Critical Pedagogy Studies Research Articles

Epistemic injustice and neo-racism: how Zhihu users portray ‘Chinese doctoral supervisors’ working in Western academia

AbstractThe image of Chinese doctoral supervisors working in Western academia is riddled with stereotypes in urban myths but little research to date has been conducted on these portrayals of Chinese supervisors. Drawing on postcolonial theories, including notions of epistemic injustice and neo-racism, this research conducts a thematic analysis on around 450 Zhihu comments. It proposes that the Zhihu community has portrayed three images of the Chinese supervisors as (1) ambitious and supportive, (2) sneaky and exploitative, and (3) colonised. While the second and third images are more negative, the first image is overwhelmingly positive. In portraying these images of the Chinese supervisors, the community confronted two main underlying structural forces. These include (1) a steep ethnic/racial hierarchy where White middle-class, native speakers of English dominate and (2) an unequal classed sphere within Western academia. This paper argues that this Zhihu community displayed profound yet only partial recognition of the steep ethnic/racial hierarchy due to their internalisation of their own linguistic inferiority. Moreover, this Zhihu community perpetuates neo-racism and epistemic injustice over Chinese supervisors and postgraduate research students from working-class and rural backgrounds. Among the first to examine how Chinese doctoral supervisors are portrayed in online communities, this article provides informative insights for prospective postgraduate research applicants as well as admission professionals in Western academia. The neo-racism and epistemic injustice identified can also feed into future work on Diversity and Equality as well as decolonising efforts. Conceptually, this article innovates by combining neo-racism and epistemic injustice to form a framework that furnishes a comprehensive examination of unjust practices and portrayals in the realms of racial and knowledge inequalities in doctoral supervision. This article thus makes empirical and conceptual contributions to critical studies in international and doctoral education.

A response to Variyan and Edwards-Groves

ABSTRACT This article responds to ‘The theory of practice architectures and its discontents: disturbing received wisdom to make it dangerous again’ by George Variyan and Christine Edwards-Groves, published in Critical Studies in Education in March 2024. The authors use Foucault’s genealogical approach to explore the theory but do not show that or how the theory leads to misunderstandings of social realities, in the way that Foucault’s critiques did. I address the authors’ doubts about whether the theory is characterised by a ‘flat ontology’; whether it has a dualistic or dialectical understanding of the relationship between individuals and societies; and whether the visual depictions of the theory ‘reify and mystify’ social realities. I also consider the authors’ speculation about whether the theory has lost the critical and self-critical capacities necessary for its continuing development. I argue that, in general, researchers using the theory have not lost those capacities, although Variyan and Edwards-Groves are right that, in some hands, it has been used descriptively rather than critically or transformatively (with an emancipatory intent). The article concludes that the critique by Variyan and Edwards-Groves is a sceptical rather than a critical exploration of the theory and the empirical findings it has generated.

Gender troubling critical whiteness studies in education

Gender is gaining more attention as a category of analysis in educational scholarship; however, much misunderstanding of gender remains, especially in how sex and gender are often treated as synonymous analytics. Additionally, gender and race are often treated as wholly separate despite their ongoing entwined epistemic and ontological genealogies. While critical studies of whiteness hold the potential to interrogate how gender itself is a violent imposition of white supremacy (Ozias & Nicolazzo, 2021; Spillers, 1987), the present study uncovers substantively different findings. Specifically, our content analysis of the past decade of CwS literature in higher education demonstrates what we identify as an investment in technologies of whiteness; a commitment that reinforces reductive, harmful, and inaccurate knowledge/power regimes of race/gender. In doing so, much of the CwS scholarship (including our own) undermines its intended goals by furthering, rather than dismantling, the effects of white cisheteropatriarchy.

The resonance approach for non-alienated relationships: beyond slowness in higher education

ABSTRACT Critical studies in higher education often embrace the ideas of the slowness movement to address time pressure. However, this desirable horizon presents some limitations. On the one hand, by emphasizing solutions at the individual level, boosting slowness may promote tactics incapable of producing changes to the underlying structural dynamics of time pressure. On the other hand, approaches based on slowness may also inadvertently foster a form of ethical paternalism within the context of ethical pluralism by prescribing substantive models of practice ultimately based on ‘do this quickly or do it slowly.’ This theoretical research moves away from the temporal paradigm to that of the way of relating. Building upon the ethical concept of resonance, the approach focuses on a formal critique of the current socioeconomic and ethical dynamics of social acceleration, growth, and innovation that can contribute to projecting non-alienated relationships in higher education.

