Visualizing the politics of innocence in the age of AIDS

We are concerned with the ways in which social constructions of age can contribute to reducing or exacerbating the vulnerability of young people, and for this reason we refer to the issue as one of ‘the politics of innocence’. The focus of this paper is on gender, youth and HIV prevention/AIDS awareness in the context of South Africa and investigates the uses (and abuses) of images of ‘childhood’, ‘youth’ and ‘adolescence’ in the age of AIDS. Notwithstanding the particular case of South Africa where the incidence of new cases of HIV infection amongst young people is at crisis proportions, the impetus for our work on the visual representations of youth, gender and AIDS comes out of a recognition of the increasing risk of youth to sexually transmitted infections, HIV and AIDS, and within that the particular vulnerability, worldwide, of young women.     

Youth media and agency

This article addresses how capacity is conceived of and understood in youth media/civic education programming, and how beliefs about agency, development, relationality and youth manifests in the discourses, programmes, and practices of organizations operating youth media programmes. Through attention to a youth media and development programme in rural Nicaragua, the article addresses a key gap in theorizing how capacity operates within discourses and related practices that constitute ‘youth media’ and, in particular, it critically investigates how youth media discourse rests on an assumed foundation where capacity is defined as agency, empowerment or voice. This article situates youth media production within modernist discourses about education, development and ‘change’, in order to re-conceptualize agency through a mobilities framework that more fully attends to the complex and affective moments in youth media discourses.     

Challenging ideals of connected learning: the networked configurations for learning of migrant youth in the Netherlands

New infrastructures that dramatically change our possibilities for knowledge production and learning have also brought forward ideals on ‘new’ connectivity. Two important ideals of connectivity are that of the individual who tailors his or her knowledge among expansively dispersed resources, and the ideal of access to multiple, diverse resources that provide individuals rich learning opportunities. In order to better understand what cultural norms are implied in our ideals of connectivity, we argue, they must be tested in the crucible of empirical data through the analysis of the actual socio-technical practices of different social and cultural groups. Through a combination of ego-network analysis and a qualitative, in-depth discursive approach, we analyze the networked learning practices of three ethnically different groups in the Netherlands from an extensive research study called ‘Wired Up'. We comparatively describe Dutch youth as ‘unrooted' learners, Moroccan-Dutch youth as ‘routed' learners, and Turkish-Dutch youth as ‘rooted' learners. We propose the idea of the Networked Configuration for Learning as a means to contrast the learning opportunities individuals and groups have in relation to particular offline and online connections, their historical geographies, the development of learning ‘places’, and particular learning affinities.     

‘But when are they going to produce some artwork?’ Against Pastiche: Issue‐Based Art and Authorship within the Key Stage 3 Curriculum

Ideas and issues based contemporary art is often seen as something to be avoided in schools, as the controversial subjects that it broaches are often perceived as problematic and inappropriate. However, by censoring education, it can be seen that educators are missing vital opportunities to confront the relevant personal, social, political and cultural issues that shape young peoples' lives in our postmodern, contemporary society. This article reflects on the experiences of an artist/teacher gained through the Recreating Landscapes (Illuminate Project), which aimed to utilise LeWitt's concept of the ideas ‘machine’ to broaden the way that Key Stage 3 art is taught and explore student voice. The construct of the teacher as giver of knowledge was challenged, informed by Barthes' work on the deconstruction of the modernist concept of Authorship. Issues were derived from a pupil voice workshop and the ownership of response to this stimulus belonged to the students. The aim was to challenge mimetic, technical achievement often favoured in ‘traditional’ school art pedagogy, allowing ideas and discussion to be the lynchpin, shifting away from the emphasis commonly placed on outcomes. Through this practice it was hoped that the ‘landscape’ of the learning environment would be recreated: a discursive setting where issues perceived as ‘challenging’ could be broached in a supportive environment, enabled by a reconsidered, culturally relevant pedagogy.     

Discourses of Employability and Empowerment: Foundation Degrees and ‘Third Way’ discursive repertoires

This paper contextualises the UK Foundation Degree within competing economic and democratic agendas. In tracing the development within these ideological and discursive priorities it analyses how they are textually represented in policy speeches, and in particular in ‘New Labour’ consultation documents. The purpose of this is to critically evaluate New Labour's attempt to offer, through the Foundation Degree, a ‘Third Way’ synthesis of these traditionally competing agendas, facilitating a neat discursive synchronisation of utilitarian and progressive objectives—democratising access to higher education and empowering the individual, while tooling up ‘UK PLC’ (public limited company) to compete in a global economy. The paper, however, sees significant potential, provided by the discourses of the Foundation Degree experience, for further democratisation of higher education. It is argued that this provides opportunities to facilitate diversity and differentiation by involving the further education sector through partnerships with higher education, and providing opportunities to stem and reverse academic drift.     

