Jessica Gerrard
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 110342 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Jessica Gerrard |
| NOMBRES | Jessica |
| APELLIDO | Gerrard |
| FIRMA | GERRARD J |
| AFILIACIONES | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9011-6055 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 57 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 261 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 57 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2011 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Before ‘gender whisperers’
This paper responds to the contemporary backlash to LGBTIQ+ rights and its focus on queer and transgender children and teachers in schools, by returning to campaigns to exclude gay and lesbian teachers in the 1970s. It brings renewed historical context to debates surrounding teacher employment and teachers’ moral status as harbingers of the future nation state. We focus on one Australian case, when in 1976 the Queensland government refused to emp…
Educational authority on the outskirts of schooling
This paper explores the experiences of parents who reject formal schooling, providing home education for their own children. At a time of debate about knowledge and expertise, we examine how home educators—operating on the outskirts of formal education—curate knowledge and define their educational authority. Based on interviews with 15 Australian home educators, we show how they sought knowledge aligned with their values, their children’s interes…
Scalecraft, scalecreep and scalecrunch
Quantifying, measuring, and enacting equity
The barriers between work and play have broken down’
Parental rights and state concerns
This paper examines the contestations surrounding the rights and responsibilities of the state and parents to educate children. Focusing our analysis on home education, we suggest that these disputes represent the convergence of–at times agonistic–parental and state politics of care and concern surrounding education and children. To advance our argument, we analyse how the problem of ‘home education’ is represented in two policy reports across tw…
The engaged parent
Schools as public things
This article takes up Bonnie Honig's notion of 'public things' to conceptualise schools as sites of attachment and meaning that draw people into the relationships of care and concern that are crucial for democratic life. By linking this with Sara Ahmed's theorisation of affective relations and use, we develop Honig's idea that communities cultivate public things through their use of such things, at the same time as the things themselves shape the…
Participatory politics and education policy reform
In this theoretical article, we respond to a common education policy discourse that represents community participation in educational policy-making as an essentially rational solution to policy problems and as inherently progressive and democratic.We propose that conceptualising participatory politics as 'publics' challenges this discourse and provides new openings for understanding community participation in education policy reform as modes of w…
Philanthropy, marketing disadvantage and the enterprising public school
Disadvantage in schooling is often constructed as a crisis in need of fixing. Global policy reforms tend to emphasise that solutions for disadvantage often lie beyond the capacity of the state, necessitating private/philanthropic intervention. This paper seeks to contribute to this line of analysis by investigating the rise of philanthropy in Australian public schooling. Our analysis focuses on the intermediary organisation, Schools Plus, which w…
Against “Progressivism”
This article charts how a disdain for progressivism in schooling was central to the development of conservative interests across the 1970s and 1980s. It does so by examining the Australian Council for Educational Standards (ACES) Review (1973–1987). This under-examined newsletter offers important insight into the cultivation of cultural conservatism, having links with the influential Australian conservative think tank the Centre for Independent S…
Working with and against the bureaucratic state
The article introduces an international Special Issue that addresses the significant question of how and why people organise to engage with policy making in the public sphere of education, from a historical perspective. Focusing on the phenomenon of ‘grassroots' community organising during the key formation period of the 1970s and 1980s, the issue collects articles from Australia, Canada, Chile, South Korea, Spain (Catalonia) and the United State…
The educational dynamics of populism
In response to the contemporary problematic of populism and associated reactionary right-wing politics, this paper argues for a greater analytic focus on the role of schools and teacher expertise in understanding the social relations of populism. This conceptual paper builds a conjunctural conceptualisation of populism that understands it as an invariable political modality of modern democracies, mobilised to different political ends. Extending t…
The Productivity of Unemployment and the Temporality of Employment-to-Come
