Spirits, Miracles and Clauses: Economy, Patriarchy and Childhood in Popular Christmas Texts

In this paper I explore the notion of childhood as it is re/configured in Christmas texts through the discursive frames of industrialisation and global capitalism. Through a poststructuralist analysis of three Christmas texts from the 1840s, 1940s and 1990s, I map discursive shifts in the ways that children and childhood are constructed in relation to the discourses of capitalist societies. Three texts are examined in detail: A Christmas Carol, published by Charles Dickens in 1843; the 1947 version of the film, Miracle on 34th Street; and the 1999 Walt Disney film, The Santa Clause. While these texts provide only a small sample from the thousands of texts available, their commercial success and sustained popular appeal makes them particularly significant sites of analysis. Dickens' text is widely considered 'the most often repeated and imitated secular Christmas story of all' (Belk 2005, p.18), which has itself 'become sacred Christmas literature' (Belk 2005, p. 19). The success of Miracle on 34th Street led to several remakes for television audiences, with major motion picture remakes released in 1973 and again in 1994, while The Santa Clause the role credited with launching actor Tim Allen from a successful television career into a string of Hollywood blockbuster films won the 1995 People's Choice Award (USA) for Favourite Comedy Motion Picture, and was followed by sequels in 2002 and 2006 (IMDb, 2007). When considered together, these three popular, enduring and commercially successful texts illustrate some of the ways in which cultural texts are implicated in constructing children, over time, as particular kinds of economic subjects

Economic Subjectivities in Higher Education: Self, Policy and Practice in the Knowledge Economy

This article considers higher education in the context of global knowledge economy policies as a site for the production of economic subjectivities. Drawing insights from poststructuralist theory and feminist economics, it explores how the incorporation of economic discourse and market metaphors into education policy and practice functions as a disciplinary technique of governmentality. The article argues that while economic discourse displaces, disciplines and disrupts educational discourse, there is a need for greater acknowledgement of the productive potential of the intersection of education and economy as a means through which agency is in part accomplished. Implications for university learning and labour are considered, with a view to contributing to dialogues about new ways of undisciplining economic subjectivities, through which new ways of doing and being might enact alternative educational economies

'The kid most likely’: naming, brutality and silence within and beyond school settings

Violence in educational settings is a complex issue, and the topic of a considerable body of international research literature (see, for example, Casella, 2001; Elliott, Hamburg, & Williams, 1998; Mills, 2001). This volume of research asks authors and readers to rethink what is known and believed about school violence, and in this chapter I draw on three narratives in order to query the brutality of discourses within which children are labelled and silenced. The chapter is concerned with systemic violence (Watkinson & Epp, 1997) and its discursive effects, calling into question: labelling practices that name children as particular 'types' of social subject; silencing practices that denigrate, disregard and dismiss those most vulnerable in unequal relations of power; as well as those discursive silences that tacitly enable the reproduction of violence. Through the figure of 'the kid most likely'—in other words, children who are constituted as those most likely to experience educational failure, to commit criminal offences, to pose risks to themselves and others—the chapter considers how discursive practices of naming and silence powerfully reproduce and normalise symbolic and material violence within unequal relations of power

Heteronormativity, childhood and invisibilised consumption

Response to Kerry H. Robinson's chapter: 'Childhood as a 'queer time and space': alternative imaginings of normative markers of gendered lives' in Queer and subjugated knowledges: generating subversive imaginaries, Bentham, Sharjah, UAE, 2012

Michel de Certeau, everyday life and cultural policy studies in education

This chapter considers the work of Michel de Certeau in relation to cultural approaches to policy studies. The chapter explores concepts of culture as everyday practice, and policy as cultural practice, and argues that policy and culture are reciprocal and coconstitutive. The chapter examines the importance of understanding the everyday activities and meaning-making practices of policy makers and stakeholders, as well as (meta)methodology and the ethical and political implications of Certeau’s work for approaches to policy research

The politics of normative childhoods and non-normative parenting: a response to Cristyn Davies and Kerry Robinson

This article offers a consideration of the ways that the politics of normative childhoods are shaped by discourses of happiness predicated on heteronormativity. Responding to the work of Cristyn Davies and Kerry Robinson (2013, this issue), the authors argue that non-normative families and in particular, non-normative parenting, are obliged to secure, protect and police their children’s perceived entitlements to normative ‘happy’ childhoods in order to achieve social legitimacy. Such obligations, they contend, locate non-normative parents and families, rather than societies, as responsible for the effects of discriminatory social norms to which they are subjected. Informed by the work of Jonathan Silin, the authors support a politics of childhood that gives discursive legitimacy to children’s voice and experience regarding the ways in which normativity is enforced at their and their families’ expense

In search of the ethical university

Information societies and global knowledge economy policies have brought about unprecedented levels of organisational and cultural change in universities worldwide. Critics argue that the reconfiguration of universities as engines of economic growth has dealt critical blows to ethical principles and conduct in institutions now driven by corporate interest, competitive individualism, and the intensification of audit and surveillance regimes

Minding the P\u27s for implementing online education : purpose, peadagogy, and practicalities

Online education has a presence in most Australian universities, and its uptake has been broadly understood as being driven by external imperatives associated with intensive competition within the global knowledge economy. However, the implementation of online education does not take place uniformly, and tensions can arise as a consequence of the considerable variation in approaches taken by institutions, faculties, departments and individual educators. In this paper, we analyse interview data from five Australian universities to consider how senior administrators, teacher educators and educational designers interpret the drivers of and barriers to online education. Our findings indicate that there are considerable tensions between the economic considerations driving online delivery, the pedagogical approaches embraced by many teaching academics, and the practicalities associated with financial and human resource costs, technological supports and succession planning. We argue that minding the ‘P’s of purpose, pedagogy and practicalities can be a valuable and productive way forward for addressing ongoing issues of quality and sustainability in online education

Diversity as a Condition of Cultures: Querying Assumptions of Mainstream and Minorities in Education Policy and Curriculum

• Discussions of diversity in relation to children's education are often characterized by binaries of same/different, mainstream/margins, inclusion/exclusion, self/Other. • Curriculum remains a contested site in educational debate, with differing views about curriculum as reinforcing social norms, beliefs, and values, as addressing the learning and social needs of learners from a variety of backgrounds and worldviews, or as a hybrid of these. • Policy and curriculum designed or intended to address diversity tend to rest on assumptions of majority or dominant cultures as homogenous and distinct from the cultures of minority Other/s. • Inequality is often multidimensional, intersecting with, perpetuating, and reinforcing other inequalities and human rights violations affecting children and families. • Understanding culture in terms of heterogenous practices of everyday life shifts the focus of discussion and debate toward more nuanced understandings of Otherness, difference and diversity as operating within, as well as between, cultures

Out and About in Global Cities

This chapter considers childhood in the context of global cities, taking the space of the city as a site of everyday life and its multiplicity of cultural practices. Informed by cultural theory concerned with spatial practices, the practice of place, and the ways that everyday life is implicated in the formation of culture (Certeau, 1984), and drawing on the work of scholars from the transdisciplinary field of global studies, the chapter explores how social imaginaries of the global city are enmeshed within broader contexts, cultures and world events. Through a discussion of city spaces, events and activities available to children in the public spaces of global cities, local histories and everyday practices of art, politics, play and culture are shown to extend beyond what might otherwise be designated as “local”, and to instead be porous to the space and time of elsewhere. Images from galleries, museums and parks illustrate multiple entanglements between embodied practices in children’s lifeworlds and social imaginaries of global childhoods, which in turn take place in dialogue with dynamic global forces that continue to shape social imaginaries of global childhoods