Deborah Youdell
Biographic Data
| ID | 760832 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Deborah Youdell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Deborah |
| FAMILY NAME | Youdell |
| SIGNATURE | YOUDELL D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Birmingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7924-6262 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 281 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
‘Quality and consequence’: Interrogating the drive for new performance indicators and funding levers in Australian initial teacher education programs
Performance indicators and other accountability measures are increasingly common in higher education internationally. Consistent with this trend, the Australian Federal Government’s Teacher Education Expert Panel (TEEP) recently recommended new reforms to strengthen the link between performance and funding of initial teacher education (ITE). Recommended reforms included (i) the measurement and publication of ITE performance on four categories of …
Feeling school failure: The emotional politics of grade retention and the making of schooled subjects
Reflections on how education can be for democracy in the twenty-first century
This paper is one of two that bring together a range of education scholars to consider how education might be for democracy in a time of complex challenges facing twenty-first century societies. In this paper, scholars from Australia, Japan and the United Kingdom consider how sites of formal and informal education can respond to multiple unfolding crises, including the COVID-19 global pandemic, catastrophic climate change and ecological collapse,…
From science wars to transdisciplinarity: The inescapability of the neuroscience, biology and sociology of learning
In this paper we begin to explore how knowledges being generated in bioscience might be brought into productive articulation with the Sociology of Education, considering the potential for emerging transdisciplinary, ‘biosocial’ approaches to enable new ways of researching and understanding pressing educational issues. In this paper, as in our current research, we take learning as our focus. Our work brings together collaborators from across field…
Biological sciences, social sciences and the languages of stress
There are well documented concerns with the imposition of high stakes testing into the fabric of school education, and there is now an increasing focus on how such tests impact children’s ‘well-being’. This can be witnessed in reports in the popular news media, where discussion of these impacts frequently refer to ‘stress’ and ‘anxiety’. Yet, there is no work that is able to tell us about what is happening in the bodies of the teachers and childr…
Bioscience and the sociology of education: The case for biosocial education
This article makes a case for biosocial education as a field of research and as a potential framework for education practice. The article engages with sociology of education’s contemporary interests in embodiment and affect, the possibilities offered by concept studies, and uses of assemblage and complexity theory for thinking about educational phenomena. It also considers broader social science and political theory engagements with epigenetics a…
Ghostings, materialisations and flows in Britain's special educational needs and disability assemblage
In this paper we argue that the UK government's new special educational needs and disability (SEND) Code of Practice marks a further movement in the expansion of what Tomlinson has identified as the SEN industry. Yet at the same time, we suggest that the Code inaugurates a series of less familiar movements of policy, of governance and responsibility, of understanding SEND, and of the constitution of subjects identified in these terms. We make use…
New biological sciences, sociology and education
Since the Human Genome Project mapped the gene sequence, new biological sciences have been generating a raft of new knowledges about the mechanisms and functions of the molecular body. One of the m
Psychopathology at school: Theorizing mental disorders in school
Review Symposium of Psychopathology at school: theorizing mental disorders in school, by Valerie Harwood and Julie Allan, London, Routledge, 2014, 208 pp., ISBN 978-0-41-581042-5
Assembling, disassembling and reassembling ‘youth services’ in Austerity Britain
This paper moves from a reading of processes that are transforming public services in ways that amount to a dismantling of the welfare state in the UK. In order to interrogate these processes, the paper focuses on ‘youth’ and ‘youth services’. Framed by an analysis of the aggressive disinvestment of ‘austerity’, we take up Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the assemblage as a tool to map and understand the apparently disparate factors or component…
A politics beyond subjects: The affective choreographies and smooth spaces of schooling
The emotional geographies of education: Beginning a conversation
Fabricating ‘Pacific Islander’: Pedagogies of expropriation, return and resistance and other lessons from a ‘Multicultural Day’
This paper is concerned with the potential for pedagogic practices that unsettle race hierarchies and open up possibilities for young people who are minoritised and excluded through these race hierarchies to be recognised as legitimate students and learners. It explores these possibilities through an analysis of an ethnographic account of the dance, song and musical practices of a group of ‘Pacific Islander’ students, their peers and their teache…
Pedagogies of becoming in an end-of-the-line ‘special’ school
