Purpose: This article explores the case of the Queensland's reformatory for boys through the years 1871-1919 to analyse how the institution negotiated the complex, and at times competing, goals of reforming, educating and punishing its inmate population. Design/methodology/approach: The article relies on documentary evidence, including archival…

What are controversial issues? Who decides whether something is controversial, and how does it affect how a subject is taught whether a topic is presented as either controversial or not so? Although there has long been a lively debate within educational research on what criteria should be used to determine whether or not an issue is controversial,…

The ethnographer's embodied action during research is a complex of habit, belief, social and institutional positioning, and intention. This article examines what urban anthropologist Wacqaunt calls 'carnal sociology' and considers its implications for ethnographers of religious educational spaces. Contemporary ethnographers of education have…

This essay investigates the development of the boys' magazine, "Our Boys," and how this became a powerful auxiliary to the Christian Brothers' work in schools. It championed the values that the Christian Brothers had propagated since their foundation in 1802. Often characterised as Celtic and Romantic, it was neither, but aimed at…

An analysis of the history of primary education in Belgium by Depaepe et al. in 2000 has demonstrated how the idea of "order" structured classroom reality in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This "order" is not only visible in the internal organisation of schooling (e.g. division into year classes, a…

We get our fixed--or malleable--notions of sexuality and gender from a variety of sources: family expectations, a hypersexualizing media gaze, and through the dictates of those great monoliths, Faith and Obedience within a/the Church. However, gender is also being formed in the well-worn halls and the ordered environment of classrooms: schools are…

This article focuses on the continuing impact of recuperative masculinity politics in the schooling of economically advantaged boys (elite and middle class); yet, it also indicates resistance to this politics. An understanding that the gender order is unstable and that variants of hegemonic masculinity continue to morph in the context of…

This paper explores the cultural and economic strategies of educated but un/under-employed young Muslim men aged between 20 and 34 in a village in western Uttar Pradesh, north India. Drawing on Connell's gender theory, the paper demonstrates how economic and political forces shape Muslim young men's strategies. The paper distinguishes between…