ABSTRACT Studies on the educational transitions of children of migrants are dominated by a quantitative perspective that highlights the unequal distribution of students across educational pathways but fails to account for the heterogeneity of experiences or the subjective dimension of these processes. This article examines the transitions to post-compulsory education among children of Moroccan and Pakistani migrants in Barcelona, focusing on the interplay between identities and aspirations within structural and institutional constraints. Drawing on qualitative longitudinal and visual research, the study follows 17 students over a year to explore how they navigate their transitions within a context of school and urban segregation. I propose two types of transition: transitions by ambition, where students choose studies based on a prestigious long-term professional goal; and transitions by alignment, where choices align with abilities, naturalised under the ideology of natural gifts, and available pathways. Transitions to post-compulsory education of participants are experienced through complex identity and aspirational articulations. These experiences underscore the futility of essentialist frameworks and the importance of incorporating young people’s voices in transition research.

ABSTRACT Situated within critical debates in education, this paper examines the challenges faced by teachers of post-graduate students through the emerging concept of neuroliberalism. The latter draws attention to how trends in brain science, affect studies and technology are reshaping the ways in which the roles and positionalities of HE practitioners are conceptualised. In a field inflected by long-standing debates about reflexion, neuroscience and educationalisation, neuroliberalism is used as an overarching governmental principle to bring together seemingly disparate strands of policy and practice. Drawing on analyses of qualitative data from interviews with teachers on post-graduate programs, we discuss how our interviewees’ concerns about HE practices signal a neuroliberal agenda focused on meta-cognition, affect and techno-hybridity. Positioning this study within wider debates about neuroliberal governance, we suggest that while the latter presents itself as more humanistic and less technocratic, its effects are politically regressive. It intensifies existing power asymmetries and consolidates structures that normalise and extract from an increasingly volatile model of HE practice and provision.

ABSTRACT This manuscript argues for the framing of teacher education research and programs through a visionary feminist lens. We believe that teacher education serves as an important space for the education of women, yet these spaces have a history of reproducing patriarchal, sexist, and misogynistic ways of thinking and being in the world that are not in the best interest of the very students in these programs, and indeed are harmful to them. Thus, we present the work of Jane Addams, analyzed through the work of bell Hooks to illustrate a visionary feminist theory and pedagogy that incorporates: the critique and decentering of patriarchy and patriarchal power through the centering of girls’, women’s, and other marginalized people’s lives; non-hierarchical ways of being in solidarity; and approaching education as a political project grown out of lived experiences. Overall, we argue that the radical, visionary feminist projects of Addams and hooks is one possible combination that can inspire a conceptual lens for designing and studying teacher education that is up for the task of our personal, social, political, and economic lives in 2025 and beyond.

ABSTRACT This paper analyses 19 autistic individuals’ stories of school experiences in Canada drawn from the Re•Storying Autism project, which aims to challenge dominant deficit logics of autism and re-story ways of becoming and belonging in schools. In our analysis, we were struck by ubiquitous stories of relentless, dehumanizing violence and by occasional moments of belonging and care. Through the feminist materialist ontology and metaphor of (mis)fitting and feminist affect theory, we engage discursive, material, and affective dimensions of autistic school experiences of violence and belonging to challenge harmful deficit logics circulating therein and open avenues for understanding affects/effects alongside pathways for transformation. We argue that misfitting and violence in schools materializes through assemblages produced, in part, via a constellation of affects – fear, hatred, discomfort – accompanying ableist developmentalist legacies still structuring formal education systems. Our approach intervenes into feminist neomaterialist and critical autism studies, which have yet to grapple with autism and school violence. Based on this analysis combined with stories of relational and creative responses to misfitting, we consider opportunities for transgression and advocacy that can expand possibilities for affirming (neuro)diverse becomings and for remaking school practices and spaces in more relational, contextual, and ethical ways.

ABSTRACT Across the globe, governments are responding to a ‘teaching crisis’ marked by high attrition rates and labour shortages. This crisis can be attributed to macro changes in the economy (intensified by the shift towards high inflation, low growth economies post-COVID) and micro changes to the organisation and funding of schools with teachers experiencing stagnating wages and unmanageable workloads in punishing accountability environments. In this paper we examine how government and other authorities in England seek to manage the teaching crisis through diagnostic tools and skills training designed to measure and improving teacher wellbeing. This includes inciting new teacher subjectivities, namely neuro-liberal workers who are resilient, agile or emotionally communicative. Through combining elements of policy archaeology and genealogy, this paper specifies: i. the conditions for the emergence of teaching wellbeing as a problem; ii. the knowledge claims and alliances framing the construction of said problem; and iii. the interventions made possible by these problem framings. Critically, this paper develops a new deconstructive language to address some of the limits or overreach of scientific psychology approaches to wellbeing that are central to government approaches to framing the problem of and solutions to teaching wellbeing.