In this paper I draw on ethnographic data generated inside an English ‘special’ school for boys designate as having ‘social, emotional and behavioural difficulties’. I offer a detailed analysis of one teacher's pedagogic practices inside her ICT classroom and the boys' responses to this. I suggest that the teacher's pedagogy, and the classroom, are marked by movements and flows of bodies, practices, affectivities and subjectivities. Following fro…
Queer outings: Uncomfortable stories about the subjects of post‐structural school ethnography
In this paper, I consider the abiding value as well as the limits of queer; navigating the contradictions of a politics and ethnographic practice based on a refutation of an abiding subject; resisting subjectivation and needing recognition; and ‘coming out’ in school ethnography framed by queer theory. The paper moves from the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, borrowing Pillow’s notion of uncomfortable reflexivity and grafting the notion…
Impossible Bodies, Impossible Selves: Exclusions and Student Subjectivities
Looking across national contexts and drawing on ethnographic studies of schools in the UK and Australia, the book explores the implications of the contemporary education policy context and processes a
Subjectivation and performative politics—Butler thinking Althusser and Foucault: Intelligibility, agency and the raced–nationed–religioned subjects of education
Judith Butler is perhaps best known for her take‐up of the debate between Derrida and Austin over the function of the performative and her subsequent suggestion that the subject be understood as performatively constituted. Another important but less often noted move within Butler’s consideration of the processes through which the subject is constituted is her thinking between Althusser’s notion of subjection and Foucault’s notion of subjectivatio…
Diversity, Inequality, and a Post-structural Politics for Education
This paper considers the contribution to understanding educational inequalities offered by post-structural theories of power and the subject. The paper locates this consideration in the context of the ongoing endeavour in education studies to make sense of, and identify ways of interrupting, abiding educational exclusions and inequalities. The paper examines the potential of Judith Butler's work, in particular her engagement with Foucault's conce…
Sex–gender–sexuality: How sex, gender and sexuality constellations are constituted in secondary schools
This paper explores the relationships between sex, gender and sexuality through a series of close readings of data generated through an ethnography undertaken in a south London secondary school. The paper takes as its focus girls aged 15 to 16 and considers how particular sexed, gendered and sexualized selves are constituted. Drawing on Foucault's understanding of subjectivation and the subsequent work of Judith Butler, in particular her theoriza…
Special sport’ for misfits and losers: Educational triage and the constitution of schooled subjectivities
Engineering school markets, constituting schools and subjectivating students: The bureaucratic, institutional and classroom dimensions of educational triage
This paper seeks to contribute to existing understandings of the impacts of education policy reform by drawing together analyses of state‐level policy reforms; institutional responses to these; and day‐to‐day school‐ and classroom‐level practises that constitute particular sorts of learners. The paper draws on data generated through a school ethnography, with detailed interview and observational data set alongside school‐ and state‐level document…
Wounds andReinscriptions: Schools, Sexualities and Performative Subjects
Boys in school, homophobia, and forms of masculinity are currently the focus of significant debate in and about education and schools. Much of this discussion takes as given the sexual orientation, and therefore sexual identity, of the students of whom it speaks and mobilizes equal rights discourses on behalf of gay and lesbian students. This paper offers an alternative view of the school level processes at work around these issues. The paper tak…
Identity Traps or How Black [1] Students Fail: The interactions between biographical, sub-cultural, and learner identities
The enduring inequities experienced by African-Caribbean students in UK schools has been well documented. This paper aims to better understand how these inequities have come to be so enduring. Through detailed analyses of data generated through a school ethnography, this paper demonstrates the processes through which African-Caribbean students are identified as undesirable, or even intolerable, learners. The paper builds on the insights offered b…
Sex–gender–sexuality: How sex, gender and sexuality constellations are constituted in secondary schools
This paper explores the relationships between sex, gender and sexuality through a series of close readings of data generated through an ethnography undertaken in a south London secondary school. The paper takes as its focus girls aged 15 to 16 and considers how particular sexed, gendered and sexualized selves are constituted. Drawing on Foucault's understanding of subjectivation and the subsequent work of Judith Butler, in particular her theoriza…
Identity Traps or How Black [1] Students Fail: The interactions between biographical, sub-cultural, and learner identities
The enduring inequities experienced by African-Caribbean students in UK schools has been well documented. This paper aims to better understand how these inequities have come to be so enduring. Through detailed analyses of data generated through a school ethnography, this paper demonstrates the processes through which African-Caribbean students are identified as undesirable, or even intolerable, learners. The paper builds on the insights offered b…
