Troubling Practice - Victoria Carrington, Jane Mitchell, Shaun Rawolle and Agli Zavros (eds)

For many, the contemporary era is troubling. To find one's way in these challenging times is increasingly complex and requires new ways of thinking about academe, culture, society, methodology, ourselves. Researchers and theorists find they must transcend traditional boundaries as they attempt to account for and respond to these challenges. The papers in this collection reflect these issues as they set out to analyse, interrogate, describe, examine, 'unpack', disturb, and explain the practice of educational research and/or the educational practices under investigation.

Published by Post Pressed

Globalisation, literacy, curriculum practice - Luke & Carrington

What is the relationship between economic and cultural globalisation and everyday literacy practices for teachers and students in the stolid 20th century institution, the state primary school? What happens when the very institution that was designed for the propagation of print literacy, for the transmission of encyclopedic knowledge, for the inculcation of industrial behaviours, for the development of the postwar citizen, for the domestication of diversity into monocultural identity — the technology of the modern state par excellence — faces the borderless flows and ‘scapes’ of information and image, bodies and capital? And, no less important, what might happen if we engage in a momentary suspension of belief in current policy-driven preoccupations with pedagogical method, with decoding and basic skills — and ask a larger curriculum question: Within the existing walls and wires, capillaries and conventions of the school how might we construct a literacy education that addresses new economic and cultural formations?

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New Times: New Families - Victoria Carrington

The most pressing challenge facing contemporary educators and social theorists is how to deal with new configurations of family without slipping into nostalgia or deficit models. New Times: New Families reframes the nuclear family in a way that will challenge traditional theorizations. It takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey towards a new kind of family, drawing upon theorists such as Bourdieu, Wilden, and Deleuze & Guattari. Unlike other `family' oriented texts, this book reframes family in provocative and unexpected ways. As a result it has the potential to elicit vigorous debate amongst postgraduate students and other researchers involved in family and cultural studies.

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