Brad Gobby
Biographic Data
| ID | 767066 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brad Gobby |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brad |
| FAMILY NAME | Gobby |
| SIGNATURE | GOBBY B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Curtin University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2170-5435 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 83 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Making room for ‘feelings’: What's at stake for the theory of practice architectures?
This paper responds to Thelin, K. [2024. What about feelings? Elaboration on and consideration of the theoretical construct of emotions in practice and practice architectures. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 1–14] intriguing proposal that the theory of practice architectures (hereafter TPA) would benefit from an augmentation to its oft-repeated analytical mantra of ‘sayings, doings and relatings’ by adding the notion of feelings…
The affective milieu of school market competition: Using affect and governmentality to study market competition
The affective milieu of school market competition: using affect and governmentality to study market competition
Principals and the careless erosion of employment standards in the context of school autonomy and marketisation: A case study of school support staff
Devolved governance, school autonomy and marketisation impact the employment practices of schools and the working conditions of teachers. However, the employment-related effects on school services staff are under-researched. This study draws on data from interviews with staff at one public high school to analyse school services staff experience of school autonomy and the employment practices of principals in the context of competitive education m…
The teacher wellbeing turn: Neuropolitics, education and the psy-complex
Across the globe, governments are responding to a ‘teaching crisis’ marked by high attrition rates and labour shortages. This crisis can be attributed to macro changes in the economy (intensified by the shift towards high inflation, low growth economies post-COVID) and micro changes to the organisation and funding of schools with teachers experiencing stagnating wages and unmanageable workloads in punishing accountability environments. In this pa…
Teacher professional autonomy in an atypical government school: Matters of relationality and context
Teacher professional autonomy is important to teachers’ work satisfaction, efficiency, well-being, and empowerment. However, it cannot simply be defined as freedom from control because it is relational and contextual. In this paper, we examine the relationality and contextual sensitivity of teacher professional autonomy at ‘Newstall’ College, a senior secondary government school in Australia. The paper draws on a larger study that examined the so…
Researching Global Education Policy: Diverse Approaches to Policy Movement
How teacher wellbeing can be cruel: Refusing discourses of wellbeing in an online Reddit forum
Teacher wellbeing is a growing international concern. Despite teachers' experiences being deleteriously impacted by education policies and organisational conditions, dominant discourses of wellbeing focus on strategies that enhance individual self-management of wellbeing. This paper critically examines teacher wellbeing and the counter-discourses of wellbeing mobilised by teachers on an online platform, Reddit. Contributors criticise the wellbein…
Principals’ perceptions of school autonomy and educational leadership
This paper examines principals’ perceptions of school autonomy and leadership as part of a 3-year research project looking at the implications of school autonomy on social justice across four states of Australia (Victoria, New South Wales, Western Australia and Queensland). Drawing on interviews with principals and representatives from principal stakeholder organisations in these four state jurisdictions, the paper identifies a number of key issu…
School autonomy reform and social justice: A policy overview of Australian public education (1970s to present)
Election or selection? School autonomy reform, governance and the politics of school councils
Neoliberal policies promoting school autonomy reform in Australia and internationally have, over three decades, appropriated earlier social democratic discourses of parental participation and partnership in school governance. Recent school autonomy reforms have repositioned school council/boards within a narrow frame of accountability and management operating in marketized systems of education. This paper considers the perceptions of 12 stakehold…
The spatiality of economic maldistribution in public-school funding in Australia: Still a poisonous debate
This paper analyses the composition, distribution, and history of school funding in Australia through a spatial lens (Soja 2010). We explore multi-scalar school funding policy through three layers of economic maldistribution. We sketch the funding disparities between the three school sectors (public, Catholic, and independent) exposing a spatial injustice in policies of school choice; the spatial and economic maldistribution between state jurisdi…
Common Worlds Justice in Post-Anthropocentric Education: Attuning to the More-Than-Human through Walking with Sound and Smell
Onrushing ecological precarity and collapse disproportionately affects particular humans and their common worlds. This article proposes that in the face of the myriad crises the Earth is experiencing, and the uneven distribution of their effects, extending conceptions of justice in education beyond the human is crucial. This, however, requires honing the ability to notice and attune to the common worlds we inhabit. Drawing on research which deplo…
Objects and subjects of risk: A governmentality approach to education governance