The critical study of digital platforms and infrastructures: Current issues and new agendas for education technology research

Digital platforms have become integral to contemporary schooling. Google Classroom, Compass, Office 365, EdQuire, ClassDojo and Canvas are just some of the many platforms that litter students’ and teachers’ computers today. While students may have only one school to physically attend, there is a labyrinth of digital enclosures for them to navigate as part of their schooling. The rise of digital platforms in education has occurred at an erratic rate—sometimes through function creep, sometimes through whole system mandates, and certainly the global pandemic has accelerated their rise. In this article we consider how platforms have become an infrastructure in education and the implications this has for teaching, learning and the relationships between key stakeholders. We provide an overview of the education research into platforms to date, highlighting areas that require further empirical and theoretical investigation. We conclude the article by outlining a research agenda for critical platform studies in education.

Globalization, Mission, and the Latest Development of Critical Educational Studies: An Interview with Professor Michael W. Apple

Globalization is the third stage in the development of Professor Apple’s critical educational studies, which is also called “the third trilogy.” In this interview, Professor Apple first elaborated on the reasons for his taking globalization into account. Then, he told the story of the family and social missions he had undertaken as a critical scholar/activist. Finally, he introduced the latest developments in critical educational studies, claiming that critical educational studies are now in a period of transition because many studies are quite fragmented. The solution to this problem is what he called the theory of “decentered unities.” He suggested that critical scholars should pay more attention to intersectionality. When they are examining the various dynamics, they should try to look at the interconnections of all these dynamics.

Ecological materialism: redescribing educational leadership through Actor-Network Theory

ABSTRACT In the latest two decades, there has been an increasing number of publications in education studies drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT). However, the uptake of ANT in education studies was not immediate, and the investigations on educational leadership through ANT have been rare. With the aim of promoting the study of educational leadership through ANT, this article shows that ANT is a vocabulary to counter modernistic thinking in education and brings ecological materialism to critical educational leadership studies. While modernity inscribes educational leadership in binary (mind vs body; people vs things; human vs machine) and humanist thinking (humans above things), ANT invites to see it as a more-than-human activity of (re)assemblage of people, technologies, and things for the (re)composition of the common world.

Venus in the Unvisible: Accounting for AntiBlackness in the International Higher Education Research Archive

Critical race studies in international higher education remains on the margins. More so are analyses of Black subjects (nations, institutions, people, etc.) and/or knowledge traditions. In particular, there remains a dearth of research centering Black subjects as not only the unit of analysis, but also agents in the internationalization of higher education. These absences shape the way researchers approach the questions and problems of international higher education, perpetuating an archive of research that erases global Black experiences. The purpose of this article is to imagine a study of international higher education guided by Black studies. In conversation with two Black studies analytics—McKittrick’s Black Unvisibility and the inquiries shaping Hartman’s Critical Fabulation—I narratively and creatively explore the Black subject possibilities therein.

Institutional Diversity and Its Discontents: Antiblackness, University Political Economy, and George Floyd Uprising Statements

In this R. Freeman Butts Lecture, the authors engage this year’s AESA theme, “Dreaming of Otherwise Worlds and Alternate Nows: Unsettling Colonialisms and Racism in the Social Foundations of Education,” through a set of Black knowledge traditions and schools of thought and how these implicate our ideologies about education, specifically the university, and broader concerns about life and death, freedom, insurgency, and coalitional politics. As a contribution to the undertheorized field of Black critical educational studies, we read and dialogue about the university’s liberal-multicultural, so-called “anti-racist” intervention following global uprisings after George Floyd’s suffering and death at the hands of a structure that invented Derek Chauvin and the state police force. We query what is to be done about the university, drawing from nearly two years of collaborative research. In this effort, we discuss Black educational study, antiblackness as a scholarly lens, and offer a way it helps us think about policy and practice.

