Karl Kitching
Biographic Data
| ID | 77541 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Karl Kitching |
| GIVEN NAMES | Karl |
| FAMILY NAME | Kitching |
| SIGNATURE | KITCHING K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Birmingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7141-9333 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 25 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Is religious expression supported at school? Examining youth perspectives in an age of antagonisms
Liberal multicultural education policies have traditionally viewed religious freedom and equality as complementary aspects of state support for majority and minority groups. This complementarity has been undermined internationally by securitisation policy discourses, which portray Muslim minorities as potential extremists needing restrictions, and right-wing populist portrayals of majority religious freedom and minority religious equality as anta…
Unfit for free speech? How minoritised youth expression and (self-)censorship is organised across schools in ‘no-majority’ cities
Analysis of the silencing of racially minoritised communities is a cornerstone of race-critical theories. Yet amid resurgent attacks on anti-racist education by alleged ‘free speech’ defenders internationally, few studies analyse the speech conditions experienced by minoritised youth across urban contexts. Drawing on substantial qualitative data from case studies of four secondary schools in the ‘no-majority’ cities of London and Birmingham, the …
The reactionary use of concepts of secularism, pluralism and freedom of expression
This paper is the text of a keynote address given at the Education Studies Association of Ireland Conference on March 31st 2023. Drawing on diverse examples of reactionary politics in Ireland and the UK such as protests against queer-inclusive education, the maintenance of sectarian and Catholic majoritarian schooling, and the use of ideas of 'free speech' arguments to shut down anti-racist education, Karl Kitching argues for vigilance against th…
Education policy and ‘free speech’ on race and faith equality at school
Right-wing populists have recurrently created moral panics inter-nationally about the supposed need to ‘protect free speech’ in higher education (HE), and ‘protect children’ from progressive speech in schools. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of how such dynamics function with respect to race and faith equality in a national school policy context. Drawing on a critical post-structural framework, we conceptualise the policy proble…
The neutral order of things
Basing views about race on facts? Meso-level policy actors' navigation of anti-racist and faith-inclusive expression with schools
‘Bearing witness to negativity’
Contemporary educational discourse is filled with references to ‘the future’ and ‘the futures of education.’ In September 2024, the United Nations (UN) will host a Summit of the Future, billed as a
Contemporary, racialised conflicts over LGBT-inclusive education
This paper analyses public conflicts over school policies that seek to advance Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) equality. It focuses in particular on conflicts where Muslims, who protest LGBT-inclusive policies, become racialised as other to secular national/Western values. Growing attention has been paid to the secular arguments used by majority and minority religious groups to publicly counter LGBT-inclusive education. In this pape…
Walking and talking with girls in their urban environments
Young people spend a lot of time in their neighbourhood, yet little is known about the relationship between wellbeing, belonging and place from their own perspective. Our study sought to understand how young people navigate their neighbourhood and perceive various aspects of its health environment in its broadest sense. In this article we reflect on the walking methodology we used as part of a Participatory Photo Mapping (PPM) exercise with 11-ye…
Towards Critical Secular Studies in Education
This paper calls for systematic inquiry into the relationship between secular governing formations and education inequalities. We present a thematic analysis of existing scholarship on secularism, the secular and post-secular in education. Our review of 184 texts reveals a frequent implicit or explicit reliance on the liberal state to address religious inequalities in education, and to draw the line on the extent of public religious expression. T…
Covid-19 and education
According to the UN (2020), almost 1.6 billion people, or circa one-fifth of the world’s population, across 190 countries and all continents, have been impacted in terms of disruption to education
Young girls’ experiences of ‘good’ food imperatives in a working class school community
Education policy internationally positions schools as central sites of intervention on ‘obesity epidemics’, particularly in working class communities. This article presents a moral geographies approach which examines how such obesity-focused healthy food imperatives are experienced in specific places and times. The authors draw on data from a participatory photo mapping exercise with 11-year-old girls in a working class school setting in Ireland.…
