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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.

We call ourselves the Arctic terns after the birds that migrate between the northern and southern hemispheres. Three of us live in south-west Britain and three in south-east Australia. We tried to make sense of our lockdown lives and the ways we were imbricated in world events. We wrote and made art in response. We read our work to each other and showed each other our artworks. The material practices we developed helped make the pandemic endurable, and at times hilarious. Here we share some of our work and some of our thinking about why it matters.

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.

Vocational decisions made at school have significant long term impacts on young people’s life chances, their opportunities for securing decent jobs and economic growth for themselves, their familie...

In secondary schools, English teachers are often made responsible for writing results in national testing. Yet there have been few studies that focussed on this key group, or on how pedagogical practices have been impacted in the teaching of writing in their classrooms. This study investigated practices of English teachers in four secondary schools across different states, systems and regions. It developed a novel method of case study at a distance that required no classroom presence or school visits for the researchers and allowed a multi-sited and geographically dispersed design. Teachers were invited to select classroom artefacts pertaining to the teaching of writing in their English classes, compile individualised e-portfolios and reflect on these items in writing and in digitally conducted interviews, as well as elaborating on their broader philosophies and feelings about the teaching of writing. Despite and sometimes because of NAPLAN, these teachers held strong views on explicit teaching of elements of writing, but approached these in different ways. The artefacts that they created animated their teaching practices, connected them to their students and their subject, suggested both the pressure of externally driven homogenising approaches to writing and the creative individualised responses of skilled teachers within their unique contexts. In addition to providing granular detail about pedagogical practices in the teaching of writing in the NAPLAN era, the contribution of this paper lies in its methodological adaptation of case study at a distance through teacher-curated artefact portfolios that enabled a deep dive into individual teachers’ practices.

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.

Aspiration for higher education has been a focus of significant policy intervention in Australia for some time, with numerous large-scale research studies investigating the formation of aspiration amongst high school students. However, case studies in particular schools which might provide insights into the complexities and contradictions of aspirations for individual young people are scarce. This paper explores aspirations for particular futures from the perspectives of young women in a single-sex NSW government school in an area of historically lower HE participation. Rather than conventional interview-based methods where researchers ask young people to articulate their plans for the future, the study adopted creative arts-based methods which enabled students to engage with each other and a range of materials to produce multimodal ‘aspiration artefacts’ of their imagined futures. The method assemblage privileged imagination and embodied feelings, beyond the rational information-driven pedagogies that are promoted in widening participation policies. Our close readings of artefacts created by three Year 9 girls demonstrate that aspiration is a process that is relational, embodied, affectively and discursively constituted; and further, that this is inflected by gender, class and other positionalities in elusive and unanticipated ways. Arts-based methods allow us to tentatively trace the work of thinking–feeling–imagining that is entailed in developing and articulating aspirations for particular futures.

Neoliberal ideologies, marketization and performative regimes associated with recent reforms in universities have exerted considerable pressure on academic working conditions and subjects in recent years. While analysing these pressures is important, it is also productive to consider the ways in which academics engage in moments of resistance by mobilising resources beyond those of critique. This paper therefore focuses on joy and positive affect in the everyday moments of academic life. It utilises the feminist methodology of collective biography to explore ways of making the restricted spaces of our working day more expansive and finding within them unexpected openings for joy. Our analysis of the stories included in this paper traces the mercurial and ambiguous affective atmospheres of academic work. We suggest that joy is founded upon connections with others, that it arises in different academic spaces and that it can lead to revised knowing of ourselves. We argue that the glimpses of joy evident in this paper provoke affective attunement within the everyday, sensitizing us to other fragments of joy and providing strategies to strengthen that resistance.

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.

Since 2010, the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP) has provided funding for Australian universities to ‘raise aspiration’ among under-represented groups. Underpinned by utilitarian discourses of human capital and individual capacitation, these resources have transformed the ways that universities seek to engage prospective students. This paper turns to an overlooked cohort that is integral to widening participation initiatives, but has rarely been the focus of research. These are the student ambassadors – university students who work within HEPPP programs. This paper reports findings from the alumni component of a mixed-method study which examines how widening participation programs, which are ostensibly directed at future university enrolments, might also help university students who work as student ambassadors to become successful professionals and citizens once they graduate from university. Alumni accounts of their experiences and self-reported impact of their amba...

