ABSTRACT In a context of global education reforms driven by market logics that promote competition, accountability, and parental choice, understanding parents’ conceptualisations of education quality is essential. This article examines how Chilean parents make sense of quality within a highly marketised education system, defined by social stratification and school segregation. Drawing on Laclau and Mouffe’s concept of articulation, the paper analyses narratives from 47 interviews across 20 families to explore how ‘education quality’ functions as an empty and floating signifier that acquires meaning through parental discourse. The article argues that parents directly link education quality to the schools’ socioeconomic composition, and indirectly, to related concerns such as academic performance and children’s well-being. These associations reinforce patterns of segregation and shape the moral and political terrain of school choice. The article contributes to critical policy debates by exposing the contested and politicised nature of education quality at the level of parents’ everyday experiences, highlighting the tensions it creates around equity, justice, and the implementation of desegregation policies.

ABSTRACT This paper explores the extent to which Chinese higher education has become a national security concern under General Secretary Xi Jinping’s leadership. To do so, it draws on ‘second-wave’ securitisation theory, demonstrating the broader analytical value of this framework and highlighting its urgent relevance for understanding how higher education is increasingly being brought under the purview of national security across the globe. The paper analyses how Chinese universities have been transformed into arenas for ideological securitisation, where dissent and international collaboration are increasingly framed as threats to both regime and research security. Through an analysis of policy texts, state media reports and institutional practices, it examines how discursive constructs, such as the framing of ‘Western’ ideology as subversive, and the linking of those deemed to be internal ideological threats to this external threat, have legitimated the securitisation of Chinese universities. It also details the everyday or mundane security practices, including surveillance, training sessions and political education which have contributed to this process of securitisation. These developments are situated within a broader trend of rising nationalism and tightened control over knowledge production. The analysis underscores how the securitisation of higher education impacts academic freedom and creates barriers to international collaboration.

ABSTRACT Teaching social justice within initial teacher education is a fraught endeavour, often interwoven with discomforting forms of learning for both teacher educators and the students they work with. In this article, we introduce the special issue, ‘Teaching social justice education: the nature, role and future of discomfort’. We discuss the impetus for the issue – borne out of both personal professional circumstances as well as the current socio-political climate – and establish some conceptual foundations for discomfort as a part of teacher education. As socio-cultural institutions that are always already interwoven with power differentials, we argue that schools and preservice teacher education are ongoing sites of interest and significance for such work, in which the pursuit of ‘social justice’ is a contested yet necessary aim. We provide an introduction to the articles included in the issue and how they variously engage with the nature and operation of discomfort, and other attendant concerns such as power and violence. Overall, we seek to open up discussion of the discomforting work being done in initial teacher education, generating deeper understanding of the role such learning can play and how it could and should be supported.

ABSTRACT Engaging in discomfort is often considered essential for meaningful social justice education with pre-service teachers. Yet the way in which discomfort is experienced by such students is an underdeveloped area of the literature. In this article, we explore student feedback survey (n = 2303) and interview (n = 3) data from pre-service teacher education courses that engage with discomforting content, gathered from an Australian university over a five-year period from 2019–2023. We also draw upon data from an auto-ethnographic focus group conducted with authors of this article, as teaching staff working on these courses during this time. We consider how discomforting content is experienced by students, and how educators understand and respond to these experiences. We argue that while discomfort is viewed as valuable by some students, others resist the destabilisation of their presuppositions, reflected in concerns about ‘bias’ and a distancing of the self. This range of responses, considered alongside educator perspectives, prompts new questions regarding how much discomfort is appropriate, for which students and in what ways; and the institutional structures that do, and do not, support it.

ABSTRACT In contemporary lifelong learning policies by the OECD and the European Union, citizens are expected to acquire knowledge, skills and attitudes that are believed to enhance individual, social and economic well-being. This article examines the current ideal of lifelong learner constructed in these policies from a governmentality perspective. The central object of theorisation is the concept of the ability-capital machine, which is introduced as a heuristic device to capture how lifelong learning policy constructs the ideal subject in the context of cognitive capitalism. This concept allows for the analysis of how subjectivities are shaped through the standardisation of competences, the demand for emotional and attitudinal reflectivity, and the promotion of self-optimisation. Additionally, drawing on the notion of neuroliberalism, the analysis explores how individual traits, emotions, and psychological attributes are brought under governing through neuroscientific and behavioural discourses in lifelong learning policies. Finally, the notion of the neurotic citizen is introduced to describe the unintended yet systemic consequences of these policies. It is contended that policies based on key competencies in lifelong learning not only construct and govern an emancipated and self-directed ability-capital machine but also evoke a self-concerned and anxious one: a neurotic lifelong learner.