This article demonstrates how unemployment is made productive through workfare activities for older disadvantaged job seekers. We suggest that the requirement to look for work, engage in education and training, and participate in voluntary work blurs the boundaries between employment and unemployment. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research with older disadvantaged job seekers, we demonstrate how this obligatory productivity is lived and felt, c…
Learning Whiteness
Teachers and educational policy
This double special issue, “Teachers and educational policy: markets, populism, and im/possibilities for resistance” explores the figurative politics of the teacher in current education systems around the world. In this introduction to the issue, we discuss how and why teachers have emerged as a key focus of contemporary policy reform. We argue that teachers are seen as a logical site of public commentary in the global knowledge economy, yet teac…
Activist women, schooling and the rise of grassroots Christian conservatism
Policy translations of citizen participation and new public governance
This paper considers the policy problematic of state–citizen relationships, reflecting on renewed calls for citizen collaboration and codesign in the provision of public services in ‘new public governance’. Analysing this through recent policy reform in Australian public school governance, we examine how existing policy architectures – in this case school boards/councils – are being rearticulated in relation to such calls. Drawing on in-depth int…
Post-secular affective labours of teaching
This paper examines the complex interweaving of the ‘personal’ and ‘professional’ in the affective labour of teachers. In line with theorisations of affective labour, contemporary school-teaching involves practices of self-work and self-making, as much as practices of curriculum and pedagogy. One emergent form of self-work, reflective of post-secular socio-cultural movements in education, is the use of contemplative practices (mindfulness, medita…
The governing parent-citizen
Internationally, major policy reforms seek to deepen parent and community engagement in schools. Whilst pervasive in policy documents, however, discourses surrounding ‘parent engagement’ are often elastic and imprecise, ultimately gaining meaning through the technologies of governance that shape policy enactments in schools. In this paper, we argue that contemporary schooling reforms are constructing a new ‘governing parent-citizen’ through which…
A política da sociologia crítica das políticas
Este artigo reflete sobre o que significa fazer sociologia crítica das políticasna mudança de contextos teóricos, empíricos e metodológicos da educação. Concentramos nossas lentes analíticas em duas considerações principais.Em primeiro lugar, refletimos sobre a política da criticidade, examinando diferentes afirmações e debates sobre o que significa fazer pesquisa crítica e ser um pesquisador crítico da política educacional, prestando atenção esp…
Ethics in neoliberalism? Parental responsibility and education policy in Chile and Australia
This article questions the diverse and, in some cases, contradictory ethical forms present in contemporary neoliberal policy frames. In particular, we analyse the demands of responsibility - as a form of ethical commitment - requested of parents by education policies in the contexts of Chile and Australia. Assuming neoliberalism as a contextualised and multivocal form of governing, we applied a policy sociology approach to study the ethical impli…
The politics of critical policy sociology
Este artigo reflete sobre o que significa fazer sociologia crítica das políticasna mudança de contextos teóricos, empíricos e metodológicos da educação. Concentramos nossas lentes analíticas em duas considerações principais.Em primeiro lugar, refletimos sobre a política da criticidade, examinando diferentes afirmações e debates sobre o que significa fazer pesquisa crítica e ser um pesquisador crítico da política educacional, prestando atenção esp…
Education and racial capitalism
This paper works with theories of racial capitalism to show how formal education has been produced through interlocking systems of domination: capitalism, racism, and colonialism. With a focus on the enduring histories of British settler colonialism, we put forward a framework for analysing the constitutive relationship between contemporary systems of education and racial capitalism. The paper discusses three connected relations: (I) the ongoing …
Love across Class
Education and racial capitalism
This paper works with theories of racial capitalism to show how formal education has been produced through interlocking systems of domination: capitalism, racism, and colonialism. With a focus on the enduring histories of British settler colonialism, we put forward a framework for analysing the constitutive relationship between contemporary systems of education and racial capitalism. The paper discusses three connected relations: (I) the ongoing …
The Politics of Post-Qualitative Inquiry
In this article, we offer a critical reading of the increasingly popular "post-qualitative" approach to research. We draw on insights from postcolonial theory to offer some provocations about the methodological and conceptual claims made by post-qualitative inquiry. The article considers how post-qualitative inquiry opens up possibilities for post-humanist social research. But, our critical reading of these "new" approaches argues that such resea…