Parents displaying family consumption in Ireland
This article considers qualitative data collected from 78 parents in an Irish study on the commercialisation and sexualisation of children. It makes a distinctive contribution in showing that the framework of family display (Finch, 2007) can be productively applied to the entire field of family consumption. It shows that consumption narratives can be viewed as a tool that is used to display family – in other words, showing how family is done – to…
Sweets are ‘my best friend’
Research and policy on children’s food consumption commonly highlights the unequal impact of obesogenic environments on their health. Yet obesogenic theories risk pathologising certain communities, when assuming fixed relationships between ‘unhealthy’ environments and ‘obese’ bodies, and neglecting children’s multi-layered relationships to food and health. Drawing on participatory photomapping with 11–12-year-old girls in an urban Irish working-c…
Parents’ encounters with ‘the sexualisation of childhood’
This paper draws on an Irish government-commissioned study of parents’ views about the sexualisation and commercialisation of children. We examine how parents understand ‘sexualisation’ qualitatively, through their evoking of past, present and future images of childhood. The data underlines how sexualisation becomes rationalised as something to protect against and control, not least through the restrictive surveillance of girls’ development. But …
Slane Girl, beauty pageants and padded bras
Public and academic concern about the sexualisation of children first emerged in the early 1980s in the US, and has been traced back to the early 1990s in the UK. By contrast, public concern about child sexualisation is relatively new in Irish public discourse. In 2013 in particular, a number of “flashpoint” events occurred in Ireland, prompting both political and media reactions, which set the dominant tone of Irish discourse on this issue. This…
What can beliefs do? Ethics education and authenticity after postmodernism
What can beliefs do? Ethics education and authenticity after postmodernism." Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(14), pp. 1477–1478
A thousand tiny pluralities
This paper critiques the idea that secular education policy can neutrally recognise children’s non/religious identities at school. It also empirically analyses how one child becomes restricted by, and eludes, classed, gendered and adult-centred moral codes enacted through local school recognition. The concept of policy assemblage is first used to problematise postsecular, market-led enactments of non/religious school community recognition transna…
Governing ‘Authentic’ Religiosity? The Responsibilisation of Parents beyond Religion and State in Matters of School Ethos in Ireland
The aim of this paper is to advance scholarship on the governance of religious difference and its relationship to social reproduction, inclusion and exclusion, with specific reference to parenting, schooling and childhood. Rather ask ‘how does the state and religion govern religious pursuits?’, the focus of this paper is ‘how might parents’ and children's religious expressions be already implicated, or caught up in, the ordering and coordination …
How the Irish became CRT’d? ‘Greening’ Critical Race Theory, and the pitfalls of a normative Atlantic state view
This article considers the transatlantic use of Critical Race Theory (CRT) frameworks to critically interpret racism in education internationally, and the possibilities and pitfalls this has for understanding racism in Ireland. It argues for the importance of CRT’s framework on a number of grounds, but echoes cautions against the assumed, or sole use of a white/non-white framework to understand situated anti-racisms ‘elsewhere’. This caution focu…
Taking Responsibility for Race Inequality and the Limitless Acts Required
Certain radical race scholars argue that white people can and must act in anti-racist ways as part of a project that aims to end racial identities built on inequality, terror and domination. Yet revisioning the white subject as non-oppressive should not be the primary goal of anti-racism, as this re-centralises concern for those benefiting from whiteness. In this article, the author considers the ongoing erasure of white responsibility for race i…
Interrogating the changing inequalities constituting ‘popular’ ‘deviant’ and ‘ordinary’ subjects of school/subculture in Ireland
This paper explores moments in which three new migrant students become constituted as particular types of learners and classmates, through the interplay of racialised, classed and gendered norms made available in one Irish school. Certainly, new migrant students’ subjectivities may be constrained due to already embedded school/subcultural inequalities. Yet rather than simply being entirely subject to the exclusionary norms underpinning ‘deviance’…