Subjectivation and performative politics—Butler thinking Althusser and Foucault: Intelligibility, agency and the raced–nationed–religioned subjects of education
Judith Butler is perhaps best known for her take‐up of the debate between Derrida and Austin over the function of the performative and her subsequent suggestion that the subject be understood as performatively constituted. Another important but less often noted move within Butler’s consideration of the processes through which the subject is constituted is her thinking between Althusser’s notion of subjection and Foucault’s notion of subjectivatio…
Assembling, disassembling and reassembling ‘youth services’ in Austerity Britain
This paper moves from a reading of processes that are transforming public services in ways that amount to a dismantling of the welfare state in the UK. In order to interrogate these processes, the paper focuses on ‘youth’ and ‘youth services’. Framed by an analysis of the aggressive disinvestment of ‘austerity’, we take up Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the assemblage as a tool to map and understand the apparently disparate factors or component…
Engineering school markets, constituting schools and subjectivating students: The bureaucratic, institutional and classroom dimensions of educational triage
This paper seeks to contribute to existing understandings of the impacts of education policy reform by drawing together analyses of state‐level policy reforms; institutional responses to these; and day‐to‐day school‐ and classroom‐level practises that constitute particular sorts of learners. The paper draws on data generated through a school ethnography, with detailed interview and observational data set alongside school‐ and state‐level document…
Wounds andReinscriptions: Schools, Sexualities and Performative Subjects
Boys in school, homophobia, and forms of masculinity are currently the focus of significant debate in and about education and schools. Much of this discussion takes as given the sexual orientation, and therefore sexual identity, of the students of whom it speaks and mobilizes equal rights discourses on behalf of gay and lesbian students. This paper offers an alternative view of the school level processes at work around these issues. The paper tak…
Queer outings: Uncomfortable stories about the subjects of post‐structural school ethnography
In this paper, I consider the abiding value as well as the limits of queer; navigating the contradictions of a politics and ethnographic practice based on a refutation of an abiding subject; resisting subjectivation and needing recognition; and ‘coming out’ in school ethnography framed by queer theory. The paper moves from the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, borrowing Pillow’s notion of uncomfortable reflexivity and grafting the notion…
Diversity, Inequality, and a Post-structural Politics for Education
This paper considers the contribution to understanding educational inequalities offered by post-structural theories of power and the subject. The paper locates this consideration in the context of the ongoing endeavour in education studies to make sense of, and identify ways of interrupting, abiding educational exclusions and inequalities. The paper examines the potential of Judith Butler's work, in particular her engagement with Foucault's conce…
Ghostings, materialisations and flows in Britain's special educational needs and disability assemblage
In this paper we argue that the UK government's new special educational needs and disability (SEND) Code of Practice marks a further movement in the expansion of what Tomlinson has identified as the SEN industry. Yet at the same time, we suggest that the Code inaugurates a series of less familiar movements of policy, of governance and responsibility, of understanding SEND, and of the constitution of subjects identified in these terms. We make use…
Fabricating ‘Pacific Islander’: Pedagogies of expropriation, return and resistance and other lessons from a ‘Multicultural Day’
This paper is concerned with the potential for pedagogic practices that unsettle race hierarchies and open up possibilities for young people who are minoritised and excluded through these race hierarchies to be recognised as legitimate students and learners. It explores these possibilities through an analysis of an ethnographic account of the dance, song and musical practices of a group of ‘Pacific Islander’ students, their peers and their teache…
Pedagogies of becoming in an end-of-the-line ‘special’ school
In this paper I draw on ethnographic data generated inside an English ‘special’ school for boys designate as having ‘social, emotional and behavioural difficulties’. I offer a detailed analysis of one teacher's pedagogic practices inside her ICT classroom and the boys' responses to this. I suggest that the teacher's pedagogy, and the classroom, are marked by movements and flows of bodies, practices, affectivities and subjectivities. Following fro…
Bioscience and the sociology of education: The case for biosocial education
This article makes a case for biosocial education as a field of research and as a potential framework for education practice. The article engages with sociology of education’s contemporary interests in embodiment and affect, the possibilities offered by concept studies, and uses of assemblage and complexity theory for thinking about educational phenomena. It also considers broader social science and political theory engagements with epigenetics a…
Special sport’ for misfits and losers: Educational triage and the constitution of schooled subjectivities
Biological sciences, social sciences and the languages of stress
