Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education
Based on empirical research with working-class students studying in Australian universities, this... more Based on empirical research with working-class students studying in Australian universities, this article frames class as a structuring relation, but also as a series of affective events, through which we emphasise capacities. Putting the concept of class in conversation with two analytics of affect, we show how class is a relational site of struggle in which subjectivities and socio-material arrangements come together to produce emergent yet patterned effects. Lines of inquiry are opened up that go beyond the reproduction of inequalities, which tends to command attention in customary critical class analysis. Class struggle is enacted via events of an affective-discursive-material kind that constrain and capacitate. While working-class identifications are normatively devalued, working-class students hold on to them, enacting classed subjectivities affirmatively. We suggest that expanding class analysis to include affective capacities illuminates new dimensions of class struggle.
This article explores the role of affect in addressing the advantage conventionally accorded to h... more This article explores the role of affect in addressing the advantage conventionally accorded to high socioeconomic status (SES) in higher education and how this advantage plays out for students from low SES backgrounds. Positioned as the 'other' to an assumed norm, the capacities of these students can be considered the 'wrong' capacities, such that privilege prevails. Drawing on interview data from a project undertaken in Australia with female postgraduate students from low SES backgrounds, we bring a pluralised affective capacities approach to bear. We argue that thinking class (dis)advantage with affect has considerable political potential. Affect emerges as a key site through which the normative and transformative capacities of the classed subject emerge. By attuning to affective dissonance, responsivity and capacities, we aim to challenge the advantage afforded high socioeconomic status in higher education. We demonstrate how a focus on affective relations can create more complex constructions of 'advantage' and 'participation' in higher education, disrupting deficit models.
... and innovation (1991) Organization Science, 2 (1), pp ... Edwards, R., St Miller, K., Putting... more ... and innovation (1991) Organization Science, 2 (1), pp ... Edwards, R., St Miller, K., Putting the context into learning (2007) Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 15 ... Gherardi, S., Practice-based theorizing on learning and knowing in organizations: An introduction (2000) Organization, 7 (2 ...
This article seeks to locate the body and embodiment more centrally among the concerns of actor-n... more This article seeks to locate the body and embodiment more centrally among the concerns of actor-network theory by exploring working bodies. Using a newly introduced national system of vocational training as an exemplary case, it explores the tension between representations of skilled human bodies—‘competencies’—as given to trainers and the ways in which these representations are incorporated into their everyday practice. Vocational training has had a long struggle with the apparent separability of subject and object—between what can be felt and experienced as distinct from what can be stated, measured, and expressed in words. The argument is made that paying attention to bodies in vocational training can shed light on this struggle. Paying attention to bodies in networks can also strengthen network analyses. Like texts and other forms of materiality, ‘the body ’ is not singular but multiple. Furthermore, body politics constitutes an important actor-network theme. An I Story: Travels...
Abstract This article seeks to augment an emerging interest in education policy research in enact... more Abstract This article seeks to augment an emerging interest in education policy research in enactment theorising, to explicitly consider the role and contribution of materiality in this theorising. Guided by the notion of policy matters, the article takes as its empirical context a major policy initiative, the Building the Education Revolution infrastructure programme, which commenced in Australia in 2009 and saw funding distributed to schools to develop new learning spaces and facilities. Deploying a sociomaterial approach to researching policy, and bringing selected Deleuzian concepts to bear, this programme is traced as it is playing out presently in Victorian government schools. The argument is made that understanding policy objects such as these ‘open’ and ‘flexible’ learning spaces as being in a perpetual state of ‘becoming’ is especially useful in the context of education policy where rationalistic approaches tend to prevail. It opens a space for re-imagining education policy and the politics of this policy by crediting the idea that materialising processes such as architecture and facilities matter in education policy. They are performative agents with interventionist possibilities regarding schools’ curricular and pedagogic outcomes and goals.