The ‘lamentable sight’ of homelessness and the society of the spectacle
In this paper, we contend that the visual discourses of poverty and inequality are constructed through everyday social relations – the visual, spatial and bodily ‘encounter’ with homelessness in public space, steeped in the politics of the stigmatised Other. Bringing together Erving Goffman’s theory of everyday encounters with Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle, we explore the intersection between the ‘sight’ and ‘scene’ of homelessness and th…
Academic Knowledge and Contemporary Poverty
This article explores the field of homelessness research in relation to the dynamics of contemporary inequality and governmentality, arguing that the dominant perspectives within this field have developed in ways that can converge with the demands of neoliberal governance. The article discusses the causal focus of much homelessness research, the emergence of the 'orthodoxy' of homelessness research and new approaches emphasising subjectivity and …
Self help and protest
First initiated in the late 1960s, the black supplementary school movement is now approaching its fifth decade of existence. Located across Englands town and city centres, this movement represents important sites of community-based education and independent black culture. The history of black supplementary schooling points to a concerted reclamation of black knowledge and culture, and the asserted capability of black students, parents, and commun…
Public education in neoliberal times
This article reflects on the desire to defend and claim public education amidst the educational policy effects of contemporary neoliberal politics. The defence of public education, from schools to higher education, undoubtedly provides a powerful counter-veiling weight to the neoliberal policy logic of education-as-individual-value-accrual. At a time of intense global policy reform centred on marketisation in education, the public education insti…
The economy of smiles
This paper examines the affective dimensions of new forms of informal entrepreneurial work carried out in spaces of unemployment. Situating the analysis within contemporary scholarship on deservingness and on affect and labour, I shed light on the forms of entrepreneurial labour that rely upon affect-driven economies of exchange underpinned by moral judgements of deservingness, value and worth. In particular, this paper draws on a multi-city (Mel…
All that is Solid Melts into Work
In this paper I examine the intersections between a general commitment to education and learning and the moral and ethical dimensions of the work ethic under contemporary capitalism. Drawing on Kathi Weeks' (2011) recent exploration of the work ethic in The Problem with Work, I suggest there is a relationship between the form and function of the work ethic- and what I term the 'learning ethic'. I suggest that commitment to a learning ethic, to th…
The politics of critical policy sociology
Este artigo reflete sobre o que significa fazer sociologia crítica das políticasna mudança de contextos teóricos, empíricos e metodológicos da educação. Concentramos nossas lentes analíticas em duas considerações principais.Em primeiro lugar, refletimos sobre a política da criticidade, examinando diferentes afirmações e debates sobre o que significa fazer pesquisa crítica e ser um pesquisador crítico da política educacional, prestando atenção esp…
The governing parent-citizen
Internationally, major policy reforms seek to deepen parent and community engagement in schools. Whilst pervasive in policy documents, however, discourses surrounding ‘parent engagement’ are often elastic and imprecise, ultimately gaining meaning through the technologies of governance that shape policy enactments in schools. In this paper, we argue that contemporary schooling reforms are constructing a new ‘governing parent-citizen’ through which…
The uneducated and the politics of knowing in 'post truth' times
Contemporary politics has brought the figure of the ‘uneducated’ into glaring view, from Trump’s ‘love’ of the ‘poorly educated’ to analyses suggesting a supposed ‘uneducated populous’ is responsible for the rise of far-right politics. In this paper I respond to this so-called ‘post-truth’ contemporary moment by considering how education underpins many ‘progressive’ or ‘left’ responses to rightist political impulses and flesh out the repercussion…
Whose public, which public? The challenge for public education
Contemporary campaigns for public education rest upon an assumption that public schools are fundamental to an equitable and inclusive society. In this paper, I reflect on this presumption by exploring the inherent tensions of the meaning and practice of ‘public’ education, especially when the ‘public’ in public schooling is linked to political contestation and change in relation to the nation state. In particular, this discussion considers the wa…
Searching for the public