There are well documented concerns with the imposition of high stakes testing into the fabric of school education, and there is now an increasing focus on how such tests impact children’s ‘well-being’. This can be witnessed in reports in the popular news media, where discussion of these impacts frequently refer to ‘stress’ and ‘anxiety’. Yet, there is no work that is able to tell us about what is happening in the bodies of the teachers and childr…
New biological sciences, sociology and education
Since the Human Genome Project mapped the gene sequence, new biological sciences have been generating a raft of new knowledges about the mechanisms and functions of the molecular body. One of the m
Reflections on how education can be for democracy in the twenty-first century
This paper is one of two that bring together a range of education scholars to consider how education might be for democracy in a time of complex challenges facing twenty-first century societies. In this paper, scholars from Australia, Japan and the United Kingdom consider how sites of formal and informal education can respond to multiple unfolding crises, including the COVID-19 global pandemic, catastrophic climate change and ecological collapse,…
Psychopathology at school: Theorizing mental disorders in school
Review Symposium of Psychopathology at school: theorizing mental disorders in school, by Valerie Harwood and Julie Allan, London, Routledge, 2014, 208 pp., ISBN 978-0-41-581042-5
Identity Traps or How Black [1] Students Fail: The interactions between biographical, sub-cultural, and learner identities
The enduring inequities experienced by African-Caribbean students in UK schools has been well documented. This paper aims to better understand how these inequities have come to be so enduring. Through detailed analyses of data generated through a school ethnography, this paper demonstrates the processes through which African-Caribbean students are identified as undesirable, or even intolerable, learners. The paper builds on the insights offered b…
Special sport’ for misfits and losers: Educational triage and the constitution of schooled subjectivities
Engineering school markets, constituting schools and subjectivating students: The bureaucratic, institutional and classroom dimensions of educational triage
This paper seeks to contribute to existing understandings of the impacts of education policy reform by drawing together analyses of state‐level policy reforms; institutional responses to these; and day‐to‐day school‐ and classroom‐level practises that constitute particular sorts of learners. The paper draws on data generated through a school ethnography, with detailed interview and observational data set alongside school‐ and state‐level document…
Wounds andReinscriptions: Schools, Sexualities and Performative Subjects
Boys in school, homophobia, and forms of masculinity are currently the focus of significant debate in and about education and schools. Much of this discussion takes as given the sexual orientation, and therefore sexual identity, of the students of whom it speaks and mobilizes equal rights discourses on behalf of gay and lesbian students. This paper offers an alternative view of the school level processes at work around these issues. The paper tak…
Sex–gender–sexuality: How sex, gender and sexuality constellations are constituted in secondary schools
This paper explores the relationships between sex, gender and sexuality through a series of close readings of data generated through an ethnography undertaken in a south London secondary school. The paper takes as its focus girls aged 15 to 16 and considers how particular sexed, gendered and sexualized selves are constituted. Drawing on Foucault's understanding of subjectivation and the subsequent work of Judith Butler, in particular her theoriza…
Impossible Bodies, Impossible Selves: Exclusions and Student Subjectivities
Looking across national contexts and drawing on ethnographic studies of schools in the UK and Australia, the book explores the implications of the contemporary education policy context and processes a
Subjectivation and performative politics—Butler thinking Althusser and Foucault: Intelligibility, agency and the raced–nationed–religioned subjects of education
Judith Butler is perhaps best known for her take‐up of the debate between Derrida and Austin over the function of the performative and her subsequent suggestion that the subject be understood as performatively constituted. Another important but less often noted move within Butler’s consideration of the processes through which the subject is constituted is her thinking between Althusser’s notion of subjection and Foucault’s notion of subjectivatio…
Diversity, Inequality, and a Post-structural Politics for Education
This paper considers the contribution to understanding educational inequalities offered by post-structural theories of power and the subject. The paper locates this consideration in the context of the ongoing endeavour in education studies to make sense of, and identify ways of interrupting, abiding educational exclusions and inequalities. The paper examines the potential of Judith Butler's work, in particular her engagement with Foucault's conce…
Pedagogies of becoming in an end-of-the-line ‘special’ school
In this paper I draw on ethnographic data generated inside an English ‘special’ school for boys designate as having ‘social, emotional and behavioural difficulties’. I offer a detailed analysis of one teacher's pedagogic practices inside her ICT classroom and the boys' responses to this. I suggest that the teacher's pedagogy, and the classroom, are marked by movements and flows of bodies, practices, affectivities and subjectivities. Following fro…
Queer outings: Uncomfortable stories about the subjects of post‐structural school ethnography