The last two decades have witnessed a number of initiatives in vocational education and training ... more The last two decades have witnessed a number of initiatives in vocational education and training aimed at developing more flexible systems of learning, offering greater choice to employers and- more arguably-employees, in relation to the what, how and where of learning. The Frontline Management Initiative (FMI) is one such initiative. A competence-based management development strategy, the FMI places learning within an organisation. It could be considered a critical site for cultivating ideas of lifelong learning and translating these ideas into practice. Drawing on data collected as part of a national evaluation study, this paper explores the contribution of the FMI to the practice of management learning in selected enterprises. Initially, some discourses of management and learning are presented as background to this exploration. The argument is made that ‘identity work ’ is central to the FMI. Managers not only learn to manage by means of acquiring or demonstrating skills, but
ABSTRACT This article takes as its focus the doing of pedagogic affect. We are not so much concer... more ABSTRACT This article takes as its focus the doing of pedagogic affect. We are not so much concerned with what pedagogic affect is as what it does and how it might do more. We revisit Spinozist concepts of affect, as taken up by Deleuze and Braidotti, in the context of affirmative ethics. Bringing assemblage thinking together with empirical material generated through two qualitative research projects, we map affect-ethics relations within a classroom-citizenship-test assemblage and a kinetic-fungi-tower-sculpture assemblage. Pedagogic affect emerges as constitutive of ethical subjectivities in a nexus of affect, pedagogy and power. We argue that attending to affective and material-discursive relationality in all pedagogic processes affords a practice of response-able pedagogy and invites an ethics of affirmation that augments the affective capacities of learner- and teacher-bodies, enlarging their potential to engage in ethical action.
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
As critical posthumanist and (new) materialist scholarship become more established in educational... more As critical posthumanist and (new) materialist scholarship become more established in educational research, a reconsideration of methodological approaches suited to a radical relational onto-epistemology is required. A popular figuration adopted by researchers to help think and do such research is the Deleuze-Guattarian “rhizome.” Coming to terms with how rhizomic styled research (rhizo research) is undertaken and what it can yield however, can be challenging. In this paper, a study involving a Zombie Apocalypse Survival Course run at a human pathology museum becomes an animated example of rhizo research. Through it we demonstrate how infusing this research with an “analytic of lines” (derived from Deleuze-Guattarian rhizomatics) provides for a practice of research that has the power to shift the ontological and epistemological positions that continue to define qualitative research in education and bring understudied, ethico-political dimensions of it into view.
In this paper, I draw on video case data of classroom teaching collected as part of a national st... more In this paper, I draw on video case data of classroom teaching collected as part of a national study of professional teaching standards and teacher professional learning in which accomplished teachers (in this case, school geography teachers) and their students took part, towards tracing teacher subjectivities and teaching standards in situ. Particular attention is given to affective encounters which tend to be downplayed in standards development work around quality or accomplished teaching and teachers. In association with other concepts drawn from actor-network theory (Latour, 2005; Law, 2009a) and poststructuralist theory that invokes the work of Deleuze (Massumi, 2002; Thrift, 2008), the concept of socio-material practice is used to make an argument about the centrality of affect, as a socio-material process, to accomplished teaching and teaching standards. Exploring teacher subjectivities and teaching standards as practised affords a strong sense of the affective, embodied and ...
It has become commonplace to argue that current trends in the economy, most particularly the glob... more It has become commonplace to argue that current trends in the economy, most particularly the global economy, have placed greater emphasis on the needs of the workforce to be able to change their skills. While some work now appears to be quite knowledge-intensive, the skill demands of other work may be in decline. This paper reports on a national evaluation study of competency-based training which was conducted in enterprises in 1998. Findings from this study suggest that distinctively different discourses of competency are developing among different industry sectors and between different workforce groups. Thus, the competency required of operational, technical and trade staff is commonly conceived as 'specific skills for specific jobs'. And, the competency required of managerial and professional staff is commonly conceived more broadly. Various consequences of these different discourses of competence for the contemporary workforce will be explored and some implications for V...
Drawing on data collected in a national evaluation, this paper explores the contribution of Front... more Drawing on data collected in a national evaluation, this paper explores the contribution of Frontline Management Initiative (FMI) to the practice of management learning in selected enterprises in Australia. (A competence-based management development strategy, FMI places learning in an organization and links management performance to the achievement of business outcomes.) Initially, some discourses on management and learning are presented as background to this exploration. The argument is made that "identity work" is central to FMI. Excerpts from participants' accounts indicate managers not only learn to manage by means of acquiring or demonstrating skills, but also by negotiating particular types of identity for themselves with respect to managing, e.g. business manager, strategic manager, and "high performing manager." Managers are also shown to assume certain kinds of social roles proposed for them in standards set for achieving competency in front line man...