This article offers a diffractive methodological intervention into workplace studies of academic life. In its engagement of a playful, performative research and writing practice the article speaks back to technocratic organisational and sociological workplace ‘time and motion’ studies which centre on the human and rational, and presume a linear teleology of cause and effect. As a counterpoint, we deploy posthumanist new materialist research practices which refuse human-centric approaches and aim to give matter its due. As a means to analyse what comes out of our joint workspaces photo project we produce two ‘passes’ through data – two diffractive experiments which destabilise what normally counts as ‘findings’ and their academic presentation. The article deploys the motif of ‘starting somewhere else’ to signal both our intention to keep data animated, alive and interactive, and to utilise visual and written modes of seriality as enabling constraints which produce a more generative focus on the mundane, emergent, unforeseen, and happenstance in studies of daily working life.

Seven years ago, enamoured with notions of ‘next practice’ and ‘twenty-first century learning’, my Dean sent a small delegation to England to attend a conference by the Innovation Unit and then to ...

This chapter examines teaching and learning materials addressing gender-based violence produced for Australian schools at two points in time to consider how issues of concern shift, along with the framing of learning and teaching by disciplinary knowledges. It addresses both the micro practices of classrooms and wider frames of feminist theories, policies and politics. It considers whether it is possible to identify a ‘subject didactics’ for teaching and learning about gender-based violence. Comparative analysis of No Fear: A Kit Addressing Gender-Based Violence, from the mid-1990s, and Building Respectful Relationships: Stepping Out Against Gender-Based Violence, produced two decades later in 2016, suggests continuities in curricular strategies addressing gender-based violence. These include establishing the scale of the problem in order to secure stakeholder support, committing to ‘whole school approaches’, recognizing and managing ‘risk’ and the continuing influence of post-structural feminism. Analysis of classroom materials traces the classroom choreography of ‘joint meaning-making’ between teachers and students. These lessons require ‘safe spaces’ to be established, draw on narratives and discussions as pedagogical tools and require empathy, reflexivity and compliance from students. However, recent classroom materials show greater insistence on the expertise of external professionals, more directive instruction and more explicit links to mandated curriculum.

Collective biography has, since its origins, been an intervention into sexist knowledge practices. Groups of women have gathered to generate knowledge of their own lived experience and interrogate the discourses and practices through which they have become (more or less) recognisable as appropriately feminised subjects. Working in a post-structural paradigm, the authors have utilised collective biography to bring theory into productive collision with everyday life, bringing in bodies and memories to flesh out theory. Collectives have deployed deconstructive and creative experiments in order to resist naive claims to voice or settlements for singular truths. This chapter revisits the Canadian-Australian collective biographies on girlhood sexualities, examining them through a feminist methodological lens, acknowledging where processes faltered, and the complexities and paradoxes of feminist work in academia.

Almost 20 years ago the Australian government released Gender Equity: A Framework for Australian Schools (1997). It was adopted by all states but almost immediately disappeared from sight after a conservative change of government. This was followed by the dismantling of gender equity units in each state, and a turn to boys’ education that eclipsed the more complex strategies and theoretical underpinnings of the Framework. This paper takes up the Gender Equity Framework (1997) as a case of policy emergence, mutation and dissipation. In particular, it attends to feminist temporality, and its affective force, to begin to trouble conventional accounts of these policy shifts. Close readings of sections of the policy document and of interviews with policy actors working at that time are analysed through the notion of kairos – timeliness, or political actions that open opportunities, breaks and ruptures – in order to provide new insights into the policy moment of gender equity in Australian schooling.