Teachers’ politicity as a sociohistorical juncture: bringing a Freirean angle to education policy studies

ABSTRACT This paper engages with the Freirean concept of politicity for critical policy studies in education. The first part lays the ground to expand the conceptualisation of teachers’ politicity. I argue this entails an examination of the limits and possibilities within a juncture. To develop the argument, the second part focuses on a teacher strike that took place in Chile and draws on corpus-driven discourse analysis to explore news from a national teacher organisation and from an influential newspaper. Through the angle of politicity, I identify and discuss ideational projects during the strike with an emphasis on counterhegemonic resources for change.

Towards Critical Secular Studies in Education: addressing secular education formations and their intersecting inequalities

ABSTRACT This paper calls for systematic inquiry into the relationship between secular governing formations and education inequalities. We present a thematic analysis of existing scholarship on secularism, the secular and post-secular in education. Our review of 184 texts reveals a frequent implicit or explicit reliance on the liberal state to address religious inequalities in education, and to draw the line on the extent of public religious expression. Taking a critical sociological approach, we argue this reliance neglects the state’s regulation, as opposed to its elimination, of the violence of multiple education inequalities. Understanding state sovereignty as an assemblage of forces, we illustrate the need for a cohesive body of research into how secular sovereign power privatises and de-privatises religiosity through education, and how race, gender and sexuality are shaped as public or private concerns in the process. We conclude with key indicators for a Critical Secular Studies research and curriculum agenda.

Homo responsabilis as an extension of the neoliberal hidden curriculum: The triple responsibilization of responsible management education

In the responsible turn in business school education and management learning, the responsibility approach is proposed as a possible panacea against a hidden curriculum which leads to damaging business practice. The explicit promise of responsible management learning and education is that homo oeconomicus can be re-formed in the image of a responsible business subject, what we here call ‘ homo responsabilis’. We explore how a business school curriculum centred on responsibility affects key subject positions such as consumer, employee, manager, entrepreneur, investor and leader. In three responsible management learning and education illustrations at our business school, we observe three layers of responsibilization of the individual: responsibilization for self-enhancement, responsibilization for economic prosperity and responsibilization for social and environmental sustainability. We find that these three layers of responsibilization impact business school subjects in several problematic ways: excessive moral burdening of consumers, overburdening of self-managing employees and fantasmatic gripping of prospective entrepreneurs. Our contribution to critical studies of responsible management learning and education is twofold: (1) we show how explicit responsible management learning and education curricula tend to extend the neoliberal HC, and (2) we complement studies calling for re-politicizing responsible management learning and education by suggesting transformative learning ways to generate explicitly ethico-political imaginations that can help in resisting individual responsibilization in business school education.

Book review: Elders’ cultural knowledge and the question of Black/African Indigeneity in Education, Critical studies of education

Book review: Elders’ cultural knowledge and the question of Black/African Indigeneity in Education, Critical studies of education

A Practical Logic of Socially Just Education in Late Modernity and its Inevitable Dilemmas: Suggestions from Critical Educational Studies

A Practical Logic of Socially Just Education in Late Modernity and its Inevitable Dilemmas: Suggestions from Critical Educational Studies

Trend of critical thinking skill studies in mathematics education: A study design to data analysis

The aim of this study was focuses on the analysis of international publications related to critical thinking skills in education including the number of publications and how they trend, the distribution of study countries, study types, study subjects, critical thinking linkages that arise from published publications. analyzed, data collection instruments, data analysis and results of study on these publications. the most distribution of data related to critical thinking skills in 2021 with the distribution of countries namely Indonesia, USA, Iran, Malaysia, Turkey, UAE and the most publications obtained by Indonesia. The most common type of study is qualitative study, followed by quantitative study and then study and development. The study subjects used in the article are quite spread out from early childhood, elementary school students, junior high school students, high school students, university students, teachers to the books used. Most of the study trends discussed here relate to teacher pedagogical competence, problem solving, achievement, creative thinking, peer shared intervention and communication skills as a form of cooperation in 21st century skills. Test instruments are used the most, then questionnaires, interviews, continued questionnaire and observation guide, systematic literature review and finally book scoring. data analysis using percentage is the most, data analysis with descriptions then t test and ANOVA.

