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.

ABSTRACT This paper brings together two complementary, but also distinctive, concepts – difficult knowledge and dark funds of knowledge – to theorise difficult funds of knowledge, or DFoK, in educating for systemic (in)justice. Difficult knowledge, referring to trauma-related experiences, has been recently theorised by Michalinos Zembylas to accentuate the affect of vulnerability for instigating solidarity towards a more action-oriented framework. Dark funds of knowledge (or dark FoK) – a derivative from the original concept, funds of knowledge – was introduced by Lew Zipin, and refers to everyday challenging experiences such as encounters with crime, poverty, and their connections to classed, racialized, gendered and other power relations which can be mobilised for teaching and learning. Whilst both concepts are driven by a commitment to social justice in education, they have distinctive features. Difficult knowledge’s attention to affect is not foregrounded in dark FoK. Conversely, dark FoK’s key argument for epistemic justice through an asset framing of everyday difficult encounters is not emphasised in difficult knowledge. Thus, this paper seeks to propose a conceptual framework through the notion of difficult funds of knowledge to invite curricular and pedagogical deliberations that simultaneously attune to epistemic vulnerability and epistemic justice.

ABSTRACT This paper engages with the concept of school-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) as an essential classifying, clarifying and categorising concept to encapsulate gendered abuse, misogyny, sexual harassment and sexism experienced by women, girls and non-binary young people in schools. While SRGBV is currently used in reference to violence in schools in low- and middle-income nations, it is near-absent in both policy and research on school-related violences in high-income countries, despite a long history of research documenting violence as a normative feature of schools in those regions. We argue that this absence is informed by ontological fallacies, gender biases and complacencies that create a sense of exceptionalism among these nations around the presence of gendered violence in their school settings and that to confront gendered violence in schools, we must reckon with the inherent and formative violences of all educational institutions. Finally, we contend that in the context of intensifying gender-based violence in schools around the world, and in order to make progress towards the elimination of school-related gender-based violence, there is significant utility in adopting a singular conceptual classification across policy and practice.

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the increasing use of a ‘capitals approach’ in research into graduate employability in higher education. Bourdieu’s ‘social/cultural capital’ has become supplemented by the coining of a range of other forms of capital, the meanings of which are often inadequately defined. Informed by conceptualisations of ‘capital’ in the work of Bourdieu and Marx, a critical examination of the use of ‘capital’ approaches in graduate employability research is developed, especially with the most influential terms of social and cultural capitals. It is found that the term ‘capital’ is largely under-theorized in these extended forms and is frequently taken for granted as any property or resource that provides competitive advantage in accessing the labor market. Although intended to provide a more comprehensive understanding of graduate employability than the skills approach, the capitals approach remains fundamentally individualistic, providing some but limited understanding of the complex process of transition between higher education and the labour market in different contexts. Conceptual/theoretical frameworks that recognise key sociological approaches to ‘distribution’ – of wealth, jobs, power, etc. – and its complexity are needed in future research.

ABSTRACT In this essay, we provide a novel critique of the emerging hegemonic discourse of the evidence-based movement in education by introducing the notion of epistemic status at the core of our argument. Specifically, we examine the assumed superior epistemic status granted to randomized controlled trials (RCTs) by the evidence-based movement in education, and emphasize that this status is based on their use in another research field that investigates objects of research having a different onto-epistemological nature, without convincing justification for such a transfer. We first develop what we understand to be the epistemic status of a scientific investigation. Next, we discuss the higher epistemic value granted to RCTs and its relation to a misplaced trust in statistics in the social sciences. We then describe the institutional mechanisms that have allowed the evidence-based movement in education to become an attractive trend. Finally, we suggest how we might move forward toward conducting high-quality research in the educational sciences.

ABSTRACT This study examines how knowledge about two biopolitical topics – abortion and homosexuality – are constructed and legitimized in high school textbooks in Poland. The research method used was qualitative content analysis. The study identified distinct legitimation strategies characterizing each of the subjects analyzed – social studies and family life education. Social studies textbooks emphasize legal arguments and highlight the struggle for subjectivity of excluded individuals and groups, while also noting the diverse perspectives from which the issues discussed can be assessed. The family life education textbook, meanwhile, accentuates the significance of the causes of the phenomena under discussion, using pejorative language to put students off abortion and homosexuality. The applied approach may offer a productive lens for analyzing how particular visions of reality are constructed in school education, and for illuminating what is marginalized, restricted, or overrepresented in teaching materials in relation to the interests of power.

ABSTRACT In this article, the authors analyze the ways Black women are represented in elementary social studies texts in the United States. Using the controlling images of Black Feminist Thought as the theoretical framework for this content analysis, we reveal that U.S. elementary social studies texts place a heavier emphasis on enslaved Black women than Black women who were born free, ascribe humanity to enslaved Black men that they do not ascribe to enslaved Black women, and silence Black women by rarely allowing readers to engage directly with the words of Black women historical figures or excluding Black women historical figures altogether. This study has implications for future research.

ABSTRACT We developed this special section partly to showcase the cutting edge social/media work being conducted by education academics around the globe, but also in response to Ball’s (2021) challenge to readers of Critical Studies in Education to consider the irrational in critical policy sociology. We posit that by centring the political in critical policy sociology and consider the democratic contexts those policies are developed within, we might be able to explain, some of the ad hocery, serendipity, muddle and negotiation in contemporary education policy. Today the political context of education policy is seemingly absurd, especially when mediated by global communication complexes like Meta, X and Google. But media influence is not new. The old players in political communication and influence are in the thick of it with clashes of social media and news media titans over who will influence the hearts and minds of the masses. It is in this context that these papers focus in on the possibility of the era of despair that education policy sociology finds itself when engaged in the Sisyphean task of always attempting to reform or improve itself.

ABSTRACT While neuroscience increasingly influences education globally, little attention has been paid to neuroeducation’s capacity to reshape teacher professionalisation and subjectivities, particularly in the Global South. To address this gap, we conducted fieldwork in Chile using three main methods: semi-structured interviews, archival documentation and a novel mapping of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and master’s programmes in neuroscience and education for teachers. This mapping focused on the justifications, aims and expertise behind these programmes, as well as their discursive activity across different spaces. Building on biopolitics and further developing the notion of pedagogies of brain awareness, our analysis demonstrates neuroscience’s growing ascendancy in teacher professionalisation and the emergence of a new professional subjectivity. Pedagogies of brain awareness highlight the conditions, discursive logics, practices and subjective orientations that have been constructed around the brain and its affordances. We argue that the new subjectivities manifested by pedagogies of brain awareness are enabled by performativity-driven marketisation and privatisation in education, a pathologising style of problematisation, responsibilisation and epistemic inequalities that overlook socio-historical epistemologies. These dynamics ultimately curtail teachers’ critical subjectivation capable of interrogating neuro-discourses within a broader constellation of power and pedagogical knowledges, and undermine the project of transdisciplinary collaboration.