What makes teachers tick? Sustaining events in new teachers’ lives
To investigate what keeps teachers motivated on a day‐to‐day basis, we traced the importance of routinely encountered affective episodes . Significant research on emotions already highlights the relative importance of positive versus negative episodes, the importance of perceived origins of events and the need to differentiate between the frequency and affective intensity of episodes. Survey reports from 749 recently qualified primary teachers in…
White privilege
The resurgence and success of far-right and fascist-aligned politics in western parliaments has shocked some. But for others, it has not been surprising. The burden that black and minority ethnic w
Interrogating the changing inequalities constituting ‘popular’ ‘deviant’ and ‘ordinary’ subjects of school/subculture in Ireland
This paper explores moments in which three new migrant students become constituted as particular types of learners and classmates, through the interplay of racialised, classed and gendered norms made available in one Irish school. Certainly, new migrant students’ subjectivities may be constrained due to already embedded school/subcultural inequalities. Yet rather than simply being entirely subject to the exclusionary norms underpinning ‘deviance’…
What makes teachers tick? Sustaining events in new teachers’ lives
To investigate what keeps teachers motivated on a day‐to‐day basis, we traced the importance of routinely encountered affective episodes . Significant research on emotions already highlights the relative importance of positive versus negative episodes, the importance of perceived origins of events and the need to differentiate between the frequency and affective intensity of episodes. Survey reports from 749 recently qualified primary teachers in…
How the Irish became CRT’d? ‘Greening’ Critical Race Theory, and the pitfalls of a normative Atlantic state view
This article considers the transatlantic use of Critical Race Theory (CRT) frameworks to critically interpret racism in education internationally, and the possibilities and pitfalls this has for understanding racism in Ireland. It argues for the importance of CRT’s framework on a number of grounds, but echoes cautions against the assumed, or sole use of a white/non-white framework to understand situated anti-racisms ‘elsewhere’. This caution focu…
A thousand tiny pluralities
This paper critiques the idea that secular education policy can neutrally recognise children’s non/religious identities at school. It also empirically analyses how one child becomes restricted by, and eludes, classed, gendered and adult-centred moral codes enacted through local school recognition. The concept of policy assemblage is first used to problematise postsecular, market-led enactments of non/religious school community recognition transna…
Education policy and ‘free speech’ on race and faith equality at school
Right-wing populists have recurrently created moral panics inter-nationally about the supposed need to ‘protect free speech’ in higher education (HE), and ‘protect children’ from progressive speech in schools. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of how such dynamics function with respect to race and faith equality in a national school policy context. Drawing on a critical post-structural framework, we conceptualise the policy proble…
Basing views about race on facts? Meso-level policy actors' navigation of anti-racist and faith-inclusive expression with schools
Towards Critical Secular Studies in Education
This paper calls for systematic inquiry into the relationship between secular governing formations and education inequalities. We present a thematic analysis of existing scholarship on secularism, the secular and post-secular in education. Our review of 184 texts reveals a frequent implicit or explicit reliance on the liberal state to address religious inequalities in education, and to draw the line on the extent of public religious expression. T…
Slane Girl, beauty pageants and padded bras
Public and academic concern about the sexualisation of children first emerged in the early 1980s in the US, and has been traced back to the early 1990s in the UK. By contrast, public concern about child sexualisation is relatively new in Irish public discourse. In 2013 in particular, a number of “flashpoint” events occurred in Ireland, prompting both political and media reactions, which set the dominant tone of Irish discourse on this issue. This…
What makes teachers tick? Sustaining events in new teachers’ lives
To investigate what keeps teachers motivated on a day‐to‐day basis, we traced the importance of routinely encountered affective episodes . Significant research on emotions already highlights the relative importance of positive versus negative episodes, the importance of perceived origins of events and the need to differentiate between the frequency and affective intensity of episodes. Survey reports from 749 recently qualified primary teachers in…