Critical Studies of Technology, Psychology, and Education on Online Games

nline games are developing rapidly and have an impact on children's behaviour. This study aims to explain the phenomenon of online game addiction from the perspective of psychology, technology, and education. The method is narratively qualitative—data obtained from online focus group discussions. The results of this study explain that online games today tend towards addictive behaviour. This situation is supported by the use of current technology in programming that allows the provision of varied features to increase the game's attractiveness. This addictive behaviour affects other behaviours that can affect the development of attitudes. This behaviour change affects learning performance. The teacher should adjust learning strategies in the digital era to adapt to children's new behaviours today related to online games.

Ship of Darkness: Jazz and/as Affect in the Global Cruise Industry

Ship of Darkness: Jazz and/as Affect in the Global Cruise Industry

Cinzas no Pantanal (2021): questões socioambientais e educativas

This article aims to discuss the Brazilian short film Ashes in the Pantanal (2021), lasting 3 minutes and 21 seconds, in its aesthetic devices, and bets on its constitution as an emancipated filmic work. The work depicts the great fires that occurred in the Pantanal in 2020. The film by filmmaker Mariana Marques and animated by Tiago Franco, produced in stop motion, used scenarios and characters made in origami by artist Elder Alves, requiring more than 350 team working hours. The short film was financed with funds from the Aldir Blanc Law, with the mediation of the Municipal Department of Culture and Tourism (Sectur) and the Municipality of Campo Grande - Mato Grosso do Sul. This work is linked to the research Cine childhood: critical perspectives of cinema – education, UEMS (State University of Mato Grosso do Sul), and the study and research group GECCAE (Group of Critical Studies in Culture, Art and Education). The theoretical contribution of film analysis undertaken here is linked to Critical Theory theorists, especially Adorno (2003), Adorno and Horkheimer (1985), Horkheimer (1939), Benjamin (1994), Fraser and Jaeggi (2020) and cinema, Tarkovski (1998), Vanoye; Goliot-Lété (1994). The choice of the film Cinzas do Pantanal is due to the strong appeal that the production presents to the preservation of this rich Brazilian biome that suffers year after year with fires during the drought period. The film analysis will permeate both the audiovisual techniques used and the socio-environmental and educational issues related to the theme.

Impossible Dreaming: On Speculative Education Fiction and Hopeful Learning Futures

In this paper, we grapple with the possibility of rethinking education futures by arguing for the continued use of speculative education fiction in critical education studies, a method which has the potential for radical imagination. However, we note that, as a research method, such fictions need to rely less on what we identify as pessimistic visions of the future, which are visions exploring themes such as disconnection, lack of autonomy and sovereignty, and technological, corporate, state and/or authoritarian control, as these visions and themes are currently over-represented in recent publications using this method. We further demonstrate the limits of these thematic visions by tracing the relationship between the ways in which pessimistic storytelling, related as it is to apocalyptic storytelling, risks reinforcing inequality, especially with respect to settler colonial injustice. Alternatively, we propose using this method to help develop hopeful futures. These are futures shaped by themes, such as connection, agency and community and individual flourishment, and suggest a turn to the genres of hopepunk, solarpunk and visionary fiction as models of storytelling grounded in hope which imagines more liberatory education and learning futures.

From affirmative to transformative approaches to academic development

ABSTRACT Much academic development work, whether it be student, academic staff, institutional or curriculum development, is undertaken from an affirmative rather than a transformative approach (Luckett, L., and S. Shay. 2020. “Reframing the Curriculum: A Transformative Approach.” Critical Studies in Education 61 (1): 50–65). To be transformative, academic development has to reframe the problem beyond one of poor student retention and throughput. We need to make sense of the conditions from which issues such as poor retention and throughput rates emerge, rather than focusing on mitigating the effects of such conditions within the status quo. Drawing on Fraser’s concept of parity of participation, we suggest that if academic development is to engage in transformative approaches, it needs to adjust the scale of the problem and challenge underpinning assumptions, and thereby review the fitness of universities, curricula and academic development practices for a pluralist society. In sum, a transformative approach to academic development work will entail conceptualising academic development as a political knowledge project.