This paper argues that there are some common characteristics that define what we label graduate professional programmes. By analysing two programmes, law and psychology--as experienced by the students--it becomes obvious that while the programmes educate their students well in the academic aspects of professional work, they do not prepare students…

We provide an analysis of some recent widening participation literature concerning the barriers preventing non-traditional students accessing higher education. This literature criticizes higher education institutions and staff, opening up the academics' attitudes and skills to inquiry. We follow the genesis of four themes in the literature and…

The evaluation of systematic review as part of the evidence-based or evidence-informed practice movement is a dominant theme in current debates in educational research. This article contributes to the debate by offering a personal, reflexive narrative on the process of doing systematic review, relating some of the arguments regarding the merits…

Cultural studies is positioned to address various dilemmas by asking, among other important and relevant questions: Who is responding to current urgent social issues, and how are these responders both regulated by and resisting the wider cultural forces within which they navigate? The purpose of this article is to offer some response to these…

This essay explores the cultural-pedagogical logic of what the author calls the perlocutionary effect of transcendence that the "discourse of the West" produces. This discourse provides a fortified interiority beyond history, but also a door through which racisms, imperialisms, and fascisms of the past can possibly return. The second part of this…

In this article, the author reads the Fulford debate as an index to the current focus in cultural studies on hegemony and the cultural politics of difference, which the author argues connects to Imre Szeman's (2006) negative assessment of disentangling cultural studies from biopolitical ends. Rather than stay within the terms of the debate,…

This article considers and assesses a youth exchange project between two community-based youth centers: The Purple Thistle Centre in East Vancouver, British Columbia, and the K'asho Got'ine Youth Centre in Fort Good Hope, Northwest Territories. Both centers serve primarily low-income youth, but after that the similarities are very few. The…

The field of youth studies appears to have increasingly taken on a self-consciously "international" orientation, characterized by grappling with how to represent local youth identities and social practices within international, transnational, or global contexts. This challenge is repeated across many different types of study and worked through in…

This article presents the author's response to Henry Giroux's "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex." Henry Giroux has written a provocative assessment of the contemporary challenges facing the United States as a society, which over the course of the 20th century had assumed the role of leader and exemplar…

Henry A. Giroux is recognized as one of the fifty most significant thinkers on education in the 20th century. He is also considered a scholar of immense influence in a number of fields internationally, hardly an inconsequential accolade in a century noted for a glut of educational and social thinkers. Yet, its wide-ranging and ever-expanding…

More than 30 years since Hannah Arendt's death in 1975 at the age of 69, her novel theory of the public realm continues to attract attention and debate. In this article, the author contributes to this discussion by drawing on Arendt's theory of public life to investigate the space of youth media production in relation to questions of democratic…

This paper is grounded in a deep appreciation of Nel Noddings' "ethics of care" as an important contribution to moral philosophy and moral education. We seek to offer some philosophical reflections that have the potential to strengthen this important alternative to mainstream ethics and to how moral education might be conceived and practiced…

In this essay I propose that education be conceived as seance: a place where ghosts are summoned in order that we may come to (speaking) terms with them. Against the backdrop of my own summoning of the ghosts haunting my childhood visits to a nearby castle, I draw on the work of Jacques Derrida to provide a theoretical rationale for the importance…

In current-day criticisms of consumer culture as well as of the performativity culture of the work place, the originally religious concept of the vice of acedia or sloth is reinterpreted as a virtue. Art, especially poetry, is put to the fore in that connection. The image of the reader is addressed when the question of the relationship between…

The purpose of this paper is to consider the continued saliency of the ideas of Harold O. Rugg, particularly for social studies education. Given the conservative political times in which we work, and the current educational emphases on academic standards, high-stakes standardized testing, and mastery of specified knowledge, and the impact of these…