In this paper, I consider the abiding value as well as the limits of queer; navigating the contradictions of a politics and ethnographic practice based on a refutation of an abiding subject; resisting subjectivation and needing recognition; and ‘coming out’ in school ethnography framed by queer theory. The paper moves from the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, borrowing Pillow’s notion of uncomfortable reflexivity and grafting the notion…
A politics beyond subjects: The affective choreographies and smooth spaces of schooling
The emotional geographies of education: Beginning a conversation
Fabricating ‘Pacific Islander’: Pedagogies of expropriation, return and resistance and other lessons from a ‘Multicultural Day’
This paper is concerned with the potential for pedagogic practices that unsettle race hierarchies and open up possibilities for young people who are minoritised and excluded through these race hierarchies to be recognised as legitimate students and learners. It explores these possibilities through an analysis of an ethnographic account of the dance, song and musical practices of a group of ‘Pacific Islander’ students, their peers and their teache…
Assembling, disassembling and reassembling ‘youth services’ in Austerity Britain
This paper moves from a reading of processes that are transforming public services in ways that amount to a dismantling of the welfare state in the UK. In order to interrogate these processes, the paper focuses on ‘youth’ and ‘youth services’. Framed by an analysis of the aggressive disinvestment of ‘austerity’, we take up Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the assemblage as a tool to map and understand the apparently disparate factors or component…
Psychopathology at school: Theorizing mental disorders in school
Review Symposium of Psychopathology at school: theorizing mental disorders in school, by Valerie Harwood and Julie Allan, London, Routledge, 2014, 208 pp., ISBN 978-0-41-581042-5
New biological sciences, sociology and education
Since the Human Genome Project mapped the gene sequence, new biological sciences have been generating a raft of new knowledges about the mechanisms and functions of the molecular body. One of the m
Bioscience and the sociology of education: The case for biosocial education
This article makes a case for biosocial education as a field of research and as a potential framework for education practice. The article engages with sociology of education’s contemporary interests in embodiment and affect, the possibilities offered by concept studies, and uses of assemblage and complexity theory for thinking about educational phenomena. It also considers broader social science and political theory engagements with epigenetics a…
Ghostings, materialisations and flows in Britain's special educational needs and disability assemblage
In this paper we argue that the UK government's new special educational needs and disability (SEND) Code of Practice marks a further movement in the expansion of what Tomlinson has identified as the SEN industry. Yet at the same time, we suggest that the Code inaugurates a series of less familiar movements of policy, of governance and responsibility, of understanding SEND, and of the constitution of subjects identified in these terms. We make use…
Biological sciences, social sciences and the languages of stress
There are well documented concerns with the imposition of high stakes testing into the fabric of school education, and there is now an increasing focus on how such tests impact children’s ‘well-being’. This can be witnessed in reports in the popular news media, where discussion of these impacts frequently refer to ‘stress’ and ‘anxiety’. Yet, there is no work that is able to tell us about what is happening in the bodies of the teachers and childr…
From science wars to transdisciplinarity: The inescapability of the neuroscience, biology and sociology of learning
In this paper we begin to explore how knowledges being generated in bioscience might be brought into productive articulation with the Sociology of Education, considering the potential for emerging transdisciplinary, ‘biosocial’ approaches to enable new ways of researching and understanding pressing educational issues. In this paper, as in our current research, we take learning as our focus. Our work brings together collaborators from across field…
Reflections on how education can be for democracy in the twenty-first century
This paper is one of two that bring together a range of education scholars to consider how education might be for democracy in a time of complex challenges facing twenty-first century societies. In this paper, scholars from Australia, Japan and the United Kingdom consider how sites of formal and informal education can respond to multiple unfolding crises, including the COVID-19 global pandemic, catastrophic climate change and ecological collapse,…
‘Quality and consequence’: Interrogating the drive for new performance indicators and funding levers in Australian initial teacher education programs
Performance indicators and other accountability measures are increasingly common in higher education internationally. Consistent with this trend, the Australian Federal Government’s Teacher Education Expert Panel (TEEP) recently recommended new reforms to strengthen the link between performance and funding of initial teacher education (ITE). Recommended reforms included (i) the measurement and publication of ITE performance on four categories of …
Feeling school failure: The emotional politics of grade retention and the making of schooled subjects
Sociology (21 works) · Anthropology (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Ethnography (8 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Pedagogy (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Law (7 works)