Across the globe school autonomy reforms have been criticised for opening up public assets to various dangers or risks, from misappropriation of public monies by private sponsors to secretive governance structures maintained by homophilic groups. While these risks are not the exclusive product of school autonomy reforms, they are an endemic feature of the conditions made possible by these reforms, namely ‘depoliticisation’, ‘corporatisation’, ‘en…
The least we could do’: Troubling school leaders’ responses to the school strikes for climate in Australia
News coverage of the Thunberg-inspired student climate strikes in Australia in 2019 and 2020 framed school leaders ‘in conversation’ with politicians, education system spokespeople, political pundits, the public and student activists. While previous scholarly interest has mainly focused on the student protestors, we examine the intertextual framing of school leaders in the news. While our analysis affirms previous understandings of the politicall…
Powers of Curriculum: Sociological Aspects of Education
A Foucauldian ethics of positivity in initial teacher education
This article explores ways pre-service teachers learn to work upon their positive emotional conduct during an initial teacher education course. The article argues that education practice today promotes the acting out of positive emotions, creating conditions within which pre-service teachers ethically shape their emotional conduct. Utilising Foucault’s four-part ethical framework, the article draws on longitudinal research of pre-service teachers…
The Neo-Performative Teacher: School Reform, Entrepreneurialism and the Pursuit of Educational Equity
The impact of neoliberal reforms of education systems on the work of teachers and school leaders, particularly in relation to high-stakes accountability frameworks, has been extensively studied in recent decades. One significant aspect of neoliberal schooling is the emergence of quasi-autonomous public schools (such as Academies in England, Charter Schools in the USA and Independent Public Schools in Australia), characterised by heterarchical gov…
Extinction, education and the curious practice of visiting thrombolites
The Earth is in the midst of a recent acceleration in the rate of species extinction and the unravelling of ecological communities. The authors think with the emerging field of Extinction Studies to explore educational approaches to ecological endangerment and extinction. Using a notion of visiting as ‘curious practice’, we story encounters between the authors, young children and the endangered Noorook Yalgorup-Lake Clifton thrombolites and their…
School autonomy, marketisation and social justice: The plight of principals and schools
There remains strong political support for school autonomy reform within Australian public education despite evidence linking this reform to exacerbating school and systemic inequities. This paper presents interview data from key education stakeholders gathered from a broader study that is investigating the social justice implications of school autonomy reform across three Australian states. We focus on the concerns these stakeholders raise about…
Translations of new public management: A decentred approach to school governance in four OECD countries
Despite the prevalence of corporate and performative models of school governance within and across different education systems, there are various cases of uneven, hybrid expressions of New Public Management (NPM) that reveal the contingency of global patterns of rule. Adopting a ‘decentred approach’ to governance (Bevir, M. 2010. “Rethinking Governmentality: Towards Genealogies of Governance.” European Journal of Social Theory 13 (4): 423–441), t…
Professionalism and competing responsibilities: Moderating competitive performativity in school autonomy reform
Discourses promoting the benefits of school autonomy have floated freely internationally since moves in the 1980s to greater devolution in the UK, New Zealand, the USA, Australia and Sweden. The most recent Australian version, Independent Public Schools (IPS), grants school leaders more latitude over aspects of their work. But this autonomy is constrained by technologies of competitive performativity, now the norm across Australian and other scho…
Obliged to calculate: My School , markets, and equipping parents for calculativeness
This paper argues neoliberal programs of government in education are equipping parents for calculativeness. Regimes of testing and the publication of these results and other organizational data are contributing to a public economy of numbers that increasingly oblige citizens to calculate. Using the notions of calculative and market devices, this paper examines the Australian Government’s My School website, which publishes academic and organizatio…
Putting "the system" into a school autonomy reform: The case of the Independent Public Schools program
The Australian Federal and state governments have been introducing neoliberal reforms to the governance of their education systems for a number of decades. One of the most recent programs of reform is the Western Australian Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative. Similar to decentralizing reforms around the world, the IPS program seeks greater school autonomy from the state education bureaucracy by providing selected principals and school co…
Leading schools in challenging circumstances: Strategies for success
In examining studies of education leadership, Thrupp and Wilmott (2003) divide those working in the field into four categories: problem-solvers, overt apologists, subtle apologists and textual diss
Principal self-government and subjectification: The exercise of principal autonomy in the Western Australian Independent Public Schools programme
The launch of the Independent Public Schools (IPS) programme in Western Australia (WA) in 2010 reflects the neoliberal policy discourse of decentralisation and school self-management sweeping across many of the world’s education systems. IPS provides WA state school principals with decision-making authority in a range of areas, including the employment of staff and managing school budgets. Using an analytical toolkit provided by Michel Foucault a…