School funding is a principal site of policy reform and contestation in the context of broad global shifts towards private- and market-based funding models. These shifts are transforming not only how schools are funded but also the meanings and practices of public education: that is, shifts in what is ‘public’ about schooling. In this paper, we examine the ways in which different articulations of ‘the public’ are brought to bear in contemporary d…
Ethics in neoliberalism? Parental responsibility and education policy in Chile and Australia
This article questions the diverse and, in some cases, contradictory ethical forms present in contemporary neoliberal policy frames. In particular, we analyse the demands of responsibility - as a form of ethical commitment - requested of parents by education policies in the contexts of Chile and Australia. Assuming neoliberalism as a contextualised and multivocal form of governing, we applied a policy sociology approach to study the ethical impli…
The refugee crisis, non-citizens, border politics and education
In the midst of the most serious refugee crisis since WWII, nation states are buttressing their borders. This paper explores the border politics of the nation state in response to the refugee crisis. Drawing on the work of Susan Sontag, Judith Butler and Imogen Tyler it considers the ways in which the imagery of the pain and suffering of Others is deployed to bolster concerns surrounding the sovereignty and safety of the nation state. I suggest t…
The limits of learning
Across national contexts, in the attempt to develop and buttress ‘knowledge economies’, increasing pressure is placed on the need for flexible lifelong learners capable of constant knowledge and skills renewal. In this paper, I explore the impact of this broader sociopolitical context on the policy approach to poverty and, in particular, homelessness in Australia. Examining the ways in which education and learning for adults are increasingly at t…
Gender, community and education
This paper compares the ways in which gender was articulated and experienced through the construction of children’s education in two very different community-led educational initiatives in Britain: turn-of-the-century Socialist Sunday Schools and late-twentieth-century Black Supplementary Schools. Exploration of these historical examples of practice assist to challenge dominant representations of inactive working-class and Black parents, and prov…
Peopling’ curriculum policy production
This paper explores the methodological basis for empirically researching moments of major policy change. Its genesis is in the methodological challenges presented by the initial stages of an ongoing research project examining the current attempts to establish the first nation-wide Australian curriculum. We draw on Dorothy Smith's development of institutional ethnography and Bourdieuian field analysis to outline a methodological framework for rese…
Templates, typologies and typifications
Neoliberalism as a concept, ideology, or theoretical lens has emerged in the last couple of decades as a monolithic presence in education research, and the social sciences more broadly. We bring two aims to this Special Issue: to critique the rigour of neoliberalism as a theoretical framework utilised within education research; and second, to explore and propose an alternative to neoliberalism as a critical frame of analysis. This paper will post…
Welfare rights, self-help and social enterprise
Neoliberalism is often represented as a fundamental intrusion of individualism into post-war welfare policy settlements. This article seeks to unpick this understanding through a case study of the intersections between the welfare rights and self-help approaches of the homeless and community sectors in the 1970s and 1980s, and the emergence of social enterprise and The Big Issue in the 1990s. First, I outline the development of a dedicated 'homel…
Little Soldiers” for Socialism
This paper examines the ways in which turn-of-the-century British socialists enacted socialism for children through the British Socialist Sunday School movement. It focuses in particular on the movement's emergence in the 1890s and the first three decades of operation. Situated amidst a growing international field of comparable socialist children's initiatives, socialist Sunday schools attempted to connect their local activity of children's educa…
The Productivity of Unemployment and the Temporality of Employment-to-Come
This article demonstrates how unemployment is made productive through workfare activities for older disadvantaged job seekers. We suggest that the requirement to look for work, engage in education and training, and participate in voluntary work blurs the boundaries between employment and unemployment. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research with older disadvantaged job seekers, we demonstrate how this obligatory productivity is lived and felt, c…
Cleaning public education
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 of cleaning labour on the basis that it allows schools to concentrate on the ‘core’ business of teachi…
Tracing radical working-class education
