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The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped life for all in countless ways. For young people, the pandemic accelerated the digitalization of school education and upended relations with peers, parents, and society as a whole. In this paper, we look beyond these immediate effects to explore how pandemic experiences, feelings, and thoughts suggest profound shifts in young people’s perspectives on and orientations towards the future. Our research comprises parallel qualitative research with young people aged 15–19 in Denmark and Australia. Drawing on a posthumanist account of the world as entanglements of multiple human and non-human agencies and inspired by Donna Haraway’s admonition to stay with the trouble of the world, we discuss how species meet as the coronavirus makes kin with the young people and how the young people’s perspectives on the future become with the pandemic. That is, what intimations of worldings and reworldings can be glimpsed as young people shared their changed perspectives on priorities related to the meaning of life and the sustainability of the (more-than-) human condition from the midst of the pandemic.

In 2020 when schooling was abruptly reconfigured by the pandemic, young people were required to demonstrate new capabilities to manage their learning and their wellbeing. This paper reports on the feelings, thoughts and experiences of eight Year 9 and 10 students in NSW and Victoria about the initial period of online learning in Australian schools that resulted from the Covid-19 pandemic. Beyond dominant narratives of vulnerability and losses in learning, our participants offered counternarratives that stressed their capacities to rise and meet the times. We trace three central themes on how they: found moments of agency that increased their confidence, reconfigured resilience as a socially responsible set of practices, deployed sociality as a resource for the benefit of themselves and others. The pandemic opened up conversations with young people about where and how learning takes place and how schools might adapt and respond to young people’s growing sense of urgency about the future of schooling.

This article focuses on academic temporalities to consider the rhythms, repetitions and discontinuities of academic work. Using a photo-serial methodology which generated an archive of images taken at the same time of day for a fortnight, we take up material and affective theories to rethink academic work as assemblages or micro-worlds that emerge through happenstance at particular moments. Our nonrepresentational, new materialist approach shifts away from discursive analyses of accounts of academic labour, and from assumptions of visual methods as ‘documentary’ representations of the world. We adopt an emergent, processual and experimental mode of inquiry that works against linearity, and an analytical approach that attends to the ‘punctum’ of images through glimpses, tangents and elusive details. The contributions of this paper lie in its mobilisation of images to think differently about the ubiquity and ‘throwntogetherness’ of academic labour, and its theoretical reframing of academic temporalities as composed of affective and material entanglements of events, relations, doings, objects, and spaces of all kinds.

Universities are dominated by marketisation, individualisation and competition, forces inimical to individual flourishing and collaborative endeavours. This article presents four stories from a collective biography workshop in which a group of women academics explored everyday moments in their university lives. The stories are grim tales of damage, silencing, frustration and cynicism, whose affects continue to reverberate. The article makes two contributions to higher education research. One, its focus on mundane moments offers insights into embodied dynamics of gender, power and affect within the neoliberal university. Two, it demonstrates how collective biography as a feminist methodology can mobilise increased awareness of shared experiences and, thereby, enable participants to work together to recognise and contest the affective grimness of their workplaces.

As the incoming editorial team of Gender and Education we write this at an interesting moment for global gender politics. People in the UK have recently taken a vote to leave the EU with serious, a...

The highly imagined and contested space of higher education is invested with an affectively loaded ‘knowledge economy optimism’. Drawing on recent work in affect and critical geography, this paper considers the e/affects of the promises of the knowledge economy on its knowledge workers. We extend previous analyses of the discursive constitution of academic subjectivity through the figuration of ‘emotional knots’ as we explore three stories of the constitution of academic subjectivities in institutional spaces. These stories were composed in a collective biography workshop, where participants constructed accounts of the physical, social, material and imaginative dimensions of subjectivities in the ‘academic-city’ of higher education spaces. Identifying moments of ‘perturbation’ in these stories, this paper considers the micro-contexts of ‘becoming academic’: how bodies, affects and relations become knotted in precise times and places. The figuration of ‘knots’ provides an analytical strategy for unravelling how subjects affectively invest in the promises of spaces saturated with knowledge economy discourses, and moments of impasse where these promises ring hollow. We examine the affective bargains made in order to flourish in the corporate university and identify spaces of possibility where optimistic projections of alternative futures might be formed. These stories and their analysis complicate the metanarrative of ‘knowledge economy optimism’ that is currently driving higher education reform in Australia.

This paper examines the media and political landscapes within which “whole language” is currently constituted in Australia. Through surveying the themes and rhetoric deployed in media texts over recent years, we consider how “whole language” has been taken up as part of a wider media campaign around education generally. We consider how this campaign has been instrumental in constructing a moral panic around literacy education in particular. We begin with an overview of how the literacy standards of Australia's young people compare on international measures with young people elsewhere. We consider how the media has bundled these with populist concerns about literacy pedagogy and other educational issues to create a sense of national crisis about education. We argue that the sociological concept of "moral panic" provides a useful and systematic theoretical framework for reading these discursive tactics of the media. Finally, we examine how a National Inquiry into literacy responded to this panic by reinscribing a familiar – and unhelpful - binary between “whole language” and phonics-based instruction. In the title and in the body of the paper we keep “whole language” in quotation marks to remind the readers that use of the term in the media texts that are analysed differs widely from its usage by literacy specialists.

Reflexivity involves turning one’s reflexive gaze on discourse—turning language back on itself to see the work it does in constituting the world. The subject/researcher sees simultaneously the object of her or his gaze and the means by which the object (which may include oneself as subject) is being constituted. The consciousness of self that reflexive writing sometimes entails may be seen to slip inadvertently into constituting the very (real) self that seems to contradict a focus on the constitutive power of discourse. This article explores this site of slippage and of ambivalence. In a collective biography on the topic of reflexivity, the authors tell and write stories about reflexivity and in a doubled reflexive arc, examine themselves at work during the workshop. Examining their own memories and reflexive practices, they explore this place of slippage and provide theoretical and practical insight into “what is going on” in reflexive research and writing.