The movie "Try Harder!" features a group of students at Lowell High School in San Francisco, California, as they navigate their elite public institution and apply to top-tier universities. A critical analysis of this film allows us to understand new trends and emerging discourses in urban cities, showing the way racialized groups are pit…

This paper presents an ethnographic study analyzing the influence of students' social backgrounds on students' entitlement and agency in relation to floor rights. Classroom interactions were video-recorded, and interviews were conducted in a socially diverse fifth-grade in Israel. Descriptive statistics and micro-analyses of participation patterns…

Efforts to desegregate schools have consistently been undermined by privileged parents finding ways to avoid undesirable schools. In some contexts, a more complex picture is emerging, where 'progressive' privileged parents choose 'diverse' schools but still reproduce segregation. We demonstrate how the desegregation aims of an Indian education…

Drawing upon notions of a global higher education policy field and recently theorised conceptions of 'global-local' imbrications in social space, this article explores the complex tensions that characterise the enactment of internationalisation policies in Chinese higher education (HE) and their contrasting effects upon domestic and international…

Based on empirical research with working-class students studying in Australian universities, this article frames class as a structuring relation, but also as a series of affective events, through which we emphasise capacities. Putting the concept of class in conversation with two analytics of affect, we show how class is a relational site of…

The Race Disparity Audit (RDA) was published in 2017 by the then Conservative government of the UK. The proclaimed aims were to 'reveal racial disparities and to help end the injustices that many people experience'. This paper adopts a critical discourse analysis approach to analysing the RDA and associated webpages, to critically examine the…

This paper calls for systematic inquiry into the relationship between secular governing formations and education inequalities. We present a thematic analysis of existing scholarship on secularism, the secular and post-secular in education. Our review of 184 texts reveals a frequent implicit or explicit reliance on the liberal state to address…

Inclusive education is a global rights-based response to educational exclusion. It is communicated through a range of modalities, but analysis predominantly focuses on discourses constituted in written texts. Systematic research is needed to understand the discursive ensembles constituted by the visual mode. Our interest is in images of inclusive…

The paper argues that the modern school is an 'intolerable' institution. Contrary to the sensibilities of educational research that look for more and/or better schooling as a way of making education more equal and more inclusive, our position is against the modern European school as an institution of normalisation within which equality and…

This study examines teachers' justifications for their student sorting decisions in two Israeli secondary schools. Combining descriptive statistics and micro-ethnographic discourse analysis of 281 audio-recorded discussions, the study offers a new perspective on tracking's multiple social and organizational functions: providing students' needs,…

Contemporary politics has brought the figure of the 'uneducated' into glaring view, from Trump's 'love' of the 'poorly educated' to analyses suggesting a supposed 'uneducated populous' is responsible for the rise of far-right politics. In this paper I respond to this so-called 'post-truth' contemporary moment by considering how education underpins…

Situated in an understanding of contemporary US education as heavily influenced by a neoliberal technocracy we conducted a Critical Discourse Analysis of the 2010 and 2016 National Education Technology (NETP) plans released by the US Department of Education. Our investigation was also guided by a cyber-archaeological excavation of digital…

This paper explores the processes, tensions, opportunities and constraints that migrant youth in Greek higher educational institutions experience at the present time which are characterised by social crises, economic austerity and political instability. In doing so, we also put forward an agenda of critical and feminist pedagogies in developing…

This paper is intended to provide a source of critical and theoretical reflection on the current mathematics educational objectives for Indigenous students in Australia, which are premised on acceptance of underlying concepts of 'equity'. It is not the intention of this paper to identify 'how' Indigenous knowledge can be positioned within…

In 2018 NAPLAN (National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy) reached a 10-year milestone. Introduced in 2008 by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), NAPLAN assesses student literacy and numeracy in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. As a key education reform in Australia, NAPLAN has provoked critical debate across…