Debbie Epstein

Getting Started on Research

ion, 16, 43 academic career (relevance of current study), 7–11 academic friends (support role), 91–2 academic literature, 18 see also research literature academic research, see research academics anxieties of, 8, 66, 67–81 common beliefs/perceptions, 2–5 making impact on, 47 support role, 91–2 usefulness of current study, 7–10 see also colleagues achievement (finishing problem), 67–9 administrative work, 58 advice avoidance of bad, 79–80 potential sources, 80–93 advisers (support role), 81–3 agendas, research, 15, 16, 21, 69 American Accounting Association, 90 American Historical Association, 90 analysis Bloom’s taxonomy, 21 of data, 44, 46, 64–5 research questions, 26–7 techniques, 43–6 anxieties (of academics), 8, 66 finishing project, 67–9 muddling through, 69–71 appraisal process, 86–7 arguments, 27 associations, 90–91 Australian Association for Research in Education, 90 authorship (recognition), 89, 97 ‘autobiography of the question’, 35, 38, 42 background issues (reseach topic), 38–9 balance (work–life), 53–4 behaviour (ethical practice), 97 belief systems, 2–5 beneficiaries of research, 47, 49 bibliographies, 20, 62–3 ‘black-letter law’, 28 Bloom’s taxonomy of reading, 20, 21 books on research techniques, 92–3 see also reading material bureaucracy (time factor), 59 career profiles, 81 centres, research, 89–90 ‘chaining’, 20 citations, 62 citizen (researcher responsibility), 97 colleagues commitment to, 60–61 help from, 73–93 mentoring, 37, 73–4, 78, 83–7 mutuality, 73, 90 peer review, 18 reciprocity, 79 relations with (ethical practice), 97 research teams, 73, 88–9 support role, 91–2 collegiality, 73, 89 commitment, problems and, 60–61 conferences, 47, 49 confidence (researcher fears), 67–9 confidentiality, 86–7, 95 consequences of research (for respondents), 46, 94–5 coping strategies, 54 creativity, 57 Boden(2)-Index.qxd 10/20/2004 4:01 PM Page 103

Building your academic career

11 Who should Use this Book and How? 72 Why have an Academic Career? 12The professional academic 12The pros and cons of being an academic 133 Shaping up: Academic Anatomies 20Academic identities 20Career contexts 24Paths into academia 26The main elements of academic work 32Research 36Teaching 38Consultancy and professional practice 43Administration 46Balancing acts 50Reputation matters 514 Presenting Yourself:

Postfeminist Educational Media Panics, Girl Power and the Problem/Promise of ‘Successful Girls’

In this chapter, we explore debates around ‘failing boys’ in UK schools as a postfeminist educational media panic. First, we explore how neoliberal ‘discourses’ of feminine educational success have influenced what we call a postfeminist media panic that constructs girls as wholly successful in the Global North, through a review of British policy on gender and education and news media reporting. Second, we explore the globalising reach of postfeminist notions of ‘girl power’ and the celebratory promise of how girls’ educational success will enable wider transnational economic revolution, through a consideration of the corporate social media campaign, the ‘Girl Effect’, in the Global South.

Conclusion: Looking Back, Looking Ahead

We conclude the book by drawing together the connections, conjunctions, juxtapositions and disjunctions that are involved when elite schools undertake class choreography on the global stage. And we consider how they might choreograph their futures as their own contradictions become more manifest and the challenges to their supremacy mount.

Principal Experiments on the Global Stage

We concentrate on school principals in this chapter and on the various ways they seek to position their schools, staff and students on the global stage while, at the same time, trying to remain faithful to the schools’ and the nations’ roots. Their own biographies prove central to the manner in which, and how successfully, they navigate the tensions involved in practicing their global experiments. In tracing the cultural labour of class choreography, we consider their strategies as well as the pressures and constraints on them, nuanced by their specific national and local historical contexts and their own social and political positions and subjectivities in relation to their class work as principals. We pay particular attention to the articulations of gender, class, race, nation and (post-)coloniality, showing how the various principals respond differently to the demands of and for globalization in their aspirations to perform on the global stage while responding to local/national conditions—both political and economic.

Colonialism, Capitalism and Christianity

This chapter shifts the focus from England to the various (former) colonies in which we conducted our fieldwork. Here, we examine the coiled conditions of these interlinked but diverse histories of British colonialism, capitalism and Christianity in the contexts of Australia, Barbados, England, Hong Kong, India, Singapore and South Africa. The uneven development of the British Empire is charted by considering the locally mediated and diverse effects of the aforementioned forces on elite schools in these shifting locations and the social relations that they were part of and helped to make. Here, we explore the conjunctures of the relationship between the British nation and the British Empire, the Empire and each situated site, the locally powerful and British imperialists and the connectivity between each of these sites. By using these elite schools as the lens through which we view their identified pasts, we recognize British colonialism as a particular historical form with ongoing effects that shaped, and continue to shape, social relations in globalizing times.

Little England’s ‘Public Schools’

This chapter examines how public schools and the public school system evolved in England and indicates how they were linked, over time, to shifting national and colonial social power relationships. We offer this history for a number of reasons. First, the particular model of elite schooling in the seven different former British colonies that we address began with these schools in England. Second, the very peculiar links between this type of school and dominant social groups/classes began there. Third, the elevated location of such schools within the wider education system also began there. Thus, when this particular model of schooling travelled to the many colonies of the vast British Empire, along with it went this public school history—not only of educational practices but also of power relationships. Our contention is that in order to understand both elite schools in the former British colonies and the former colonies in relation to their elite schools, one must start with the history of the boys’ public schools of England, and it this is what we explore in this chapter.

The Art of Privilege

Students in elite schools live their lives largely through the prism of privilege and, in this chapter, we concentrate on what this means for their politics. We probe the ways students engage their privilege, what they currently do with it and what they plan to do with it in their futures, pointing to the political spectra across which they range. To understand the underlying qualities of this process, we look at the ways in which privilege is enacted by the young people who proceed through these schools in the different places, spaces and times of globalizing social circumstances. We draw here on the interviews and focus groups conducted with the students in 2011 and 2012. Our purpose is to illustrate how the students understand the unequal geographies of social and political power and privilege and how they place themselves and their peers, socially and politically.

Students on the Move

Mobility is the chief concern of this chapter in which we identify some of the elite global circuits that the schools participate in. We show how the schools use the mobilities made possible through prestigious, transnational organizations of elite schools to assist them to produce leaders. And we draw out the details of some students’ itineraries, thereby pointing to students’ variegated geographic mobilities. We argue, in this regard, that the use of the term ‘elite circuits’ can be taken as characteristic of the patterns of mobility that arise in elite schools. It seems that a wealth of opportunities awaits those participating in this elite circuit. We note that elite mobilities are both collectively organized and often collectively beneficial but, at the same time, they do not ensure uninterrupted privileged lives for individual students. They are, furthermore, exclusionary and entangled with subaltern circuits which arise through the moving geographies of the poor, the refugees—those termed by Bauman, ‘vagabonds’ in contrast to the ‘tourists’ of elite mobilities.

Mobilizing the Past in the Changing Present

In this chapter we illustrate how, through their iconography and rituals, our research schools marshal represent and use their history and heritage as markers of prestige and success. Thus, we call attention to their manipulation and modulation of history to meet present challenges and the pressure of globalizing change. The chapter shows how the schools’ material and virtual resources are selectively mobilized in hyper-celebratory, highly ornamental ways. Thus, we call attention to the choreographed practices of class-making conducted by these schools as they rearticulate and reinvent their symbolic inheritances in their project of hegemonic stabilization and affirmation.