This History of Education Society Presidential Address primarily utilizes evocative autoethnography and narrative inquiry to convey its main points. It is written in the storytelling tradition of the African American past and analyzes the lives of three generations of Black Mississippians as they navigated life in Jim Crow Mississippi. It…

We propose a new framework for understanding post-conflict history education based on ethnographic fieldwork in the same South African school two decades apart. We explore how and why teachers engage with the legacies of conflict in 1998 and 2019 by investigating how they draw boundaries around 1) time, what the conflict period is and how stark…

This article explores how whiteness is enacted and negotiated from the perspective of a conductor in a Playback Theatre performance (PT). The article addresses how PT provides a stage for exercising opportunities for "doing white differently" in post-apartheid South Africa. It argues that "Doing white differently" takes place…

Multilingualism as a consequence of transnational mobility and migration is prominent in studies of language socialization and family multilingualism in the Global North. While mobility within and between the various regions in South Africa sustains multilingualism and aligns with the global dynamic of mobility, Indigenous multilingualism is…

The article critiques the tendency in the field of international education to theorize internationalization around the impacts of and policy responses to globalization in local contexts. The central argument of the article is that South Africa's history and development prospects are so intricately bound up with those of its neighbors in the…

Language policy and Linguistic Landscapes (LL) are a highly contested area in South Africa. Due to Apartheid, the education system constitutes the core of such contestation. In Post-Apartheid South Africa the new Constitution of 1996, the South African Schools Act (SASA) and recent political initiatives such as the Use of Official Languages Act of…

This article focuses on the El Sistema programme, which started up in Sweden in 2010 with the objective to deal with segregation problems typical for Swedish urban areas. The purpose of the article is to examine how promoting integration through music and music education is constructed within El Sistema as a way to help children growing up in…

In this ethnographic study, we look closely at everyday classroom interactions in order to examine the complex process of creating equitable classroom communities in racially and socioeconomically diverse schools. We use the lens of relational difference (Abu El-Haj, 2006) to examine how students negotiate social boundaries within their new…

Critical racial studies of school choice elucidate the worsening effects of school choice policy on racial segregation in diversifying cities around the world. This paper contributes to this scholarship by illuminating how a neoliberal education policy of school choice has created racial divisions in new ways in a settler-colonial city. It focuses…

Drawing on existing literature and student ethnographic projects, this article examines Asian American undergraduates' overwhelming focus on individual racial identity and practices of racial segregation in their ethnographic research about the University of Illinois. The author examines how such racial segregation is described and analysed as a…

University of Arizona's Marta Civil has been studying the complexities of bridging in-school and out-of-school mathematics for some time, during which she has raised specific questions related to connecting in-school and out-of-school mathematics (Civil, 2002, 2007, 2014). These questions have to do with "What is mathematics?"…

Drawing on data from a historical-ethnographic study of the cultural politics of school desegregation in Seattle, USA, the author explores suffering as a recurring theme in the narratives of four black leaders, educators and activists involved in the struggle for black educational opportunity in that city during the post-Civil Rights Era. As these…

This article explores the relationship between language, hegemony and identity in a desegregated school in suburban Johannesburg, South Africa. Drawing on post-structuralist theories of language learning and identity that evaluate cultural models of literacy, ideologies and institutional discourses, this article examines how multilingual learners'…

The article examines the enactment of culturally relevant progressivism on the part of the principal of the Social Justice School, a small urban public high school explicitly committed to democratic education. Drawing upon extensive interviews and field observations conducted over the course of an academic year by a teacher-researcher within the…

This article considers the socioeconomic changes that have impacted on the lives of poor children since the end of apartheid in South Africa. In particular, the article highlights the ways in which child labour legislation after 1994 has had the unintended consequence of deepening chronic hunger and childhood poverty on food-rich farms where…