Drawing upon Judith Butler's conceptualisation of performativity and subjectification, this article explores the effects of different kinds of counter political action to disrupt exclusionary school practices that further marginalise children who are, often already, on the edges of school life. Firstly, tracing the impossibilities sometimes…

Herein we examine the dominant image of East Asian schools as marked by a darker side of widespread bullying, leading to high rates of youth suicide. First outlining the substantial literature on bullying in the English language, we turn to show how -- paradoxically -- the rates of bullying and suicide are no higher, or in nearly all cases, lower…

This paper examines lesbian and gay teachers' identities and experiences in schools in the context of school policies relating to homophobia and to sex and sexuality education. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 12 lesbian and gay teachers working in English and Welsh schools, and using the concept of 'policy enactment,' I analyse the ways…

This paper discusses the use of Burnett, Merchant, Pahl and Rowsell's (im)materiality literacy analysis framework to explore online and offline literacies in the lives of globally mobile children. The voices of these children have been little explored in New Literacies research. Globally mobile 'third culture' children who attend International…

This article explores the school inspection as a political ritual for the management of tensions between competition and equality inherent in neo-liberal educational regulatory regimes. At the centre of the article is a case study of how teachers in an allegedly failing working-class English primary school coped with issues of social class,…