The intra-active production of normativity and difference

Drawing on memory stories told in a collective biography workshop about children’s encounters with schooling, this paper experiments with re-imagining the child-student-subject as an ‘emergent intracorporeal multiplicity’ [Fritsch, K. 2015. “Desiring Disability Differently: Neoliberalism, Heterotopic Imagination and Intra-Corporeal Configurations.” Foucault Studies 19: 43–66, 51]. From the feminist new materialist perspective that the authors work with, the child is configured not as an entity prior to, or separate from, encounters with education systems, but emergent with-in them. This paper focuses on difference in human relations, and in particular on the intersections of disability and gender. It does so not in terms of essential characteristics of individuals, but as emergent, in-the-moment, with others. In focussing on the detail of lives-in-their-making, the authors ask, with Barad [2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press], if we are interested in justice, how we are to ‘understand our role in helping constitute who and what come to matter?’     

Drawing on the Past: Reflecting on the Future

This paper examines the connections between the training models of late 19th century Schools of Design (Art) as exemplified by the first municipal School of Art (Margaret Street, Birmingham) and the current preparation of specialist teachers of Art and Design. A recurrent theme is the paradox of objective, measurable standards, pitted against notions of subjective independent learning, individual relevance and choice. Consistent with other papers from this author, the thrust of the perspective is questioning the compatibility of an examination–dominated agenda and opportunities for experimentation, creative risk taking and forms of supported, purposeful play. Continuing research explores the concept and purpose of drawing in an increasingly technological, global information society.     

Instructions for Authors

Instructions for Authors

Instructions for Authors     

Is Schooling a Risk? Gender,Power Relations,and School Culture in Uganda

This article relates a study of AIDS education in Uganda which used an ethnography of school culture to explore the contradictions in curriculum intervention. The school was found to be a site of an extensive set of gendered practices which constituted a risk in themselves in terms of sexual health. Four forms of control are examined in this article: hegemonic masculinity, gendered discipline patterns, sexual harassment and 'compulsory' heterosexuality. Male domination and power imbalances in the school encouraged attitudes and practices with regard to sexual relationships which negated the official messages of the AIDS curriculum.     

Changing Resource and Organizational Patterns: The Challenge of Resourcing Education in the 21st Century

This paper looks at the changing patterns ofresourcing (financing) education in thetwenty-first century. It identifies five trendsthat are altering the resourcing and provisionof education through their impact on theorganization of education systems. As aconsequence of these trends, it puts forwardthe view that the role of government ischanging from direct provider of education toone of regulator of the education industry.     

Understanding Learning Cities as discursive,material and affective infrastructures

ABSTRACT

Cities around the world are increasingly developing city-wide lifelong learning strategies to promote individual and civic adaptation to major economic, technological, and environmental challenges. Such initiatives, however, have not yet received commensurate research attention from education researchers and it is not yet clear that we have the theoretical or methodological tools to research the complexity of learning at a city scale. This paper attempts to outline one approach that might respond to this challenge by drawing on the concept of ‘lively infrastructure’ from urban studies. Based on 11 months of detailed ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Bristol, the paper draws on this concept to trace how learning infrastructures are produced, accessed, and reshaped by individuals and serve to provision particular forms of learning in the city. In so doing, the paper argues that learning infrastructures need to be understood as discursive, material, and affective; as deeply interconnected with other city infrastructures, particularly childcare and transport; and as capable of morphing to create both radical new forms of learning activity as well as consolidating existing practices of exclusion and inequality.     

Instructions for Authors

Instructions for Authors

Instructions for Authors