight at ballet". When decisions about schooling intermingle with long-held imaginings of futures in ballet, thought is provoked about ways the young…

Based on the authors' studies of material-discursively approached lives of children, this paper addresses the educational relevance of playing, through re-entangling and complicating divided, purpose-directed and individualistic conceptualisations of play. The unhelpful binary of conceiving playing as an end ("free play") as…

Across national contexts, in the attempt to develop and buttress "knowledge economies", increasing pressure is placed on the need for flexible lifelong learners capable of constant knowledge and skills renewal. In this paper, I explore the impact of this broader sociopolitical context on the policy approach to poverty and, in particular,…

Humanism has always been constructed out of an historical context. Despite the differences in the notions of humanism mediated by historical particularity, there has nevertheless been continuity in the tradition. This article argues that an orientation towards the "good life" animates the various humanisms in modern Western history, and…

This paper explores how performance culture could affect students' learning about, and disposition towards, acting as organisational change agents in schools. This is based on findings from an initiative aimed to enable students to experience acting as change agents on an aspect of the school's culture that concerned them. The initiative…

This paper asks, what more can we think in relation to debates around young people's use of mobile phones at school? Rather than attempting to answer the question of whether mobile phones are "good" or "bad" for young people, this paper recasts the debate's ontological underpinnings. To do this feminist appropriations…

Media constructions of schooling provide suggestions about what should be expected of the school experience. Studies on discourses of schooling have examined how the school is framed in media discourses, but few have examined how it is formed mundanely and repeatedly in advertisements promoting products that are not directly educational. This…

This article explores the theoretical conceptualization of the local as the preferential spatial domain for democratic participation and learning. It critiques the ideological nature of educational theory that bifurcates the local from the "the global" through the application of the Marxist concept of "fetish". The argument…

This paper analyses a specific disjunctive policy space in Scotland involving the current key children's social and educational policy agenda, "Getting it Right for Every Child" (GIRFEC), and a recent national report on teacher education, the "Donaldson Report". In four main parts, the paper first introduces and applies in…

In this article, the author looks to the work of Jacques Rancière to engage the possibilities in dissensus in queer theory in education. Fatigued of Foucault, bored with Butler, disdainful of Derrida and dumbfounded by Deleuze and Guattari, and just generally tired of feeling bullied into citing particular people and not others, the author…

This article presents a case study of the peer review process for a feminist article submitted to an engineering education journal. It demonstrates how an examination of peer review can be a useful approach to further understanding the development of feminist thought in education fields. Rather than opposition to feminist thought per se, my…

This paper provides an analysis of the discourses associated with physical education in Scotland's "Curriculum for Excellence". We implement a poststructural perspective in order to identify the discourses that underpin the physical education sections of the "Curriculum for Excellence" "health and well-being"…