Translations of new public management: A decentred approach to school governance in four OECD countries
Despite the prevalence of corporate and performative models of school governance within and across different education systems, there are various cases of uneven, hybrid expressions of New Public Management (NPM) that reveal the contingency of global patterns of rule. Adopting a ‘decentred approach’ to governance (Bevir, M. 2010. “Rethinking Governmentality: Towards Genealogies of Governance.” European Journal of Social Theory 13 (4): 423–441), t…
School autonomy, marketisation and social justice: The plight of principals and schools
There remains strong political support for school autonomy reform within Australian public education despite evidence linking this reform to exacerbating school and systemic inequities. This paper presents interview data from key education stakeholders gathered from a broader study that is investigating the social justice implications of school autonomy reform across three Australian states. We focus on the concerns these stakeholders raise about…
The Neo-Performative Teacher: School Reform, Entrepreneurialism and the Pursuit of Educational Equity
The impact of neoliberal reforms of education systems on the work of teachers and school leaders, particularly in relation to high-stakes accountability frameworks, has been extensively studied in recent decades. One significant aspect of neoliberal schooling is the emergence of quasi-autonomous public schools (such as Academies in England, Charter Schools in the USA and Independent Public Schools in Australia), characterised by heterarchical gov…
Principal self-government and subjectification: The exercise of principal autonomy in the Western Australian Independent Public Schools programme
The launch of the Independent Public Schools (IPS) programme in Western Australia (WA) in 2010 reflects the neoliberal policy discourse of decentralisation and school self-management sweeping across many of the world’s education systems. IPS provides WA state school principals with decision-making authority in a range of areas, including the employment of staff and managing school budgets. Using an analytical toolkit provided by Michel Foucault a…
Objects and subjects of risk: A governmentality approach to education governance
Across the globe school autonomy reforms have been criticised for opening up public assets to various dangers or risks, from misappropriation of public monies by private sponsors to secretive governance structures maintained by homophilic groups. While these risks are not the exclusive product of school autonomy reforms, they are an endemic feature of the conditions made possible by these reforms, namely ‘depoliticisation’, ‘corporatisation’, ‘en…
Professionalism and competing responsibilities: Moderating competitive performativity in school autonomy reform
Discourses promoting the benefits of school autonomy have floated freely internationally since moves in the 1980s to greater devolution in the UK, New Zealand, the USA, Australia and Sweden. The most recent Australian version, Independent Public Schools (IPS), grants school leaders more latitude over aspects of their work. But this autonomy is constrained by technologies of competitive performativity, now the norm across Australian and other scho…
Putting "the system" into a school autonomy reform: The case of the Independent Public Schools program
The Australian Federal and state governments have been introducing neoliberal reforms to the governance of their education systems for a number of decades. One of the most recent programs of reform is the Western Australian Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative. Similar to decentralizing reforms around the world, the IPS program seeks greater school autonomy from the state education bureaucracy by providing selected principals and school co…
A Foucauldian ethics of positivity in initial teacher education
This article explores ways pre-service teachers learn to work upon their positive emotional conduct during an initial teacher education course. The article argues that education practice today promotes the acting out of positive emotions, creating conditions within which pre-service teachers ethically shape their emotional conduct. Utilising Foucault’s four-part ethical framework, the article draws on longitudinal research of pre-service teachers…
Obliged to calculate: My School , markets, and equipping parents for calculativeness
This paper argues neoliberal programs of government in education are equipping parents for calculativeness. Regimes of testing and the publication of these results and other organizational data are contributing to a public economy of numbers that increasingly oblige citizens to calculate. Using the notions of calculative and market devices, this paper examines the Australian Government’s My School website, which publishes academic and organizatio…
Election or selection? School autonomy reform, governance and the politics of school councils
Neoliberal policies promoting school autonomy reform in Australia and internationally have, over three decades, appropriated earlier social democratic discourses of parental participation and partnership in school governance. Recent school autonomy reforms have repositioned school council/boards within a narrow frame of accountability and management operating in marketized systems of education. This paper considers the perceptions of 12 stakehold…
The least we could do’: Troubling school leaders’ responses to the school strikes for climate in Australia
News coverage of the Thunberg-inspired student climate strikes in Australia in 2019 and 2020 framed school leaders ‘in conversation’ with politicians, education system spokespeople, political pundits, the public and student activists. While previous scholarly interest has mainly focused on the student protestors, we examine the intertextual framing of school leaders in the news. While our analysis affirms previous understandings of the politicall…
Leading schools in challenging circumstances: Strategies for success