This article deploys a collective biographical methodology as a political and epistemological intervention in order to explore the emotional and affective politics of academic work for women in neoliberal universities. The managerial practices of contemporary universities tend to elevate disembodied reason over emotion; to repress, commodify, or co-opt emotional and affective labor; to increase individualization and competition among academic workers; and to disregard the relational work that the article suggests is essential for well-being at work. The apparent marginalization of feminist and feminine ways of being, thinking, and feeling in academia is examined through close readings of three narrative vignettes, which are based on memories of the everyday academic spaces of meetings, workshops, and mentoring. These stories explore moments of the breaking of ties among women and between men and women, as well as document how feminist relationalities can bind and exclude. The article suggests that academic ties are both part of the problem and the solution to countering neoliberal policies, and that academic relationships, especially with other women, are often experienced as unrealized spaces of hope. Building on feminist scholarship about race and diversity, the article reflects on how relational practices like collective biography create both inclusions and exclusions. Nevertheless, it suggests that the methodology of collective biography might engender more sustainable and ethicalways of being in academic workplaces because it provides the resources to begin to create a new collective imaginary of academia.

This essay is inspired by Kathleen Stewart's call to pay attention to the affective, material, and relational qualities of everyday life, and by the posthuman imperative that we recognize how we are imbricated with all creatures, objects, and forces in our worlds. It assembles little scenes of weather in everyday life, aiming for an atmospheric attunement to the elemental and domestic, and exploring these through some of the work of critical geographers on affect and atmosphere. As I meander through moments and events of weather in the everyday, I keep close to home, literally, in these scenes of ordinary life.

Emerging posthuman paradigms are beginning to influence approaches to educational research and pedagogy, including the ‘common worlds’ investigations of relations among children and wild animals in early childhood settings. This paper turns to child-animal encounters in a secondary school wetlands project to explore some of the implications of posthumanism for environmental education. It explores how singular encounters with wild animals – a swamp hen, a turtle and an eel – became pivot points for young people’ s affective and creative engagement with the site and emerging issues of environmental responsibility, sustainability and urban land and water management. Though initially the neighbourhood lagoon in the middle of a new housing development seemed to be a tenuous, degraded and domesticated wetland, the students and their teachers began an inquiry into the deep interconnectedness of the site with natural waterways, the animals that move through them, and themselves. Open-ended interdisciplinary inqui...

Our contribution to this collection responds through collaborative writing to the editors’ summons for writing that aspires to “free impulses to generate different creations and different connections” (p. 8). During our 2014-15 collaborative writing project at Edinburgh we – a group of faculty and students – engaged in writing and creating practices that asked us to think again about citationality. We found ourselves borrowing each other’s words and phrases to inspire new writing of our own; we took cues from each other’s breathing and sighs; we riffed off each other’s movements and gestures. Our processes were iterative, relational, affectively responsive: tightly bounded understandings of citation fail to recognise the ubiquity of the indirect citational practices in which we all are continuously involved. In this paper we draw from and inquire into these practices, thinking with Deleuze and Guattari as we become-monstrous in our collaborations. Citing all the while.

This chapter uses a collective biography methodology to explore threshold moments of academic legitimacy. They demonstrate the precarious processes and liminal spaces of being and becoming ‘academic’. We examine how the well-documented practices that characterise the corporate/managerial/enterprise university frame the experiences of women aspiring to work in the sector and the affective and embodied ramifications of such practices as casualisation, contractualism, and competition between intellectual workers. Informed by work on academic subjectivities in contemporary universities (e.g. Bansel, Studies in Higher Education, 36(5), 543–556, 2011; Mewburn, Studies in Continuing Education, 33(3), 321–332, 2011; Petersen and Davies, Learning and Teaching, 3(2), 92–109, 2010; Petersen, Studies in Higher Education, 32(4), 475–487, 2007; Petersen, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 40(3), 394–406, 2008), and specifically on analyses of women’s experiences (e.g. Clegg, Privilege, agency and affect: Understanding the production and effects of action. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; David, Feminism, gender and universities: Politics, passion and pedagogies. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014; Leathwood and Read, Gender and the changing face of higher education: A feminized future? Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press, 2009; Wilson et al., Gender and Education, 22(5), 535–545, 2010), we explore ambivalence, desire, disappointment, and at times joy in our experiences of securing PhDs and seeking work in universities. We argue that for early career and aspiring academics, becoming ‘academic’ is a precarious, contingent process where legitimacy is always provisional and reliant on conferral from those who are powerfully positioned in and beyond the institution of the academy.

