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This article inquires into discourses of globalisation as they are put to use to accelerate higher education’s seemingly ready acquiescence to the demands of the market. We maintain that globalisation operates as a way to reason about space that produces images and narratives of universities, knowledge and students. We focus our analysis on curriculum reform as a way universities materialise the seemingly abstract economic logic of the so-called ‘knowledge society’ at the level of student-citizens, who are to be educated to become economic globalisation’s next agents. In order to locate curriculum’s productive role within university respatialisation, we offer a discourse analysis of the circulation of ideas about globalisation and higher education through intergovernmental and national documents, which take material form in a US state university system’s attempted curricular reform of its general education core. We inquire into the ways space, as a rationality, acts to create systems of reasoning about in...

Mediating between queer theory's privileging of time as actor and geographic emphases on material spaces and identities, this article engages feminist geographies and the work of Deleuze and Guattari to understand the implications of time and space as imagined, or actors' spatiotemporal imaginaries. We draw on Massumi's metaphor of the ‘grid,’ which sediments ways of seeing self and other and logics for action and interaction. The grid incites imaginaries of time as active and space as passive, which evoke past, present, and future, offering coordinates for locating identities. Focusing on spatiotemporality, we conduct a discourse analysis of interviews with two Chilean lesbian-feminist activists, focusing on (1) overtly spatial and temporal dimensions (nation, region, history), (2) the constitution of lesbian space and identity (identity, visibility, consciousness, and community), and (3) oppositional entities that stabilize lesbian identity and space (men, gay men, feminists, universities, and queer). W...

This article analyzes the global proliferation of discourse about gay penguins in zoos. Based on internet-based representations, we identify a directional narrative logic of “gay penguin discourses” in which the ideal gay penguin comes out as gay, falls in love, follows natural desires to parent, and may marry as a reward. This discursive chain is animated by the zoo as institutional space of captivity, which incites human subjects to become agents in its reproduction. In contests over penguin actions and morality, zookeepers, gay activists, and conservative family groups reiterate a homonormative politics of identity through talk of discrimination and rights. To identify what makes this discourse seem real, we draw on Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology to analyze the composition of the zoo as the site of a particular “mode of address” that orients humans to adopt positions of authority, evaluation, and regulation. Three orientations—reason, emotion, and instinct—function as an assemblage whose elements connect and separate, such that when one orientation’s ability to explain penguin behaviors is exceeded, another orientation steps in or connects with the first to supply a logic that confirms the discursive chain for the ideal gay penguin and how humans can meet his needs. Locked into logics of hetero/homo, oriented through reason, instinct, and emotion, and interpellated through emotions, humans can imagine little more than an anthropocentric repetition of our own “progress.” The future, for humans and penguins, is secured.

Our aim in this introduction is neither to enunciate an ‘after‐queer’ vision nor to denounce queer theory. In thinking through an ‘after‐queer’, we identify and seek to account for particular habits of thought that are often associated with queer research in education and queer research about young people. We trace certain traditions that frame queer research and consider the proper subjects, aims, and locations of such research projects. We contend that these habits of thought require further interrogation because they are intrinsic to researchers’ visions of their own research and to the constitution of fields of research in the broader research imagination. Queer research in education is often conducted in schools and its focus is often young people and their teachers, taking abjection and amelioration as points of departure. In this special issue, we hope to provoke different sorts of imaginings about the accomplishments, problematics, and futures of queer research.

This article offers a reading of the 2006 film The History Boys, which depicts eight male working‐class grammar school students preparing for exams to enter Oxford and Cambridge and two teachers who prepare them. I read the film’s subjunctive mood, which gestures to possibility and an ‘otherwise’, as connected to an analytic of ‘after‐queer’ that complicates linear understandings of youth, sexuality, development, and education. I elaborate three intertwined themes: the boys’ multiple relations to school knowledge; the blurring of categories of youth and adult through circulations of sexuality; and the dislocation of desire from predictable categories of identity. I connect the unpredictability and creativity of identities and desires to the need to open the research imagination to a subjunctive methodology that dwells in complicated temporalities, uncertain knowledges, and disorder that underlies seeming orders.

In this article, we conduct a discourse analysis of the strategic plans of two universities, one from the global South and the other from the global North, to understand how the constitution of space and place reconfigures human experience in the two institutions. We argue that universities do not simply respond to dominant logics of globalization but are active participants in its production. We draw on feminist geographers to elaborate how these universities’ discourses of internationalization reify a division of higher education as local ‘place’ and globalization as abstract global space, ‘out there’. This imaginary spatiality obscures the work of the ‘local’ in producing the ‘global’ with important implications for the redefinition of the student-citizen, useful knowledge, and managerial practices.

In this essay, Benjamin Baez and Susan Talburt analyze the U.S. Department of Education's Helping Your Child Series to consider how the government of children, families, and schools reflects a concern with two seemingly unrelated political objectives of neoliberal projects: creating responsible, self- reliant citizens and making schools more efficient. Where these two objectives converge is in their techni- ques: they both use the parent-child relationship and what appears to motivate it. Drawing on Michel Foucault's conceptualization of government as ''the conduct of conduct,'' Baez and Talburt analyze two pamphlets with an eye to several themes: the ''commonsensical'' nature of its address to loving parents; the ''responsibilization'' of parents and children; the insidious entry of school goals and behavioral norms into homes; and the seeming empowerment of the parent as partner in his or her child's learning. Finally, the authors discuss how the logic of modern forms of governing families and schools might be contested.