Taking Responsibility for Race Inequality and the Limitless Acts Required
Certain radical race scholars argue that white people can and must act in anti-racist ways as part of a project that aims to end racial identities built on inequality, terror and domination. Yet revisioning the white subject as non-oppressive should not be the primary goal of anti-racism, as this re-centralises concern for those benefiting from whiteness. In this article, the author considers the ongoing erasure of white responsibility for race i…
Interrogating the changing inequalities constituting ‘popular’ ‘deviant’ and ‘ordinary’ subjects of school/subculture in Ireland
This paper explores moments in which three new migrant students become constituted as particular types of learners and classmates, through the interplay of racialised, classed and gendered norms made available in one Irish school. Certainly, new migrant students’ subjectivities may be constrained due to already embedded school/subcultural inequalities. Yet rather than simply being entirely subject to the exclusionary norms underpinning ‘deviance’…
Governing ‘Authentic’ Religiosity? The Responsibilisation of Parents beyond Religion and State in Matters of School Ethos in Ireland
The aim of this paper is to advance scholarship on the governance of religious difference and its relationship to social reproduction, inclusion and exclusion, with specific reference to parenting, schooling and childhood. Rather ask ‘how does the state and religion govern religious pursuits?’, the focus of this paper is ‘how might parents’ and children's religious expressions be already implicated, or caught up in, the ordering and coordination …
How the Irish became CRT’d? ‘Greening’ Critical Race Theory, and the pitfalls of a normative Atlantic state view
This article considers the transatlantic use of Critical Race Theory (CRT) frameworks to critically interpret racism in education internationally, and the possibilities and pitfalls this has for understanding racism in Ireland. It argues for the importance of CRT’s framework on a number of grounds, but echoes cautions against the assumed, or sole use of a white/non-white framework to understand situated anti-racisms ‘elsewhere’. This caution focu…
A thousand tiny pluralities
This paper critiques the idea that secular education policy can neutrally recognise children’s non/religious identities at school. It also empirically analyses how one child becomes restricted by, and eludes, classed, gendered and adult-centred moral codes enacted through local school recognition. The concept of policy assemblage is first used to problematise postsecular, market-led enactments of non/religious school community recognition transna…
Slane Girl, beauty pageants and padded bras
Public and academic concern about the sexualisation of children first emerged in the early 1980s in the US, and has been traced back to the early 1990s in the UK. By contrast, public concern about child sexualisation is relatively new in Irish public discourse. In 2013 in particular, a number of “flashpoint” events occurred in Ireland, prompting both political and media reactions, which set the dominant tone of Irish discourse on this issue. This…
What can beliefs do? Ethics education and authenticity after postmodernism
What can beliefs do? Ethics education and authenticity after postmodernism." Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(14), pp. 1477–1478
Parents’ encounters with ‘the sexualisation of childhood’
This paper draws on an Irish government-commissioned study of parents’ views about the sexualisation and commercialisation of children. We examine how parents understand ‘sexualisation’ qualitatively, through their evoking of past, present and future images of childhood. The data underlines how sexualisation becomes rationalised as something to protect against and control, not least through the restrictive surveillance of girls’ development. But …
Covid-19 and education
According to the UN (2020), almost 1.6 billion people, or circa one-fifth of the world’s population, across 190 countries and all continents, have been impacted in terms of disruption to education
Young girls’ experiences of ‘good’ food imperatives in a working class school community
Education policy internationally positions schools as central sites of intervention on ‘obesity epidemics’, particularly in working class communities. This article presents a moral geographies approach which examines how such obesity-focused healthy food imperatives are experienced in specific places and times. The authors draw on data from a participatory photo mapping exercise with 11-year-old girls in a working class school setting in Ireland.…
Parents displaying family consumption in Ireland
This article considers qualitative data collected from 78 parents in an Irish study on the commercialisation and sexualisation of children. It makes a distinctive contribution in showing that the framework of family display (Finch, 2007) can be productively applied to the entire field of family consumption. It shows that consumption narratives can be viewed as a tool that is used to display family – in other words, showing how family is done – to…
