This paper critically examines articulations of relationality present in education policy texts that shape particular discursive representations of relationality between students, teachers and curriculum. The policy texts of Australian state and territory education departments are considered as a set of discursive statements to illustrate how…

Feedback remains a fundamental and challenging aspect of higher education policy and practice. Increasingly research has sought to understand how to more effectively develop students' feedback literacy in order to improve individuals' engagement with assessment feedback. To date, work within this area has been underpinned by cognitive and…

Despite their geographical distance, the UK and Australia share proximity with their hostile immigration policies and managed migration practices, characterised by inhumanity under the guise of deterrence. People Seeking Asylum (PSA) who seek sanctuary typically endure protracted temporariness, which denies them access to state resources and…

Research on policy enactment has explored tensions created by accountability approaches associated with new forms of management under neoliberalism. These approaches generate particular discursive constructs of the 'good teacher' -- constructs that often negate the rich, unmeasurable, and ethical practices associated with teacher professionalism.…

This article reports on a critical policy analysis of discourses related to school exclusions. The management of problematic student behaviour is one of the intractable problems facing education systems today. Despite being ineffective, school suspensions and exclusions are commonly used in many countries as a discipline strategy to manage student…

The process of reversing a neoliberal regime in highly marketised higher education systems entails the discussion of such a regime's normative principles and policy frameworks. Little has been said about what decommodification would involve or the implications of such a project for the constitution of a public regime in higher education. Two…

In this essay, I draw on the socio-historical context of free speech and hate speech in U.S. public higher education and the concepts of color-evasiveness and free speech ideology to conceptualize a "color-evasive free speech ideology." The ideology I conceptualize is characterized by a prevailing belief that protecting and defending…

Social media has become a core feature in policy development and enactment. This article extends current features of digital policy sociology to include the entanglement of education policy development processes with new media, paying particular attention to how two conservative think tanks in Australia have strategically used social media in…

A concerted attempt to offer an affect (emotions, desires, moods, and/or attitudes) lens underlying the global university rankings (GURs) phenomenon remains absent. Using two commercial ranker case studies ("Times Higher Education" (THE) and "Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd" (QS)), this article provides a critical policy analysis…

This paper seeks to raise awareness among educational researchers and practitioners of some significant weaknesses and internal contradictions of randomised control trials (RCTs). Although critiques throughout the years from education scholars have pointed to the detrimental effects of this experimental approach on education practice and values,…

This paper argues that more focus on the temporal is needed in critical policy sociology in education. In so asserting, the paper extends the concept of 'historically informed' as included in the foundational definition of policy sociology in education proffered by Jenny Ozga. There are four foci to this extension to encompass the temporal, taken…

This article reflects on what doing critical policy sociology means in shifting theoretical, empirical and methodological contexts of education. We focus our analytical lens on two primary considerations. First, we reflect on the "politics of criticality," examining differing claims and debates about what it means to do critical research…

The policy and educational ideal of parent-school engagement rests on assumptions about effective communication with parents about children's educational progress and well-being. Yet communication between school and home varies, and can be a source of parental satisfaction "and" frustration. Here we consider perspectives of Australian…

This article draws upon Torfing's dialectics of path-shaping and path-dependency to shed light on the persistent challenge faced by the policymakers to reduce academic burden in Korea. It is argued that the policy agenda to promote a more all-encompassing form of education reflects the path-shaping motivation of the Ministry of Education to modify…

This paper revisits and reassesses the influence of the context of production on the origin, development and use of the term 'policy sociology' in research in the sociology of education in the UK from the 1980s to the contemporary period. Starting with the first use of the term 'policy sociology,' and its definition as 'rooted in social science…