The purpose of this paper is to explore some implications for policy and practice of findings fro... more The purpose of this paper is to explore some implications for policy and practice of findings from a national research project evaluating the contribution of competency-based training (CBT) to outcomes in vocational education and training (VET). This exploration will include analysis of the co-implications of research and practice (eg. the role of practitioner-researchers). The argument is made that CBT, contrary to its image in the public policy literature, is not a singular and universal model of VET. Rather it embeds a series of radically different decisions or options with regard to notions of competency and the use of competencies or competency standards. These decisions or options, once enacted, give rise to transformed models of VET. The further argument is made that these models need not be seen as alternatives. Rather, it appears that they interact - support and/or challenge one another, as well as support and/or challenge CBT. The conclusion is drawn that while all of thes...
This publication reports on a project that had its origins in a broad recognition among the vocat... more This publication reports on a project that had its origins in a broad recognition among the vocational education and training (VET) community of the changing roles of leaders and managers within VET provider organisations, the changing expertise required to perform these roles and the need to identify approaches to management and leadership development that might provide this expertise. The specific objectives of the project were to: identify the roles and functions of senior and frontline managers in VET organisations; identify the expertise needed by these managers and organisations to manage and lead; examine approaches to developing management and leadership expertise; and identify approaches to management and leadership that may best serve organisations in the VET sector. Data were collected by means of a mail survey, telephone interviews with senior and frontline managers from 79 registered training organisations across 5 states and 10 intensive case studies of practices of ma...
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2021
As critical posthumanist and (new) materialist scholarship become more established in educational... more As critical posthumanist and (new) materialist scholarship become more established in educational research, a reconsideration of methodological approaches suited to a radical relational onto-epistemology is required. A popular figuration adopted by researchers to help think and do such research is the Deleuze-Guattarian “rhizome.” Coming to terms with how rhizomic styled research (rhizo research) is undertaken and what it can yield however, can be challenging. In this paper, a study involving a Zombie Apocalypse Survival Course run at a human pathology museum becomes an animated example of rhizo research. Through it we demonstrate how infusing this research with an “analytic of lines” (derived from Deleuze-Guattarian rhizomatics) provides for a practice of research that has the power to shift the ontological and epistemological positions that continue to define qualitative research in education and bring understudied, ethico-political dimensions of it into view.
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education
Based on empirical research with working-class students studying in Australian universities, this... more Based on empirical research with working-class students studying in Australian universities, this article frames class as a structuring relation, but also as a series of affective events, through which we emphasise capacities. Putting the concept of class in conversation with two analytics of affect, we show how class is a relational site of struggle in which subjectivities and socio-material arrangements come together to produce emergent yet patterned effects. Lines of inquiry are opened up that go beyond the reproduction of inequalities, which tends to command attention in customary critical class analysis. Class struggle is enacted via events of an affective-discursive-material kind that constrain and capacitate. While working-class identifications are normatively devalued, working-class students hold on to them, enacting classed subjectivities affirmatively. We suggest that expanding class analysis to include affective capacities illuminates new dimensions of class struggle.
This article explores the role of affect in addressing the advantage conventionally accorded to h... more This article explores the role of affect in addressing the advantage conventionally accorded to high socioeconomic status (SES) in higher education and how this advantage plays out for students from low SES backgrounds. Positioned as the 'other' to an assumed norm, the capacities of these students can be considered the 'wrong' capacities, such that privilege prevails. Drawing on interview data from a project undertaken in Australia with female postgraduate students from low SES backgrounds, we bring a pluralised affective capacities approach to bear. We argue that thinking class (dis)advantage with affect has considerable political potential. Affect emerges as a key site through which the normative and transformative capacities of the classed subject emerge. By attuning to affective dissonance, responsivity and capacities, we aim to challenge the advantage afforded high socioeconomic status in higher education. We demonstrate how a focus on affective relations can create more complex constructions of 'advantage' and 'participation' in higher education, disrupting deficit models.
... and innovation (1991) Organization Science, 2 (1), pp ... Edwards, R., St Miller, K., Putting... more ... and innovation (1991) Organization Science, 2 (1), pp ... Edwards, R., St Miller, K., Putting the context into learning (2007) Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 15 ... Gherardi, S., Practice-based theorizing on learning and knowing in organizations: An introduction (2000) Organization, 7 (2 ...
This article seeks to locate the body and embodiment more centrally among the concerns of actor-n... more This article seeks to locate the body and embodiment more centrally among the concerns of actor-network theory by exploring working bodies. Using a newly introduced national system of vocational training as an exemplary case, it explores the tension between representations of skilled human bodies—‘competencies’—as given to trainers and the ways in which these representations are incorporated into their everyday practice. Vocational training has had a long struggle with the apparent separability of subject and object—between what can be felt and experienced as distinct from what can be stated, measured, and expressed in words. The argument is made that paying attention to bodies in vocational training can shed light on this struggle. Paying attention to bodies in networks can also strengthen network analyses. Like texts and other forms of materiality, ‘the body ’ is not singular but multiple. Furthermore, body politics constitutes an important actor-network theme. An I Story: Travels...
