This discursive paper selectively reviews the empirical papers informing the major part of the special issue. In doing so it focuses particularly on issues which are apparent across many papers. One major point of contrast is the advanced state of marketisation in schools situated at the lower socioeconomic margins. This is relative to those…

This paper focuses on an area of privatisation that has not to date received significant attention in educational research: the privatisation of infrastructure, facilities and maintenance, and in particular the labour of cleaning. Analysing the case of Victoria, Australia, we demonstrate how successive governments have defended the privatisation…

School autonomy policies have circulated through various modes of educational governance internationally, endorsing the view that more autonomy will improve schools and their systems. When subject to the discourses and practices of marketization, however, school 'autonomy' has been mobilized in ways that generate injustice. These injustices are…

The progressively global, neoliberal, privatised, and digital education environment poses new methodological challenges for educational researchers, prompting a need to innovate. It has been suggested, however, that better commentary and reflection on methodological innovation in education is required. This paper considers the benefits and…

This work attempts a comparative description and analysis, focusing on the US, the UK, and Australia on the topic of the Right, educational policy, and schooling. It adopts as its underlying theme the burning fuse in tracing the topic back to Joseph de Maistre a Rightist who fled revolutionary France to seek safety in the company of Tsar Alexander…

One significant, tangible and interesting challenge for the privatised university is its impedance of particular forms of effective engagement and action in teaching and research, notably with respect to inequities in the broader social context, and the position of the university within that context. In the face of significant resource constraints…

While students chanting "No cuts, No fees, No corporate universities" may be dismissed as youthful hyperbole by some, it is not as superficial a characterisation of the state of our public university system as it seems.

If we want to combat contemporary "neoliberal" attacks on universities, we should start by refusing the way that their pseudo-rationalities already determine so many aspects of the intellectual and institutional regimes that we consider under threat. This paper sketches an analysis of those aspects of the internal practices of academia…

Providing higher education to offenders in custody has become an increasingly complex business in the age of digital learning. Most Australian prisoners still have no direct access to the internet and relatively unreliable access to information technology. As incarceration is now a business, prisons, like universities, are increasingly subject to…