This chapter explores the mechanisms by which academic subjects willingly make themselves amenable to measurement. It explores how measurement is deployed via practices that commodify academic labour and promote an individualising and competitive milieu that is simultaneously experienced as repellent and desirable. In particular, it examines the complicity of the academic subject, who becomes increasingly willing to be formed and to form herself into a figure that might be described as the measured monster of the contemporary university. Exhibits from job and promotion applications, software programs and citation collation websites are explored for traces of this monstrous subject. Monstrous, in this sense, is less like the monstrous creature of great leathery wings and a horny head, or the misshapen freak, than the neat clean numerical subject delineated by measurements.

This chapter explores the parameters of an ‘autoethnography to come’ that might be endlessly expansive, inventive, and creative. Autoethnography is approached as a troubling textual space where writer(s) and reader(s) meet and touch, momentarily, or are repelled, where affect moves and the material things and events of the world bump up against each other in unpredictable ways. The chapter samples six specific experiments in writing risky, relational, provisional subjectivities, and attuning to affective and material modalities.

There is considerable debate both in Australia and internationally about the best way for schools to deliver the thinking skills required for university study and professional work life – skills that are often referred to by the term “critical thinking”. This article reviews the literature on the effective teaching of critical thinking and looks at one example of a secondary school subject aimed at developing critical thinking skills in its graduates, namely the Theory of Knowledge (ToK) subject in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program (DP). ToK, a core element of the DP, has no set curriculum. Instead, ToK requires students to think deeply about knowledge problems and to formulate coherent views on the nature of knowledge. This article reports on an Australian study into the teaching and learning of ToK and presents associated outcomes in cohorts of both secondary and tertiary students.

Autoethnography is an increasingly popular form of postpositivist narrative inquiry that has recently begun to appear in educational contexts. The multiple lineages of autoethnography include the insider accounts of early anthropologists, literary approaches to life history and autobiography, responses to the ontological/epistemological challenges of postmodern philosophies, feminist and postcolonial insistence on including narratives of the marginalized, performance and communication scholarship, and the interest in personal stories of contemporary therapeutic and trauma cultures. Approaches vary widely from fragmented, experimental, performative, and multimodal texts through to realist tales. Advocates claim that autoethnography enables us to live more reflective, more meaningful, and more just lives.

We met in a women’s writing group in north Queensland long before we became academics, but it seems the passions for writing otherwise that brought us together then have infused our writing ever since.

The warrant for this book is laid out in its opening chapter, which argues the case for ‘rethinking’ in terms of current approaches which subsume school violence within bullying discourses that pat...

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...

In this paper, from the particular positioning of educational researchers working in Australia, we unpack the figure of the ‘21st century learner’ from both broad and specific perspectives. The paper begins with a policy genealogy that traces this figure through networks of documents, events and bodies that transcend borders and hemispheres. We suggest that although there appear to be multiple origins for current Australian policies on educational innovation, they are intricately entangled and interdependent. We identify the steady ‘economisation’ of the learner, and a concomitant corporatisation of educational innovation. The second section of the paper presents a discursive analysis of an extract from a recent book that frames up educational innovation through technology in order to further trace the operations of these regimes of thought. Our analysis here indicates the kind of critical work that needs to be done to interrogate and deconstruct aspects of current education policy.

This paper performs a textual analysis on three popular children's picture books that describe the ‘facts of life’. It positions the books, published over a 60-year period, as components of a broader pedagogical apparatus incorporating texts, parents, children and experts in particular spatial and temporal locations. It traces movements of affect, rationality, scientificity and sexual citizenship through and between the picture books, and considers how these textual components of the pedagogical apparatus construct young children as particular subjects and objects of knowledge in sex education.