Abstract This article seeks to augment an emerging interest in education policy research in enact... more Abstract This article seeks to augment an emerging interest in education policy research in enactment theorising, to explicitly consider the role and contribution of materiality in this theorising. Guided by the notion of policy matters, the article takes as its empirical context a major policy initiative, the Building the Education Revolution infrastructure programme, which commenced in Australia in 2009 and saw funding distributed to schools to develop new learning spaces and facilities. Deploying a sociomaterial approach to researching policy, and bringing selected Deleuzian concepts to bear, this programme is traced as it is playing out presently in Victorian government schools. The argument is made that understanding policy objects such as these ‘open’ and ‘flexible’ learning spaces as being in a perpetual state of ‘becoming’ is especially useful in the context of education policy where rationalistic approaches tend to prevail. It opens a space for re-imagining education policy and the politics of this policy by crediting the idea that materialising processes such as architecture and facilities matter in education policy. They are performative agents with interventionist possibilities regarding schools’ curricular and pedagogic outcomes and goals.
The last two decades have witnessed a number of initiatives in vocational education and training ... more The last two decades have witnessed a number of initiatives in vocational education and training aimed at developing more flexible systems of learning, offering greater choice to employers and- more arguably-employees, in relation to the what, how and where of learning. The Frontline Management Initiative (FMI) is one such initiative. A competence-based management development strategy, the FMI places learning within an organisation. It could be considered a critical site for cultivating ideas of lifelong learning and translating these ideas into practice. Drawing on data collected as part of a national evaluation study, this paper explores the contribution of the FMI to the practice of management learning in selected enterprises. Initially, some discourses of management and learning are presented as background to this exploration. The argument is made that ‘identity work ’ is central to the FMI. Managers not only learn to manage by means of acquiring or demonstrating skills, but
ABSTRACT This article takes as its focus the doing of pedagogic affect. We are not so much concer... more ABSTRACT This article takes as its focus the doing of pedagogic affect. We are not so much concerned with what pedagogic affect is as what it does and how it might do more. We revisit Spinozist concepts of affect, as taken up by Deleuze and Braidotti, in the context of affirmative ethics. Bringing assemblage thinking together with empirical material generated through two qualitative research projects, we map affect-ethics relations within a classroom-citizenship-test assemblage and a kinetic-fungi-tower-sculpture assemblage. Pedagogic affect emerges as constitutive of ethical subjectivities in a nexus of affect, pedagogy and power. We argue that attending to affective and material-discursive relationality in all pedagogic processes affords a practice of response-able pedagogy and invites an ethics of affirmation that augments the affective capacities of learner- and teacher-bodies, enlarging their potential to engage in ethical action.
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
As critical posthumanist and (new) materialist scholarship become more established in educational... more As critical posthumanist and (new) materialist scholarship become more established in educational research, a reconsideration of methodological approaches suited to a radical relational onto-epistemology is required. A popular figuration adopted by researchers to help think and do such research is the Deleuze-Guattarian “rhizome.” Coming to terms with how rhizomic styled research (rhizo research) is undertaken and what it can yield however, can be challenging. In this paper, a study involving a Zombie Apocalypse Survival Course run at a human pathology museum becomes an animated example of rhizo research. Through it we demonstrate how infusing this research with an “analytic of lines” (derived from Deleuze-Guattarian rhizomatics) provides for a practice of research that has the power to shift the ontological and epistemological positions that continue to define qualitative research in education and bring understudied, ethico-political dimensions of it into view.
In this paper, I draw on video case data of classroom teaching collected as part of a national st... more In this paper, I draw on video case data of classroom teaching collected as part of a national study of professional teaching standards and teacher professional learning in which accomplished teachers (in this case, school geography teachers) and their students took part, towards tracing teacher subjectivities and teaching standards in situ. Particular attention is given to affective encounters which tend to be downplayed in standards development work around quality or accomplished teaching and teachers. In association with other concepts drawn from actor-network theory (Latour, 2005; Law, 2009a) and poststructuralist theory that invokes the work of Deleuze (Massumi, 2002; Thrift, 2008), the concept of socio-material practice is used to make an argument about the centrality of affect, as a socio-material process, to accomplished teaching and teaching standards. Exploring teacher subjectivities and teaching standards as practised affords a strong sense of the affective, embodied and ...