Sweets are ‘my best friend’
Research and policy on children’s food consumption commonly highlights the unequal impact of obesogenic environments on their health. Yet obesogenic theories risk pathologising certain communities, when assuming fixed relationships between ‘unhealthy’ environments and ‘obese’ bodies, and neglecting children’s multi-layered relationships to food and health. Drawing on participatory photomapping with 11–12-year-old girls in an urban Irish working-c…
Walking and talking with girls in their urban environments
Young people spend a lot of time in their neighbourhood, yet little is known about the relationship between wellbeing, belonging and place from their own perspective. Our study sought to understand how young people navigate their neighbourhood and perceive various aspects of its health environment in its broadest sense. In this article we reflect on the walking methodology we used as part of a Participatory Photo Mapping (PPM) exercise with 11-ye…
Towards Critical Secular Studies in Education
This paper calls for systematic inquiry into the relationship between secular governing formations and education inequalities. We present a thematic analysis of existing scholarship on secularism, the secular and post-secular in education. Our review of 184 texts reveals a frequent implicit or explicit reliance on the liberal state to address religious inequalities in education, and to draw the line on the extent of public religious expression. T…
‘Bearing witness to negativity’
Contemporary educational discourse is filled with references to ‘the future’ and ‘the futures of education.’ In September 2024, the United Nations (UN) will host a Summit of the Future, billed as a
Contemporary, racialised conflicts over LGBT-inclusive education
This paper analyses public conflicts over school policies that seek to advance Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) equality. It focuses in particular on conflicts where Muslims, who protest LGBT-inclusive policies, become racialised as other to secular national/Western values. Growing attention has been paid to the secular arguments used by majority and minority religious groups to publicly counter LGBT-inclusive education. In this pape…
White privilege
The resurgence and success of far-right and fascist-aligned politics in western parliaments has shocked some. But for others, it has not been surprising. The burden that black and minority ethnic w
The reactionary use of concepts of secularism, pluralism and freedom of expression
This paper is the text of a keynote address given at the Education Studies Association of Ireland Conference on March 31st 2023. Drawing on diverse examples of reactionary politics in Ireland and the UK such as protests against queer-inclusive education, the maintenance of sectarian and Catholic majoritarian schooling, and the use of ideas of 'free speech' arguments to shut down anti-racist education, Karl Kitching argues for vigilance against th…
Education policy and ‘free speech’ on race and faith equality at school
Right-wing populists have recurrently created moral panics inter-nationally about the supposed need to ‘protect free speech’ in higher education (HE), and ‘protect children’ from progressive speech in schools. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of how such dynamics function with respect to race and faith equality in a national school policy context. Drawing on a critical post-structural framework, we conceptualise the policy proble…
The neutral order of things
Basing views about race on facts? Meso-level policy actors' navigation of anti-racist and faith-inclusive expression with schools
Is religious expression supported at school? Examining youth perspectives in an age of antagonisms
Liberal multicultural education policies have traditionally viewed religious freedom and equality as complementary aspects of state support for majority and minority groups. This complementarity has been undermined internationally by securitisation policy discourses, which portray Muslim minorities as potential extremists needing restrictions, and right-wing populist portrayals of majority religious freedom and minority religious equality as anta…
Unfit for free speech? How minoritised youth expression and (self-)censorship is organised across schools in ‘no-majority’ cities
Analysis of the silencing of racially minoritised communities is a cornerstone of race-critical theories. Yet amid resurgent attacks on anti-racist education by alleged ‘free speech’ defenders internationally, few studies analyse the speech conditions experienced by minoritised youth across urban contexts. Drawing on substantial qualitative data from case studies of four secondary schools in the ‘no-majority’ cities of London and Birmingham, the …
Sociology (21 works) · Political science (19 works) · Gender Studies (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Politics (8 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · Social science (7 works)