In a global context where children are increasingly exposed to hostile humour in cartoons like Adventure Time and Spongebob Squarepants, it is not surprising that we see this play out in school settings. More concerning, however, is how teachers can misuse their position of power to wield such forms of humour against students who dare to question…

In the United States, schools are expected to navigate the political climate of anti-critical race theory and anti-LGBTQ + discrimination, where white identity politics herald white knowledge as the invisible standard against which racial, gender, and sexuality differences are constructed. State policies that facilitate the removal of diverse…

It is well established that China has emerged as a major economic power, resulting from the nation's neoliberal modernization. What is less understood is the socio-cultural and educational impact of this change on public institutions. This article focuses on the education system, which is currently seen as central to delivering the nation's…

This article explores the use of critical and post-critical pedagogies in a rural Australian high school for the purposes of unsettling life-limiting gender beliefs and practices. The paper problematises two examples whereby site-specific knowledges, curriculum dictates, media texts and critical pedagogies were enmeshed to create politically…

This article traces links between subjectivity, peer relations and neighbourhood risk for a group of boys living in an area of London with high levels of crime, gang activity and socio-economic inequality. Drawing on data from a qualitative study of young people and neighbourhood risk, we use a psycho-social approach to analyse how gendered…

Education reform continues around the globe, though questioned and critiqued in relation to goals of democratizing educational decision-making. Newspapers are one site of contestation and negotiation where struggles over global reform discourses are contextualized in "obvious" and "natural" local language. In this article, I…

Popular television drama is an important discursive site engaging the public with debates about schooling and professional identity. Between 1999 and 2011, external discourses of "crisis" (of academic achievement or students' mental and emotional health) were mediated as alternative discourses of "crisis, failure, and…

Drawing on post-structural and post-colonial conceptions of gender, this paper explores multiple student masculinities and femininities in the classrooms of four junior secondary schools in Botswana. These gendered identities, it is argued, are negotiated within broader institutional constraints that have been socio-historically produced. Such…

Across the analysis of interview fragments from two young men with hearing disabilities who attended secondary schools in Australia, this paper will demonstrate that masculinity in the schoolyard frequently emerges within and as a collective form of violence and malevolence against the disabled body. Yet while certain individuals or groups may…

This paper is about how 9-11-year-old children, particularly girls, co-construct tomboy and girly-girl identities as oppositional positions. The paper sits within a theoretical framework in which I understand individual and collective masculinities and femininities as ways of "doing man/woman" or "doing boy/girl" that are…

This paper explores how Foucault's concept of the panopticon, power and knowledge impacts on the identity of young Nunga males in a secondary educational institution. I argue that the regulation of the Nunga body in schools is embedded in the discursive formations of knowledge about Indigenous people and the workings of power that are tied up in…

Advocates for boys' education have forwarded numerous "fixes" for boys' supposed educational woes, including both academic and non-academic programs and strategies. This article focuses on the lesser-discussed non-academic, extra-curricular means suggested, specifically outdoor education. Using qualitative analysis of an Australian…

This paper draws on research on masculinities to examine poetry as a socially and culturally gendered genre. Situated in the context of the current "crisis" around boys' underachievement in school, attention is drawn to the problematic understanding of poetry as an unsuitable genre for boys. Attention is further drawn to the way in which poetry,…

The Greek community in Melbourne, Australia, is large and has a long history in the city. It is diverse and associated with a range of cultural, social and political structures. It has strong transnational links and in many ways exemplifies "diasporic" in contradistinction to "migrant". This paper focuses on young people from…

Drawing on a larger ethnographic study of four high school young men, this paper foregrounds high school male-male friendships as a context for examining how heterosexism and homophobia operate to limit and delimit the ways masculinities are constructed. I begin this article by first highlighting an inconsistency between recent school initiatives…