It has become commonplace to argue that current trends in the economy, most particularly the glob... more It has become commonplace to argue that current trends in the economy, most particularly the global economy, have placed greater emphasis on the needs of the workforce to be able to change their skills. While some work now appears to be quite knowledge-intensive, the skill demands of other work may be in decline. This paper reports on a national evaluation study of competency-based training which was conducted in enterprises in 1998. Findings from this study suggest that distinctively different discourses of competency are developing among different industry sectors and between different workforce groups. Thus, the competency required of operational, technical and trade staff is commonly conceived as 'specific skills for specific jobs'. And, the competency required of managerial and professional staff is commonly conceived more broadly. Various consequences of these different discourses of competence for the contemporary workforce will be explored and some implications for V...
Drawing on data collected in a national evaluation, this paper explores the contribution of Front... more Drawing on data collected in a national evaluation, this paper explores the contribution of Frontline Management Initiative (FMI) to the practice of management learning in selected enterprises in Australia. (A competence-based management development strategy, FMI places learning in an organization and links management performance to the achievement of business outcomes.) Initially, some discourses on management and learning are presented as background to this exploration. The argument is made that "identity work" is central to FMI. Excerpts from participants' accounts indicate managers not only learn to manage by means of acquiring or demonstrating skills, but also by negotiating particular types of identity for themselves with respect to managing, e.g. business manager, strategic manager, and "high performing manager." Managers are also shown to assume certain kinds of social roles proposed for them in standards set for achieving competency in front line man...
The purpose of this paper is to explore some implications for policy and practice of findings fro... more The purpose of this paper is to explore some implications for policy and practice of findings from a national research project evaluating the contribution of competency-based training (CBT) to outcomes in vocational education and training (VET). This exploration will include analysis of the co-implications of research and practice (eg. the role of practitioner-researchers). The argument is made that CBT, contrary to its image in the public policy literature, is not a singular and universal model of VET. Rather it embeds a series of radically different decisions or options with regard to notions of competency and the use of competencies or competency standards. These decisions or options, once enacted, give rise to transformed models of VET. The further argument is made that these models need not be seen as alternatives. Rather, it appears that they interact - support and/or challenge one another, as well as support and/or challenge CBT. The conclusion is drawn that while all of thes...
This publication reports on a project that had its origins in a broad recognition among the vocat... more This publication reports on a project that had its origins in a broad recognition among the vocational education and training (VET) community of the changing roles of leaders and managers within VET provider organisations, the changing expertise required to perform these roles and the need to identify approaches to management and leadership development that might provide this expertise. The specific objectives of the project were to: identify the roles and functions of senior and frontline managers in VET organisations; identify the expertise needed by these managers and organisations to manage and lead; examine approaches to developing management and leadership expertise; and identify approaches to management and leadership that may best serve organisations in the VET sector. Data were collected by means of a mail survey, telephone interviews with senior and frontline managers from 79 registered training organisations across 5 states and 10 intensive case studies of practices of ma...
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2021
As critical posthumanist and (new) materialist scholarship become more established in educational... more As critical posthumanist and (new) materialist scholarship become more established in educational research, a reconsideration of methodological approaches suited to a radical relational onto-epistemology is required. A popular figuration adopted by researchers to help think and do such research is the Deleuze-Guattarian “rhizome.” Coming to terms with how rhizomic styled research (rhizo research) is undertaken and what it can yield however, can be challenging. In this paper, a study involving a Zombie Apocalypse Survival Course run at a human pathology museum becomes an animated example of rhizo research. Through it we demonstrate how infusing this research with an “analytic of lines” (derived from Deleuze-Guattarian rhizomatics) provides for a practice of research that has the power to shift the ontological and epistemological positions that continue to define qualitative research in education and bring understudied, ethico-political dimensions of it into view.
In Emotion, affective practices, and the past in the present. Editor(s): Smith L, Wetherell M, Campbell G. 213-229. Routledge, Abington, Eng.
The chapter demonstrates the value of museum exhibitions for providing embodied learning opportun... more The chapter demonstrates the value of museum exhibitions for providing embodied learning opportunities aimed at developing critical capacities and, at the same time, to demonstrate the central role of affect in this learning practice.
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