Youth move us, fascinate us, exert a pull on us (Stewart 2007). Images and narratives of youth affect us. We are affected by the form of moral panics around gangstas, bullies, pregnant teens, tattooed and pierced bodies. And we are affected by celebrations of youth, such as the girl power of Malala,1 the Pakistani girl shot by a member of the Taliban for her advocacy of education for girls; environmentalists; DREAMers,2 the immigrant youth in the USA who would be given documented status with the ‘DREAM Act’; and Occupiers. Amid familiar panics and celebrations, the recent global economic crisis has created a pervasive unease about the state of youth as they face chronic unemployment and debt. In an epoch of austerity and precarity, the promise of good life is increasingly difficult to attain and lives are lived seemingly out of order. Images of youth protests and riots across the globe mingle with narratives of college graduates living in their parents’ basements, animating our hopes and fears.

This article draws on historical and philosophical lenses and interviews with students to question some fundamental tenets underlying the practice of freshman learning communities (FLCs): that they develop community and improve students' learning experiences. The article brings to the discourse of FLCs some critical questions regarding their value and practice.

This article questions the effects of forms of knowledge adults create that frame LGBT youth. The author focuses on dominant images of the LGBT youth at-risk and the adolescent who adopts a secure gay identity. She argues that gay identity development models and subcultural theories create a group with defined needs to which adults and school programs should respond. If used unreflectively, these normative constructions, which justify and underlie the premises of school change, can exclude youth and ignore their creativity. The article points to the need to learn from and with youth in expanding inclusive school programs.

This essay considers the uses of ethnographic and qualitative inquiry in higher educational research as they are limited by commitments to verifying data and representing the "real" and argues for broader understandings of such research. I examine limitations of and new possibilities for common elements of creating a "real" and elaborate on the role of speculative research that opens new paths for thought by acknowledging uncertainty and venturing multiple interpretations.

Introduction Over the past three decades, researchers' approaches to studying higher education and the questions they explore have changed markedly. In the 1960s and 1970s, the field was dominated by quantitative approaches (Keller, 1998), particularly small-scale statistical studies that sought to document such phenomena as access, mobility, faculty productivity, and student retention. In the last decade, as modes of inquiry have expanded in educational research generally, higher educational researchers have also turned to qualitative research, whose increasing legitimacy is reflected in the publication of the ASHE Reader on Qualitative Research in the early 1990s. In addition, critical, constructivist, and even postmodern approaches to inquiry have gained some credibility and turned researchers' attention to questions of the purposes of research. While methodologies and paradigms have expanded, so have ideas about who conducts research and for whom. For example, foundations are now funding research collaboratives of practitioners and researchers rather than individual researchers, making partnerships and action research more prevalent. A fundamental assumption we make is that this proliferation of research approaches offers valuable forms of knowledge and insight to those concerned with the study and practice of higher education. As these changes have occurred, individual articles have focused on specific methodological challenges, such as the limitations of probabilistic research about college students or the uses of critical race theory to examine access, but there has been no collection of ideas about the broad implications of changing forms of research for the field of higher education. Thus, the main goals of this special issue of the Journal--Questions of Research and Methodology--are to explore how research approaches contribute to our understandings of higher education and how higher educational researchers can continue to refine their inquiry. We hope that by bringing together in one collection various perspectives on reconceptualizing research, we can contribute to broadening conversations about individual forms of research as well as their relations, thereby enriching the work of the field. At the same time, we are aware that current political conditions may encourage a retraction rather than an expansion of research approaches. We refer specifically to the National Research Council's (NRC) (2002) Committee on Scientific Principles for Education Research's recent report, Scientific Research in Education. This report signals an epoch in which the federal government would legislate valid research as "scientific" in increasingly narrow and normative ways, as evidenced by the NRC's emphasis on experimental research and its ambivalence about multiple approaches to research that do not come from or create a research community based in consensus (Feuer, Towne, & Shavelson, 2002). In such a moment, it is increasingly important that scholars of higher education learn to articulate the values of a plurality of research approaches and of specific types of inquiry framed as nonscientific. We offer a few comments about how we decided on the issues and authors chosen for this edition. In thinking about reconceptualizing research processes and methodologies, we envisioned this topic broadly to include the focus of inquiry, the methods one chooses to approach research questions, the legitimacy of particular types of research, the practical nature of research, and the contributions of types of research to the field. We reviewed existing methodological literature in order to explore trends and themes that seemed to be emerging in various journals, books, and conferences in higher education and across other fields and disciplines. We held symposia at ASHE in 2001 and 2002 in which we explored ways of reconceptualizing research. Several key themes emerged as important areas in understanding the contributions of various types of research in the field and refining our thinking about research: (1) the role of disciplinary inquiry; (2) the importance of adopting, explaining, and working within the assumptions of research paradigms to enhance all research; (3) the potential for action or collaborative forms of research to affect practice; and (4) ways of rethinking traditional approaches that have been narrowly defined. …

