In this article, I explore complex and contested interfaces between postcolonial and poststructural theories in the context of education, focusing on seemingly paradoxical epistemic demands related to justice and ethics. I start with a brief analysis of the heterogeneous and contested areas of poststructural and postcolonial theories in education,…

In this theoretical article, I argue for a relational stance on learning as a way of reckoning with educational research as part of the settler colonial structure of the United States. Because of my geopolitical location to the United States as a settler colony, I begin by contrasting the stances of anticolonial and decolonial. I then analyze the…

Using a critical ethnographic perspective, I describe how social scientists actively transition into the evaluation industry in a reform environment that is marked by increased privatization of all aspects of public education. I do this by exploring adaptations that contract evaluators use to enhance a sense of personal connection to their work…

This article explores the legacy of John Dewey, reconsidered and reconstructed within the challenging context of neo-liberal globalization. A free-market approach to the delivery of public education and other social services has come to dominate public policy, with increasingly well-documented and potentially devastating consequences. As prospects…

Drawing upon socio-ecological and critical educational theory, this article examines neoliberal educational reforms through a theoretical framework of "commons" and "enclosure." Neoliberal reforms should be regarded as enclosures because they seek to privatize education for profit accumulation, foreclosing the possibility of…

The third edition of the "Standards for Academic and Professional Instruction in Foundations of Education, Educational Studies, and Educational Policy Studies" ("Standards") challenge us to envision what "a more holistic, inclusive and intellectually challenging approach to preparing educators" might look like. This article discusses how the…

This third edition of the "Standards for Academic and Professional Instruction in Foundations of Education, Educational Studies, and Educational Policy Studies" is presented to the educational community by the American Educational Studies Association's Committee on Academic Standards and Accreditation. The Standards were first developed and…

The task of this article is to carry out a synthetic analysis of the concept of the "educational marketplace" as it is used in the popular discourse of education reform so as to unpack what has become a commonsensical idea in American politics. It is a conceptual framework that has opened an ever-expanding sovereign space in the American state for…

Education is for anarchism, and what can very broadly be termed "autonomism"--that is, the many different schools of non-Leninist Marxism--of paramount importance in creating a society worthy of humanity, but this is not a simple formula of countering the dominant mode of institutional indoctrination known as schooling with libertarian propaganda,…

Using a critical postmodern framework, this article analyzes the relationship of the decision-making processes of anarchism and neoliberalism to that of deep democracy. Anarchist processes are found to share common core principals with deep democracy; but neoliberal processes are found to be antithetical to deep democracy. To increase the joy in…

This article uses a Latina/o critical theory framework (LatCrit), as a branch of critical race theory (CRT) in education, to understand how discourses of racist nativism--the institutionalized ways people perceive, understand and make sense of contemporary US immigration, that justifies "native" ("white") dominance, and reinforces hegemonic…

Nativism is a forgotten ideology which nevertheless operates in the current era as illustrated by the resurgence of anti-immigrant sentiment and restrictionistic policies in response to growing Latino/a immigration. This response to Latino/a immigration recalls a historic era from the early 1900s known as the Americanization period which was also…

The objective of this article is to critically examine a school reform effort that has taken hold in New York City over the past seven years. A largely privately funded venture, the New Century Schools Initiative (NCSI), opened hundreds of new small high schools in poor urban communities in New York City starting in 2002. The theory behind opening…

In this article, the authors consider the ways that faculty in the Foundations strategize the placement of Foundations in teacher education in a politics of survival. Drawing on archival and interview data, the authors discuss the strategies invoked as boundary-work. They then situate boundary-work within the broader interpretive lens of cognitive…

Are direct democratic ballot initiatives a just way to make education policy, especially when the policy disproportionately affects members of underrepresented groups? This is the broad question taken up in this article, related in particular to how education policy decided through the ballot initiative process affects minorities. The authors use…