Student voice in higher education: Opening the loop

UK national policy and the practices of university course boards tend to reduce understandings of ‘student voice’ to a feedback loop. In this loop, students express feedback, the university takes this on board, then they tell the students how they have responded to their feedback. The feedback loop is a significant element of the neoliberal imaginary of higher education globally. This qualitative research study drew on interviews with course representatives in three universities in England, and on policy analysis, to explore the discursive construction and enactment of student voice. It uses the feedback loop as an analytical frame. Drawing on Foucault’s later work, the article aims to open up the feedback loop by exploring its manifestation in the mundane everyday practices of universities. In opening the loop, we identify the following effects of the student voice policy ensemble: students have to construct feedback as it is not just waiting to be gathered; it promotes a dividing practice, where reps are positioned differently to other students; there is a focus on problems; an ‘us and them’ is reinforced between staff and students; the loop closes down discussion; and a managerial logic obscures political processes. The article articulates its opening of the loop as a way of unmasking the modes of power which work through discourses of ‘student voice’, and hence seeks to create possibilities for resistance to being governed this way.     

‘Snapchat’, youth subjectivities and sexuality: disappearing media and the discourse of youth innocence

Research on youth subjectivities and disappearing media is still in its infancy. Ephemeral technologies such as Snapchat, Frankly and Wickr offer young people opportunities for discursive agency, harnessing teenage discourses of social positioning. These media facilitate social mobility in teen peer contexts by providing a medium for dynamic and shifting relationships. The transmission of digital images can enable a social flexibility that has a significant impact on youth subjectivities where discursively constructed relational identities are brokered through cyber technologies. We tackle the question ‘what discourses are evoked and produced in the discussion of disappearing social media?’ by exploring two parents’ accounts of their children’s use of this media. We also examine a discourse of innocence that surrounds teens’ use of social media and, in particular, ephemeral applications, by sexting and cyberbullying. We engage in the debate on the use of ephemeral social media to consider the discourses influencing youth subjectivities and the nature of networked publics.     

The public face of teacher identity—narrative construction of teacher identity in public policy documents

Youth ‘at risk’ is the currently favoured label used in Australian policy for youth whose educational outcomes are considered too low, with an emphasis on the risk of not completing senior secondary education. Although some research has identified factors contributing to this risk as stemming from complex interactions between individual and family circumstances as well as characteristics of schools and society, policy identification of youth ‘at risk’ has tended to simplistically focus on personal attributes of young people. Moreover, this identification has set up a false distinction between a supposed problematic minority versus a ‘normal’ majority. Thus, the dominant conceptualization of youth ‘at risk’ draws attention to what is wrong with these youth, rather than to what may be wrong with schooling. This paper examines both empirical observations and discursive conceptualizations to critique the ‘youth at risk’ label, and proposes use of the concept of ‘marginalized students’ instead, which identifies individuals not through their personal characteristics but through their relationship with schooling. This approach allows recognition that marginalization is at least in part a product of schools and society, and requires action in those arenas.     

Education,Class and Culture: the Birmingham ethnographic tradition and the problem of the new middle class

The ethnographies of youth culture and schooling produced by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and its followers had a major impact on educational sociology during the late 1970s and 1980s. Despite this invaluable contribution, important theoretical and methodological problems emerged in their treatment of class and culture. In particular, the untheorised presence of the ‘new middle class’ and a confusing notion of ‘dominant culture’, weakened the coherence of their analyses. This article traces these problems from the early studies of youth culture through to more recent school ethnographies. It concludes by stressing the relevance of critical concepts like class and culture within contemporary debates emerging from the ‘new’ educational settlement     

Rethinking difference and sex education: from cultural inclusivity to normative diversity

This paper aimed to problematise what is meant by ‘difference’ and consider what such a reinterpretation might mean for methodological interventions in sex education research. Our concern is the tendency for sex education research to treat difference as a set of categories to be ‘added-on’, such as religious difference, cultural difference and sexual plurality. The danger of this is that it leaves the normative unchallenged, confirming the hegemony of the heteronormative, unraced subject. Constructing difference as an ‘add-on’ fails to address how young people locate themselves in a world in which they negotiate their sexualities through complex ‘glocal’ routes in popular and youth culture. We argue that decentring methodological strategies are required which draw on critiques made by post-colonial and decolonising methodologies. In the first section of the paper, we review the problem of difference, and how it is considered within current debates in youth and sexualities research. This frames a reflection on rethinking our own methodological practices through a consideration of two research moments. In the conclusion, we propose a metaphorical framework to scaffold a reimagining of methodological approaches to ensure that the normative is always a question mark.     

Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari: An exploration of writing as assemblage

We need to keep experimenting with writing to meet the challenges of Deleuze and Guattari’s flattened ontology in the humanities. The paper reports on a small, experimental research project at a university in the north-west of England. The findings are written in an experimental mode, inspired by the Deleuze and Guattarian concept, ‘assemblage’. The experiment is theorised and assessed in a non-reductive way that offers future creative possibilities to other researchers. First, the paper presents a context for the subsequent experimental writing. Some current innovative writerly practice and some theoretical and methodological standpoints are reviewed. Next, this paper presents its theorisation of ‘assemblage’ with particular reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the idea, ‘double articulation’. This approach supports and justifies the author’s schematisation of the textual assemblage into four areas: identity, work, territory and dissolving territory. The author explains how these ideas function within an experimental discursive text and illustrates their possible usage in the experimental text itself. Thus, this paper offers a theoretical justification, an explanation of and an assessment of experimental writing, in addition to the experimental text itself, all of which are of potential interest to researchers in the fields of education and philosophy.     

From ‘consulting pupils’ to ‘pupils as researchers’: a situated case narrative

Schools in England are now being encouraged to ‘personalise’ the curriculum and to consult students about teaching and learning. This article reports on an evaluation of one high school which is working hard to increase student subject choice, introduce integrated curriculum in the middle years and to improve teaching and learning while maintaining a commitment to inclusive and equitable comprehensive education. The authors worked with a small group of students as consultants to develop a ‘student's‐eye’ set of evaluative categories in a school‐wide student survey. They also conducted teacher, student and governor interviews, lesson and meeting observations, and student ‘mind‐mapping’ exercises. In this article, in the light of the findings, the authors discuss the processes they used to work jointly with the student research team, and how they moved from pupils‐as‐consultants to pupils‐as‐researchers, a potentially more transformative/disruptive practice. They query the notion of ‘authentic student voice’ and show it as discursive and heterogeneous: they thus suggest that both a standards and a rights framings of student voice must be regarded critically.     

A social semiotic mapping of voice in youth media: the pitch in youth video production†

An ethics of youth media production is the interplay of identities, media literacy, and modality that shape the environment within which young people produce media, yet how ‘voice’ is fostered and/or constrained in these environments could still be explored more fully. This paper stems from a larger qualitative study of how youth created films about their lives and communities in four non-school spaces that strove to give voice to underrepresented youth across the USA. This detailed semiotic analysis illustrates the nuances in the discussion between young people and youth media arts educators in two of these organizations during the pitch, the key moment in the filmmaking process in which the youth presented their ideas for their videos for adult approval before they moved on to the next stages, for example, filming. This analysis illustrates how young people negotiated their voice, tracing the negotiation and the inherent power dynamics that occurred.     

Participatory pedagogy for empowerment: a critical discourse analysis of teacher–parents’ interactions in a family literacy course in London

This paper revisits and discusses some of Paulo Freire’s theoretical tenets for participatory education suggested as part of a critical approach to the education of adults. Through data collected during a family literacy programme, the author analyses her discursive interactions as an adult education tutor with parents as learners. These discourse practices are analysed using critical discourse analysis and are discussed against Freire’s principles for participatory pedagogy. The author’s decision to insert the analysis and discussion of her classroom practices within these theoretical frameworks lies on their focus on language and their alleged commitment to the transformation of discursive practices that reinforce unequal power relations in society. The findings of the study indicate the presence of authoritarian discourse that does little to change the power relations within the classroom. The author posits that despite managing to give rise to a discussion of themes related to parents’ advocacy and language awareness in their interactions within their children’s school, a deeper realisation and discussion of these issues was hindered by her failure to challenge the order of discourses present in her interactions with parents. The author concludes by suggesting that there is a need for teachers to closely re‐evaluate the features of their own discourse practices if immigrant parents attending family literacy courses are to be given a voice within the classroom as a first step towards raising their prospects of advocacy and empowerment in wider social contexts.     

Middle-class young women: agentic sexual subjects?

There are a number of gaps in current understandings of the links between young femininities, agency and social class. Building on recent work, we examine how closely young middle-class women in one fee-paying school in England take up so-called top girl discourses and explore whether and how such discursive positions are linked to agentic practice within sexual and intimate relationships. Only one young woman in our study appeared to relatively successfully embody the idea of a ‘top girl’ and, through the use of an ‘I am powerful’ narrative voice, appeared also to demonstrate the most sustained, agentic approach to her sexual and intimate relationships, as well as many other parts of her life. Although other young women also drew on this idea of themselves as powerful, their narratives demonstrated fewer moments of agency, largely because they desired equally confident, assertive men as their partners (whom they understood would be dominant to them).     