Growing collections of social and educational history chronicle the many instances of educational agency that lie outside institutional narratives. Renewing and developing historical understanding, these histories raise important methodological questions surrounding historical representation. Addressing such questions, this paper develops the methodological notion of praxis as a means to trace genealogies of radical working-class educational agen…
The engaged parent
Gender, community and education
This paper compares the ways in which gender was articulated and experienced through the construction of children’s education in two very different community-led educational initiatives in Britain: turn-of-the-century Socialist Sunday Schools and late-twentieth-century Black Supplementary Schools. Exploration of these historical examples of practice assist to challenge dominant representations of inactive working-class and Black parents, and prov…
Self help and protest
First initiated in the late 1960s, the black supplementary school movement is now approaching its fifth decade of existence. Located across Englands town and city centres, this movement represents important sites of community-based education and independent black culture. The history of black supplementary schooling points to a concerted reclamation of black knowledge and culture, and the asserted capability of black students, parents, and commun…
Tracing radical working-class education
Growing collections of social and educational history chronicle the many instances of educational agency that lie outside institutional narratives. Renewing and developing historical understanding, these histories raise important methodological questions surrounding historical representation. Addressing such questions, this paper develops the methodological notion of praxis as a means to trace genealogies of radical working-class educational agen…
Educating for diversity and social justice
Peopling’ curriculum policy production
This paper explores the methodological basis for empirically researching moments of major policy change. Its genesis is in the methodological challenges presented by the initial stages of an ongoing research project examining the current attempts to establish the first nation-wide Australian curriculum. We draw on Dorothy Smith's development of institutional ethnography and Bourdieuian field analysis to outline a methodological framework for rese…
Little Soldiers” for Socialism
This paper examines the ways in which turn-of-the-century British socialists enacted socialism for children through the British Socialist Sunday School movement. It focuses in particular on the movement's emergence in the 1890s and the first three decades of operation. Situated amidst a growing international field of comparable socialist children's initiatives, socialist Sunday schools attempted to connect their local activity of children's educa…
From Fuck Marry Kill to Snog Marry Avoid
Radical childhoods
Counter-narratives of educational excellence
The notion of ‘competitive excellence’ is an enduring cornerstone of UK educational policy. Most recently, expanding and adapting New Labour’s Academy project with the introduction of free schools, the Coalition’s approach advances and embeds competitive market-based forms of community engagement in education. Responding to this policy paradigm, this paper draws upon history in order to open up the notion of excellence. Through examining alternat…
All that is Solid Melts into Work
In this paper I examine the intersections between a general commitment to education and learning and the moral and ethical dimensions of the work ethic under contemporary capitalism. Drawing on Kathi Weeks' (2011) recent exploration of the work ethic in The Problem with Work, I suggest there is a relationship between the form and function of the work ethic- and what I term the 'learning ethic'. I suggest that commitment to a learning ethic, to th…
Public education in neoliberal times
This article reflects on the desire to defend and claim public education amidst the educational policy effects of contemporary neoliberal politics. The defence of public education, from schools to higher education, undoubtedly provides a powerful counter-veiling weight to the neoliberal policy logic of education-as-individual-value-accrual. At a time of intense global policy reform centred on marketisation in education, the public education insti…
The ‘lamentable sight’ of homelessness and the society of the spectacle
In this paper, we contend that the visual discourses of poverty and inequality are constructed through everyday social relations – the visual, spatial and bodily ‘encounter’ with homelessness in public space, steeped in the politics of the stigmatised Other. Bringing together Erving Goffman’s theory of everyday encounters with Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle, we explore the intersection between the ‘sight’ and ‘scene’ of homelessness and th…
The limits of learning
Across national contexts, in the attempt to develop and buttress ‘knowledge economies’, increasing pressure is placed on the need for flexible lifelong learners capable of constant knowledge and skills renewal. In this paper, I explore the impact of this broader sociopolitical context on the policy approach to poverty and, in particular, homelessness in Australia. Examining the ways in which education and learning for adults are increasingly at t…
