‘Smart state’ for a knowledge economy: reconstituting creativity through student subjectivity

Rejecting notions of creativity as self‐realisation through free expression, this article argues that such discourses currently driving education policy comprise intellectual technologies for the production of student subjectivities required by neoliberal contexts. Using a governmentality framework, it locates the conditions of possibility for the creative subject within dominant policy articulations of the global knowledge economy and emerging rationalities of risk and uncertainty. The analysis focuses on an industry school partnership formed by a state education system in Queensland, Australia, and several multinational corporations. It examines how the partnership has emerged as a novel neoliberal space for the constitution of new education figures such as the enterprising teacher and the entrepreneurial student‐worker. These subjectivities are functional to the devolved governing strategy of social investment, which seeks to achieve a broad reconstitution of relationships between students, schools and industry in Queensland.     

Information Technology as Cultural Capital:Shifting the Boundaries of Power

Most researchers writing about the uses and applications of information technologies in schools adopt an 'objective,' asocial perspective that represents the activities taking place as neutral, technical events or procedures. This paper uses the critical sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu to frame up a case study of the role played by a secondary student in an extensive upgrade to the computer network of the school at which he was a student. The application of social theory enables the reconceptualisation of technology as a material, social practice in the institutional site of the school. The implication is that pedagogical actions and relations are then open to analysis and modification. The paper proposes that, with appropriate support and guidance, it is feasible for students with technical 'cultural capital' to move from the margins to the centre of technological innovation and educational change.     

Industry school partnerships: reconstituting spaces of educational governance

Industry school partnerships have emerged recently in Australia as a policy solution for the management of problems associated with integration into the global economy. This paper draws on governmentality theory to examine a transnational partnership, the Gateways to the Aerospace Industry Project, which has been mobilised to manage transition risk for young people in the state education system of Queensland, Australia. It argues that globalisation emerges as an effect of knowledge producing practices and programmes that seek to reconfigure the governmental spaces and subjectivities in and around schools and communities.