The Conduct of Concern: Exclusionary discursive practices and subject positions in academia

Drawing on material collected amongst Danish and Australian humanities and social science academics, the article illustrates and problematises a particular and recurring discursive practice amongst academics: ‘the conduct of concern’. Conceptualising the conduct of concern as an exclusionary and de‐legitimising discursive practice, the article offers a (mis)reading of some of the storylines and constructions it could be seen to invoke and reproduce—amongst others, the idea of the autonomous, rational academic subject. The author discusses the conduct of concern, as a particular kind of subject position and positioning, in terms of Donna Haraway's figure ‘the modest witness’. The author suggests that the conduct of concern as a readily available exclusionary discursive practice in academia ‘smuggles in’ and naturalises constructions and positionings associated with the autonomous rational subject, and participates in masking the discourse mobiliser's subjective and political investments. In that way, by appropriating the ubiquitous discursive practice academics might contribute to upholding constructions and practices they otherwise seek to disrupt.     

New rules of the game: youth training in Brazil and Finland as examples of the new global network governance

Young people labelled ‘disadvantaged’ or ‘at risk of social exclusion’ are increasingly directed into publicly funded or NGO-based, partly privately financed projects in order to secure their desired integration into society through work or further education. In this article, we carry out a comparative analysis of youth training programmes in Brazil and Finland based on empirical fieldwork undertaken in two separate research projects. The research data consist of qualitative interviews of the projects’ participants and management. The focus of the analysis is on youth employment projects as discursive practices, that is, on the ways that knowledge on employment and employment-related responsibilities is produced in the discourses and practices of the projects. Despite the different contexts, the analysis shows that the youth training projects share a number of commonalities with regards to the shaping of the self as entrepreneurial and self-regulated. This is linked to the global dominance of a new form of governance, which relies on and actively promotes the individualisation of responsibility and obscures the structural and societal forces that lie behind youth unemployment and exclusion. We suggest that engaging young people in critical discourses about the sources of inequality would be the key to more equitable forms of development.     

Using narrative and discourse analysis in researching co‐principalships

After completing a longitudinal study of co‐principal shared leadership initiatives in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the author discusses some of the issues raised by her research design and methods. First, she explains the storying techniques she used to construct case narratives of each initiative. While these accounts drew largely on the participants’ own words, she shows how her own narrative analysis shaped them. She then explains a ‘pragmatic’ discourse analysis that combines elements of Foucauldian and feminist critical and poststucturalist theory (Fraser, ). In using this for a secondary analysis of the case narratives, the aim was to illuminate some of the discursive influences that were shaping, and being shaped by, the individual co‐principals and their evolving shared leadership practices. The author encountered a range of dilemmas, however, as she tried to cross boundaries between these ‘realist’ and poststructuralist research approaches. She reflects here on the implications of what Lather () has called ‘the ruins of a feminist ethnography’ and associated issues that have been raised around authorial distance and representation and participant voice and confidentiality.     

Rhizomatic education and Deleuzian theory

Personal experience participating in a Community Massive Open Online Course (cMOOC) discussing rhizomatic education (Rhizo15) helped to ground some of the theoretical issues connected with trying to ‘apply’ Deleuzian work to education. Notions of connectivity and community as a learning resource are compared with the more abstract notion of a rhizome as an n-dimensional network in Deleuze and Guattari; a Deleuzian critique of objectivism is seen as transcending the persistent dualism of objectivity and subjectivity; Deleuzian critique of consensual thinking is seen to be relevant to a perceived problem with ‘group think’. A brief account of Semetsky’s ‘learning paradox’ leads to discussion of the suitability of the cMOOC structure for handling challenging material: participation, solidarity and engagement are encouraged, but opportunities are limited to pursue demanding and disciplined readings of Deleuzian work by excluding the positive and enlightening aspects of pedagogic authority. An example from debates on concept maps shows some neglected possibilities.     

Emotions and reflexivity in feminised education action research

The paper addresses contemporary relations between emotions, gender and feminist action research. Starting from analysis of the increasing emotionalisation of everyday life, it explores the quasi‐feminist—or what the author calls ‘feminised’—forms of incitement to reflexive confession that are increasingly gaining favour within professional and higher educational contexts and draws on literatures and sets of debates that inform education action research, including: childhood and governmentality; feminist research; and international development critiques. The author proposes that reflexivity as an educational and research practice has come to stand in for, and thereby limits, the contemporary focus on ‘participation’ to reduce its radical collaborative and action agenda and instead incite researchers to work on ourselves, and only on ourselves. The paper warns against underestimating the speed and flexibility by which neo‐liberalism absorbs and co‐opts creative strategies—such as reflexivity—for its subversion, and returns them to old‐style individualism.