ABSTRACT This conceptual paper examines the intersections of decolonial political theology and the decolonization of higher education, arguing that Enrique Dussel’s liberation theology and pedagogics provide a critical framework for productively addressing the tensions arising from essentialist binaries and rigid secular framings in decolonial discourse. Specifically, the paper explores how theological and spiritual imaginaries – particularly liberation theology and Indigenous spiritual epistemologies – shape struggles against coloniality. Drawing on Dussel’s critique of Eurocentric political theology, the paper highlights how his work reconfigures decoloniality as an ethical and political process grounded in solidarity and the lived experiences of the oppressed. The paper contends that discussions on the decolonization of higher education can benefit from engaging with the tensions and contradictions embedded in different understandings of decolonization. By drawing on insights from Dussel’s liberation theology and pedagogics, the paper contributes to a more nuanced and expansive conceptualization of decolonization in higher education.

ABSTRACT Curriculum, as a policy of the settler-state, is essential in carefully safeguarding learners and educators from encounters with the colonial project’s inherent violence. In Australia, the effort to create an acceptable engagement with the past via curriculum is particularly important given the need to reproduce liberal views and discourses of inclusion that define the politics of the contemporary settler state. At its core, curriculum thus works to placate colonial anxiety and furnish learners with ideas about the nation-state that are intrinsically geared toward colonial legitimacy and preservation. In this article, I take up this condition, highlighting how the Australian Curriculum represents the context of Australia in such a way that minimises any potentially productive anxious encounters with the violence of colonisation. Drawing on Lisa Slater’s idea of virtuous anxiety, I analyse and explore how the Australian Curriculum’s humanities and social sciences learning area represents the place and history of Australia as one that is fraught with violence all the while learners and educators are afforded space to learn about colonisation from a safe emotional and political distance.

ABSTRACT Canadian higher education is shaped by colonialism and can be characterized as inequitable and inaccessible. This paper considers the work of academic developers in Canadian higher education who contribute to equity work, including work on Indigenisation and Reconciliation, in their institutions. By examining how academic developers have learnt to do equity work, this paper explores tensions between conventional academic development practices and approaches necessary for bringing about social change. Participants emphasize the limitations of learning to do equity work through conventional academic methods and highlight the significance of relationships for their learning. While participants emphasize that learning to do equity work relies on and is informed by relationships; contrastingly, academic development may frame relationships as means by which conventional academic can be achieved. These tensions renew and expand questions and critiques of what knowledge informs academic development practice and what kind of changes academic development can contribute to higher education.

ABSTRACT Resilience interventions continue to be deployed in schools, as communities grapple with concerning mental health crises and contemporary global challenges, such as war, pandemic and climate change. Interest in resilience has given rise to independent, often not-for-profit, enterprises that package resilience training into programs offered in schools for a fee, often attracting public and private funding. Although there is little doubt that the resilience of our youth is of critical importance in these uncertain times, and interventions have achieved some positive outcomes, scholars have raised important points of contention around resilience as a concept, including its role in responsibilisation. Less frequently explored is the role of independent resilience practitioners engaged by schools in progressing social purposes of education and promoting a ‘successful self’ that advances these purposes. This paper critically explores these themes through examination of the marketing material, program information and learning activities of a popular resilience program in Australia, The Resilience Project (TRP). Specifically, this paper probes resilience interventions in connection with Biesta’s question: ‘what kind of society does the school need?’, asking who is the resilient subject in these programs, and what kind of society will a generation of these subjects create?

ABSTRACT Students disenfranchised from school have something important to teach us about how the education system might be shaped more equitably. Currently, meta-narratives of student failures and pathologies prevail and are reinforced by dominant behaviourist teaching practices. In this action research project, we sought to understand how teachers might inquire with students about critical moments from their past schooling experiences. Working within Alternative Education settings, students and teachers inquired together using a variety of mediated arts-based methods. In our analysis, I-poems illuminated the power of affective spaces to shape student identities. We identified that affect and disenfranchisement were connected through lived schooling experiences of shame, exclusion and racism. In addition to critical moments, we identified there were microaggressions in the everyday of schooling experiences, and we explored the healing power of microaffirmations in student–teacher relationships through the practices of emergent listening and relational pedagogy. Students’ affective storytelling and the analysis from this research invites us to suspend our attachment to dominant behaviourist approaches and modern, industrial concepts of schooling and consider alternatives. We invite educators to consider alternative approaches to student–teacher relationships by leaning into lessons taught from students in this research.