This response to Leslie Bloom's "Interpreting interpretation: gender, sexuality and the practice of not reading straight" explores Bloom's interpretations of her interpretations of a research participant's life-history narrative. Taking as a given that sexuality places research in a crisis of knowledge and limits, I ask how Bloom's meta-interpretive narrative informs inquiry that seeks not only to break with heteronormative structures of knowing but also to exceed the given. As Bloom's article suggests, to understand the researcher as in a constant state of transformation is to understand interpretation as always in process, always other to itself, inviting new responses. This process of becoming other highlights the perpetual reworkings of the implications of researchers' implications and relations as interpreters of others'- and our own- lives and experiences. Becoming other by interpreting interpretation demands that we let go of certainty by acknowledging the unknowability of the other in self-other r...

This article questions the logic of ethnographic inquiry that seeks to make gay and lesbian subjects seen and heard. I consider poststructural and queer challenges to ethnography's project of representing subjects, experiences, and voices to suggest that inquiry into gay and lesbian subjects analyze practices as they are constituted in social and institutional locations. Queer theorists' explorations of the "open secret" and the "epistemology of the closet," characterized by circulations of knowledge and ignorance, point to a need to place the contours of (un)knowing at the center of inquiry. I turn to participants' readings of Introduction to Christianity, taught by a lesbian faculty member, to theorize the effects of religious and sexual open secrets in constituting her pedagogy. Based on the intangible circulations of knowledge and ignorance in and around her teaching, I posit possibilities for ethnography that engage with queer theory to understand the construction and effects of practices.

Based on an ethnographic study that focused on the relations of students’ in- and out-of-class cultural learning during a 5-week study abroad program in Spain, this article analyzes processes of teaching and learning in a Spanish culture and civilization class, the experiences of the only African-American student on the program, and students’ responses to a class meeting in which race was overtly problematized. In contrast to the shared construction of cultural knowledge that characterized the class, discussion of race and gender was limited in its complexity, despite signs of new understandings among students. Given a need for all students to gain multiple cultural perspectives and growing evidence that peer groups constitute sources of identity and cross-cultural understanding for students abroad, we suggest that study abroad curricula incorporate sustained discussion of students’ sociocultural differences and resulting particularities in their experiences in the host culture as part of the formal curriculum.

Within the current debate over the methods and content of foreign language curricula, discussion of the relevance and role of literature remains largely at the level of conjecture. In order to learn about the value that students ascribe to the study of Spanish literature, we undertook a semester-long qualitative study of students' goals for, experiences in, and perceptions of a Spanish literature survey course at a regional state university. Methods of data collection were ongoing throughout the semester and included audiotaped classroom observation, interviews with four students, and a reflective teaching journal kept by the instructor. Analysis of the interviews reveals that for these students, the process of studying literature is a mixture of deciphering language, making sense of texts within their social and historical contexts, and sharing textual interpretations. Rather than the limitations frequently cited regarding foreign language literature study, they describe an interplay among language learning, cultural and historical understanding, and textual interpretation in the literature classroom. Their reflections suggest that the study of literature offers a flexible resource with the potential to combine the personal and the pragmatic and thus make their experiences meaningful.

William Haver (1998) has written that educators “have very nearly agreed that the pedagogical enterprise is about the production of subjects” (349). Although there is little agreement about what sorts of subjects education aims to produce, he says, “pedagogy is the work of Bildung, a coming to subjectivity as jubilant and relieved self-recognition” (350). Whether educators understand the subject as developing according to a natural ontology or according to culture, the education of subjects is defined by a project to “elaborate the ‘systems of the world,’ to make sense, and to transmit the sense that it makes” (350). This development of subjects entails the production of knowledge and self-knowledge, or what I will call “intelligibility.” As children move through adolescence to adulthood, society expects that they will acquire knowledge of self and other (the world and their place in it will become intelligible to them) and that maturing youth will become intelligible to others, knowable as such and such. In this chapter, I explore this problem of intelligibility—not how we can attain it, but what it attains—as it relates to queer youth. The fraught knowledges that contribute to the construction of queer youth have implications for the interventions adults would create for them and for how queer youth come to know and understand themselves.

This book is an intervention into the ways we conceptualize, represent, and work with all young people, but especially with queer youth. At a moment in which some argue that issues of access to public education and safety in peer groups will be the next major civil rights struggle facing schools in the West, we put forward this book as a strategic intervention aimed at altering the very premises that guide the actions of teachers, counselors, youth workers, and researchers. As school systems address bullying, harassment, and legal threats for failing to provide equal educational access, an entire army of professionals is being marshaled to create effective responses to newly identified “problems” related to gender, sexuality, schooling, and youth cultures. The editors of this volume have grave concerns about a range of policies and activities that are emerging internationally and that are intended to “protect” queer youth, create “safe” school cultures, and effectively divide “queer youth” from “straight youth.” In this context we deploy the term “queer” to refer to individuals and communities of young people who may identify themselves as not straight.