In examining studies of education leadership, Thrupp and Wilmott (2003) divide those working in the field into four categories: problem-solvers, overt apologists, subtle apologists and textual diss
Principal self-government and subjectification: The exercise of principal autonomy in the Western Australian Independent Public Schools programme
The launch of the Independent Public Schools (IPS) programme in Western Australia (WA) in 2010 reflects the neoliberal policy discourse of decentralisation and school self-management sweeping across many of the world’s education systems. IPS provides WA state school principals with decision-making authority in a range of areas, including the employment of staff and managing school budgets. Using an analytical toolkit provided by Michel Foucault a…
Leading schools in challenging circumstances: Strategies for success
In examining studies of education leadership, Thrupp and Wilmott (2003) divide those working in the field into four categories: problem-solvers, overt apologists, subtle apologists and textual diss
Obliged to calculate: My School , markets, and equipping parents for calculativeness
This paper argues neoliberal programs of government in education are equipping parents for calculativeness. Regimes of testing and the publication of these results and other organizational data are contributing to a public economy of numbers that increasingly oblige citizens to calculate. Using the notions of calculative and market devices, this paper examines the Australian Government’s My School website, which publishes academic and organizatio…
Putting "the system" into a school autonomy reform: The case of the Independent Public Schools program
The Australian Federal and state governments have been introducing neoliberal reforms to the governance of their education systems for a number of decades. One of the most recent programs of reform is the Western Australian Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative. Similar to decentralizing reforms around the world, the IPS program seeks greater school autonomy from the state education bureaucracy by providing selected principals and school co…
Professionalism and competing responsibilities: Moderating competitive performativity in school autonomy reform
Discourses promoting the benefits of school autonomy have floated freely internationally since moves in the 1980s to greater devolution in the UK, New Zealand, the USA, Australia and Sweden. The most recent Australian version, Independent Public Schools (IPS), grants school leaders more latitude over aspects of their work. But this autonomy is constrained by technologies of competitive performativity, now the norm across Australian and other scho…
Translations of new public management: A decentred approach to school governance in four OECD countries
Despite the prevalence of corporate and performative models of school governance within and across different education systems, there are various cases of uneven, hybrid expressions of New Public Management (NPM) that reveal the contingency of global patterns of rule. Adopting a ‘decentred approach’ to governance (Bevir, M. 2010. “Rethinking Governmentality: Towards Genealogies of Governance.” European Journal of Social Theory 13 (4): 423–441), t…
Extinction, education and the curious practice of visiting thrombolites
The Earth is in the midst of a recent acceleration in the rate of species extinction and the unravelling of ecological communities. The authors think with the emerging field of Extinction Studies to explore educational approaches to ecological endangerment and extinction. Using a notion of visiting as ‘curious practice’, we story encounters between the authors, young children and the endangered Noorook Yalgorup-Lake Clifton thrombolites and their…
School autonomy, marketisation and social justice: The plight of principals and schools
There remains strong political support for school autonomy reform within Australian public education despite evidence linking this reform to exacerbating school and systemic inequities. This paper presents interview data from key education stakeholders gathered from a broader study that is investigating the social justice implications of school autonomy reform across three Australian states. We focus on the concerns these stakeholders raise about…
A Foucauldian ethics of positivity in initial teacher education
This article explores ways pre-service teachers learn to work upon their positive emotional conduct during an initial teacher education course. The article argues that education practice today promotes the acting out of positive emotions, creating conditions within which pre-service teachers ethically shape their emotional conduct. Utilising Foucault’s four-part ethical framework, the article draws on longitudinal research of pre-service teachers…
The Neo-Performative Teacher: School Reform, Entrepreneurialism and the Pursuit of Educational Equity
The impact of neoliberal reforms of education systems on the work of teachers and school leaders, particularly in relation to high-stakes accountability frameworks, has been extensively studied in recent decades. One significant aspect of neoliberal schooling is the emergence of quasi-autonomous public schools (such as Academies in England, Charter Schools in the USA and Independent Public Schools in Australia), characterised by heterarchical gov…
Common Worlds Justice in Post-Anthropocentric Education: Attuning to the More-Than-Human through Walking with Sound and Smell
Onrushing ecological precarity and collapse disproportionately affects particular humans and their common worlds. This article proposes that in the face of the myriad crises the Earth is experiencing, and the uneven distribution of their effects, extending conceptions of justice in education beyond the human is crucial. This, however, requires honing the ability to notice and attune to the common worlds we inhabit. Drawing on research which deplo…
Objects and subjects of risk: A governmentality approach to education governance