ABSTRACT The article adopts an exploratory lens to unravel the nature and construction of diagnostic labels associated with challenging behaviours while discussing their ideological underpinnings, politicized character, effects and policy implications. The non-normative nature of categories related to challenging behaviours calls for adopting a critical and cross-cultural perspective in exposing the intricately complex web of context-specific ideological and institutional dynamics that underpin the genesis, legitimation and subsequent management of these behaviours. The analytical edge also involves unravelling the political and socio-culturally mediated processes of constructing categories of ‘need’ based on deviant and disruptive behaviours while exploring how these normative discourses ‘travel’ globally are indigenised and pathologize human behaviours by, inter alia, prescribing clinical-orientated identification and behaviour management strategies. A cross-cultural lens is not only instrumental in bringing to the fore points of cross-national convergence/divergence and identifying examples of good practice but also in revealing the politically driven nature of categorical ascriptions and associated nomenclature of challenging behaviours, and understanding how they are constructed, disseminated and managed in contemporary schooling. As an action-oriented response to these critical considerations, the article makes a case for the imperative of adopting an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach to preventing and managing students’ behaviours in inclusive education.

ABSTRACT Grade retention is used across many education systems globally. There is well-established research literature that examines the claimed effectiveness of grade retention and its reported detrimental impacts. These debates are particularly contested regarding the emotional consequences of this practice. Drawing on a post-structural, ethnographically oriented case study in Chilean primary schools, this paper approaches this field of practice, policy, research, and debate via the under-attended domain of feeling. Crucially, we ask not simply ‘how do students feel when they are retained in a grade?’, but ‘which feelings come to be attached to grade retention, how, and what are the effects of these feelings as they circulate amongst school communities?’ We attend to the ways in which feelings, as social flows and forces, are constitutive not only of individual (failed) learners but also of the school and the broader educational field. We make two key arguments: first, that emotions must be addressed as a significant productive force in education, including in relation to grade retention. Second, that debates about grade retention should move beyond the retained individual to consider how the practice is entangled in the making and remaking of competitive, individualised education.

ABSTRACT The right to play, framed within human rights rhetoric, is often seen as an emancipatory principle aimed at liberating children’s bodies in the pursuit of global educational justice. Yet this universal framing obscures the historical contingencies and governing rationalities embedded in its formation. Drawing on Foucault’s history of the present, this article critically examines how the right to play with joy has been constituted as a global object of knowledge, operating as a technique of affective governance that regulates children’s bodies in education. It traces the philosophical and historical legacies underpinning the right to play, revealing its embedded exclusionary principles and techniques of governance. The analysis further unpacks the historical conditions that enabled play with joy to be captured by human rights discourse and institutionalized as a global regime. The CDC’s ‘Learn the Signs. Act Early’. program is examined as a global condensation illustrating how play and joy are transformed into developmental indicators that normalize childhood and reproduce exclusions. The paper offers critical insights at the intersection of affect theory, human rights discourse, and constructions of childhood, and concludes by calling for a reimagination of education from the affective boundaries and limits of the present.

ABSTRACT The Moombaki Research team developed a pilot Cultural Integrity Audit (CIA) that was co-designed with Aboriginal elders and educators as a tool for school leaders to measure the extent of culturally safe and responsive education at three test sites in Perth (Boorloo), Western Australia. This article analyses the political and social contexts and experiences of implementing the CIA as a tool – including the commitment, attitudes and values of school leaders. Observations are primarily informed by the viewpoint and the positionality of the Lead Investigator, an Aboriginal woman who has deep connections with local Aboriginal communities and significant experience working with schools in the study area. We discuss how non-Aboriginal teachers and school leaders fail to manage their own pedagogies of discomfort about Aboriginal people and their culture by adopting stances of neutrality and racially defensive practices. We suggest that non-Aboriginal school leaders and teachers practice educational leadership informed by Noongar reciprocity and acknowledge the Aboriginal identities of Aboriginal students, educators, families and communities. We suggest that school leaders consider processes of truth telling and truth listening that view the inclusion of Aboriginal ways of being, knowing and doing as enriching gifts and not an extra burden.