Whose public, which public? The challenge for public education
Contemporary campaigns for public education rest upon an assumption that public schools are fundamental to an equitable and inclusive society. In this paper, I reflect on this presumption by exploring the inherent tensions of the meaning and practice of ‘public’ education, especially when the ‘public’ in public schooling is linked to political contestation and change in relation to the nation state. In particular, this discussion considers the wa…
Radical Childhoods
Academic Knowledge and Contemporary Poverty
This article explores the field of homelessness research in relation to the dynamics of contemporary inequality and governmentality, arguing that the dominant perspectives within this field have developed in ways that can converge with the demands of neoliberal governance. The article discusses the causal focus of much homelessness research, the emergence of the 'orthodoxy' of homelessness research and new approaches emphasising subjectivity and …
Precarious Enterprise on the Margins
This book explores the contemporary conditions of marginal work within the context of persistent unemployment, poverty, and homelessness in wealthy nations. Drawing from research concerning three citi
Searching for the public
School funding is a principal site of policy reform and contestation in the context of broad global shifts towards private- and market-based funding models. These shifts are transforming not only how schools are funded but also the meanings and practices of public education: that is, shifts in what is ‘public’ about schooling. In this paper, we examine the ways in which different articulations of ‘the public’ are brought to bear in contemporary d…
The refugee crisis, non-citizens, border politics and education
In the midst of the most serious refugee crisis since WWII, nation states are buttressing their borders. This paper explores the border politics of the nation state in response to the refugee crisis. Drawing on the work of Susan Sontag, Judith Butler and Imogen Tyler it considers the ways in which the imagery of the pain and suffering of Others is deployed to bolster concerns surrounding the sovereignty and safety of the nation state. I suggest t…
The Interconnected Histories of Labour and Homelessness
This paper examines the interconnections between the history of homelessness and the history of labour in Australia. Taking a purposeful broad scope, focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the paper explores the ways in which homelessness is central to the history of work and labour. Drawing on the mythology attached to the swag and swagmen in Australian popular culture as its starting point, this paper demonstrates the need to…
Welfare rights, self-help and social enterprise
Neoliberalism is often represented as a fundamental intrusion of individualism into post-war welfare policy settlements. This article seeks to unpick this understanding through a case study of the intersections between the welfare rights and self-help approaches of the homeless and community sectors in the 1970s and 1980s, and the emergence of social enterprise and The Big Issue in the 1990s. First, I outline the development of a dedicated 'homel…
The Politics of Post-Qualitative Inquiry
In this article, we offer a critical reading of the increasingly popular "post-qualitative" approach to research. We draw on insights from postcolonial theory to offer some provocations about the methodological and conceptual claims made by post-qualitative inquiry. The article considers how post-qualitative inquiry opens up possibilities for post-humanist social research. But, our critical reading of these "new" approaches argues that such resea…
Knowledge and racial violence
This paper offers a critique of ‘powerful knowledge’ – a concept in Education Studies that has been presented as a just basis for school curricula. Powerful knowledge is disciplinary knowledge produced and refined through a process of ‘specialisation’ that usually occurs in universities. Drawing on postcolonial, decolonial and Indigenous studies, we show how powerful knowledge seems to focus on the progressive impulse of modernity (its ‘shine’) w…
Migration and the borders of education
Borders matter. Borders, such as those that act as the demarcation of nation states, are routinely reinforced symbolically and materially. Trump’s infamous wall, Australia’s offshore detention cent
Social enterprise, education and work
This paper examines the rise of social enterprise in relation (and in response) to the contemporary nexus between education and work. Contextualising social enterprise within the broader trend toward private influences in education, the paper explores how diffuse networks driven by both market ideals and a social conscience are shaping new sites of education and work on the margins. Drawing on in-depth research undertaken on the experiences of ho…
Sociology (50 obras) · Political science (46 obras) · Law (32 obras) · Politics (25 obras) · Global Education and Multiculturalism (18 obras) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (17 obras) · Law (17 obras) · Economics (16 obras) · Gender Studies (16 obras) · Social science (16 obras)