Across the globe school autonomy reforms have been criticised for opening up public assets to various dangers or risks, from misappropriation of public monies by private sponsors to secretive governance structures maintained by homophilic groups. While these risks are not the exclusive product of school autonomy reforms, they are an endemic feature of the conditions made possible by these reforms, namely ‘depoliticisation’, ‘corporatisation’, ‘en…
The least we could do’: Troubling school leaders’ responses to the school strikes for climate in Australia
News coverage of the Thunberg-inspired student climate strikes in Australia in 2019 and 2020 framed school leaders ‘in conversation’ with politicians, education system spokespeople, political pundits, the public and student activists. While previous scholarly interest has mainly focused on the student protestors, we examine the intertextual framing of school leaders in the news. While our analysis affirms previous understandings of the politicall…
Powers of Curriculum: Sociological Aspects of Education
Principals’ perceptions of school autonomy and educational leadership
This paper examines principals’ perceptions of school autonomy and leadership as part of a 3-year research project looking at the implications of school autonomy on social justice across four states of Australia (Victoria, New South Wales, Western Australia and Queensland). Drawing on interviews with principals and representatives from principal stakeholder organisations in these four state jurisdictions, the paper identifies a number of key issu…
School autonomy reform and social justice: A policy overview of Australian public education (1970s to present)
Election or selection? School autonomy reform, governance and the politics of school councils
Neoliberal policies promoting school autonomy reform in Australia and internationally have, over three decades, appropriated earlier social democratic discourses of parental participation and partnership in school governance. Recent school autonomy reforms have repositioned school council/boards within a narrow frame of accountability and management operating in marketized systems of education. This paper considers the perceptions of 12 stakehold…
The spatiality of economic maldistribution in public-school funding in Australia: Still a poisonous debate
This paper analyses the composition, distribution, and history of school funding in Australia through a spatial lens (Soja 2010). We explore multi-scalar school funding policy through three layers of economic maldistribution. We sketch the funding disparities between the three school sectors (public, Catholic, and independent) exposing a spatial injustice in policies of school choice; the spatial and economic maldistribution between state jurisdi…
Teacher professional autonomy in an atypical government school: Matters of relationality and context
Teacher professional autonomy is important to teachers’ work satisfaction, efficiency, well-being, and empowerment. However, it cannot simply be defined as freedom from control because it is relational and contextual. In this paper, we examine the relationality and contextual sensitivity of teacher professional autonomy at ‘Newstall’ College, a senior secondary government school in Australia. The paper draws on a larger study that examined the so…
Researching Global Education Policy: Diverse Approaches to Policy Movement
How teacher wellbeing can be cruel: Refusing discourses of wellbeing in an online Reddit forum
Teacher wellbeing is a growing international concern. Despite teachers' experiences being deleteriously impacted by education policies and organisational conditions, dominant discourses of wellbeing focus on strategies that enhance individual self-management of wellbeing. This paper critically examines teacher wellbeing and the counter-discourses of wellbeing mobilised by teachers on an online platform, Reddit. Contributors criticise the wellbein…
Principals and the careless erosion of employment standards in the context of school autonomy and marketisation: A case study of school support staff
Devolved governance, school autonomy and marketisation impact the employment practices of schools and the working conditions of teachers. However, the employment-related effects on school services staff are under-researched. This study draws on data from interviews with staff at one public high school to analyse school services staff experience of school autonomy and the employment practices of principals in the context of competitive education m…
The teacher wellbeing turn: Neuropolitics, education and the psy-complex
Across the globe, governments are responding to a ‘teaching crisis’ marked by high attrition rates and labour shortages. This crisis can be attributed to macro changes in the economy (intensified by the shift towards high inflation, low growth economies post-COVID) and micro changes to the organisation and funding of schools with teachers experiencing stagnating wages and unmanageable workloads in punishing accountability environments. In this pa…
Making room for ‘feelings’: What's at stake for the theory of practice architectures?
This paper responds to Thelin, K. [2024. What about feelings? Elaboration on and consideration of the theoretical construct of emotions in practice and practice architectures. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 1–14] intriguing proposal that the theory of practice architectures (hereafter TPA) would benefit from an augmentation to its oft-repeated analytical mantra of ‘sayings, doings and relatings’ by adding the notion of feelings…
The affective milieu of school market competition: Using affect and governmentality to study market competition
The affective milieu of school market competition: using affect and governmentality to study market competition
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (18 works) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Public Administration (12 works) · Teacher Education and Leadership Studies (11 works) · Autonomy (10 works) · Economics (9 works) · Public Administration (9 works) · Law (8 works)