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This special issue presents a collection of recent papers drawing on qualitative research in and about schooling in Australia and the ways in which gender-related issues in the broadest sense continue to shape people's educational experiences. These papers from the present are positioned in relation to the long histories of policy and research attention to gender equity in Australian education. We set the context for work in the present by scanning the past, noting the ambitions, the gaps and the failures of earlier policies, and drawing attention to the quality and volume of research that has previously been undertaken in this area. We explore the current policy vacuum regarding gender to consider some of the pressures and complexities that have led to the erasure or avoidance of gender-related issues. Each of the papers that form this special issue demonstrate—despite different methods, theoretical frameworks, settings and participant cohorts—how stereotypes and limitations circulate in everyday life in schools and beyond them, and how these impact on people. They each explore from a different starting point how gender injustices are perpetuated and produced, in often subtle and nuanced ways that require concerted effort to unpack. They simultaneously offer insights into the critical and creative ways that young people and those around them are reconfiguring gender and seeking more hopeful and more equitable educational experiences and outcomes. Collectively, the papers that form this special issue advocate for policies and practices that embrace the complexities of young people's lives and are oriented towards inclusive and equitable educational environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ongoing racialized violence against "Asian" communities—that was simultaneously illuminated and amplified during COVID-19—is not a geographically isolated phenomenon. Vis-a-vis the Atlanta Massacre of 2021 and other senseless attacks on "Asian" Americans stemming from white supremacist fears of the Yellow Peril, "Asian" Australians have likewise been, and continue to be, victims of everyday old and new racisms rooted in Orientalist discourses and concomitant fears of the invading Other. As microcosms of society, schools are germane for the analysis, confrontation, and transformation of such racialized injustices and so, as a means of intervening in these everyday inequities, this paper weaves an AsianCrit-informed autoethnography with palimpsestuous composite narratives drawn from semi-structured interviews in a broader project with other migrant "Asian" Australian teachers to chronicle personal and professional race-making practices in the face of racism before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, while also rethinking and re-stor(y)ing a–way toward more hopeful, inclusive futures in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia’s colonial past and subsequent propagation of the White Australia policy in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 has meant that 'Whiteness' remains central to the national imaginary. Consequently, racial-colonial discourses axiomatically regulate scholarly and societal understandings of racial minorities through two unique but analogous debates – one focussed on the schism between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples; the other centred around immigration policy and multiculturalism (Curthoys, 2000). In the context of Australian education, there is a slowly developing collection of Critical Race Theory (CRT) scholarship that has addressed and challenged the inequities that pervade the Indigenous student experience (Ford, 2013; Vass, 2014, 2015); however, there has been much less momentum made with other racial minorities. Specifically, the experiences and voices of migrant pre-service and early career teachers from Asian backgrounds like myself, who have become increasingly prevalent in Australian education, remain largely absent from scholarship. In light of this, in this paper I use Asian CRT (AsianCrit) (Museus & Iftikar, 2013) to present an autoethnographic account of a migrant ‘Asian’ Australian high school teacher’s subjectivities, quests for solidarity and attempts at dealing with racial injustice across a range of White Australian classrooms.

Australia’s colonial past and subsequent propagation of the White Australia policy in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 has meant that 'Whiteness' remains central to the national imaginary. Consequently, racial-colonial discourses axiomatically regulate scholarly and societal understandings of racial minorities through two unique but analogous debates – one focussed on the schism between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples; the other centred around immigration policy and multiculturalism (Curthoys, 2000). In the context of Australian education, there is a slowly developing collection of Critical Race Theory (CRT) scholarship that has addressed and challenged the inequities that pervade the Indigenous student experience (Ford, 2013; Vass, 2014, 2015); however, there has been much less momentum made with other racial minorities. Specifically, the experiences and voices of migrant pre-service and early career teachers from Asian backgrounds like myself, who have become increasingly prevalent in Australian education, remain largely absent from scholarship. In light of this, in this paper I use Asian CRT (AsianCrit) (Museus & Iftikar, 2013) to present an autoethnographic account of a migrant ‘Asian’ Australian high school teacher’s subjectivities, quests for solidarity and attempts at dealing with racial injustice across a range of White Australian classrooms.