Purpose: Recent trends in Western civics education have attempted to secure democratic institutions from perceived threats. This paper investigates how political securitisation historically operated within civics textbooks in Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand. It further evaluates how Maori, Aboriginal and other Indigenous peoples were variably…

Background: Undergirding the dominant research focus on gender representation in textbooks is the assumption that making texts progressive in their construction of gender is a panacea for equality in the classroom. As this study demonstrates, however, textbooks containing traditional representations of gender can be used to challenge biases, while…

Although multiculturalism replaced the White Australia Policy in the 1970s, the Australian nation continues to be imagined predominantly as a White space from which Aborigines, Torres Strait Islanders and peoples of non-White immigrant heritage are excluded. Whereas White people's positioning as Australian is secure and taken for granted,…