Gregory Martin

The Legend of the Bush Gang: Imperialism, War, and Propaganda

This article explores the dialectical relationship between the Bush administration’s domestic policies and its deranged “war on terrorism,” which is being waged on a number of different fronts, for example, Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, and the United States. The authors argue that the Bush gang is using the external “international crisis” to override the remnants of U.S. bourgeois democracy in order to reestablish conditions of profitability. Perhaps not surprisingly, at least from a Marxist perspective, the supporting repressive (e.g., the Department of Homeland Security’s secret police) and ideological state apparatuses (e.g., schools and the corporate media) have played a profound role in building support for the Bush gang’s totalizing ambitions.

Indigenous students' persistence in higher education in Australia: contextualising models of change from psychology to understand and aid students' practices at a cultural interface

The need to address the substantial inequities that exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in higher education is widely recognised. Those factors that affect the performance of Indigenous students in tertiary education have been reasonably well documented across different institutions, disciplines, and programme levels but there has, to date, been less consideration of the processes by which Indigenous students either persist or desist in higher education. This paper aims to present a conceptual understanding of academic persistence that can inform the delivery of tailored academic support interventions to Indigenous students who are at high risk of leaving higher education.

Promoting the persistence of Indigenous students through teaching at the Cultural Interface

The promise of higher education remains elusive for many Indigenous students in Australia. To date, institutional efforts to improve the persistence and retention of Indigenous students have been largely piecemeal, poorly integrated and designed to remediate skill deficits. Yet, market-led expansion of Australian higher education is driving curricular reform and demands for accountability and quality. Despite this, very little is known about how teaching and pedagogy can be used to support the learning and persistence of Indigenous students. In this context, the paper provides a reconceptualization of current debates and positions that are currently bound up within the limitations of questionable binary divides and oppositions, for example, educational psychology/sociology, transmission/critical or decolonial pedagogies and Indigenous/Western Knowledge. Nakatas concept of the Cultural Interface is mobilized to acknowledge some of the nuances and complexities that emerge when Indigenous and Western knowledge systems come into convergence within the higher education classroom.

Don't lEAP into this: student resistance in labour market programmes

Abstract This article outlines how the authors conceptual understanding of a labour market programme in Australia called Landcare Environmental Action Plan (LEAP), and the authors place within it, changed as he engaged in a socially critical action research project. As a methodology, action research provided him with a deeper insight into how LEAP experiences were structured ideologically and materially within asymmetrical relations of power and privilege. Indeed, while the programme was supposedly designed to benefit unemployed youth, the reality was that the participants were often frustrated and angry which manifested in acts of passive and active resistance. As the author engaged the young people in seeking out an alternative structuring of space within the confines of the LEAP, he found that his own liberal beliefs in social mobility and equality tended to reinscribe the circle of oppression and despair he sought to eradicate. In this article the author argues that action research may become yet another normalizing and oppressive practice in itself, if educators refuse to move beyond the need for civility and professionalism

Scaling critical pedagogy in higher education

Across the globe, neoliberal reforms have produced effects in the higher education sector that are multiple, convergent and embodied or performed. In this context, a growing number of activist-scholars, from a range of disciplines, have explored the role of critical pedagogy within the space of the classroom. Yet, persistent critiques and challenges suggest that the field of critical pedagogy needs to build upon a richer set of theoretical and practical insights. While the discipline of geography has proven to be a generative source of learning and renewal, a recurring tendency exists within the educational literature to treat the key geographical concept of scale as a discrete, pre-given unit of analysis. Consequently, scale remains largely under-theorised and misunderstood leading to simplistic binary oppositions and choices. This binary filter underpins a comfortable but problematic ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ paradigm. Drawing upon contentious debates in the field of geography, this paper explores how the intersections between diverse spatial concepts, including scale, might be strategically deployed to rework the spatial imaginings of critical pedagogy.

The discursive (re)positioning of older workers in Australian recruitment policy reform: An exemplary analysis of written and visual narratives

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a methodological demonstration of how written and visual language in narrative and small stories about older workers might be read in multiple ways as supporting and/or constraining recent policy reform.Design/methodology/approach – Critical theory and critical discourse analysis, supported by narrative analysis and visual analysis, offer a robust methodology to problematize the manner in which textually mediated discourses impact social policy reform for recruiting, retraining and retaining older workers.Findings – The results show that still in such an “age positive” social policy environment, negative stereotypes about older workers persist, threatening to constrain social change.Research limitations/implications – An exemplary analysis of two texts, representative of those related to Australian government initiatives to reform access to work for older citizens, provides an accessible means of (re)evaluating if and how such policies are more inclusive o...

Theorising globalisation and pedagogy: the totally unacceptable ‘other’

Since the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the degenerated workers states of Eastern Europe, there has been a plethora of must-read ‘expert opinion’ reports, articles, and books on the ill-defined topic of globalisation. With the winds of economic and discursive restructuring billowing in their sails, many academics on the educational left have been quick to cut themselves free from the moorings of foundational truths and imperial consequences. Travelling swiftly along cultural currents interpreted as evidence of liberatory mobility, these academics engage with intimate and fashionable ‘readings’ of post-industrial and post-development societies. Such fleet-footed scholars eschew what they claim to be the absurdities of big theory in favour of practices of hybridity, nomadism and fluidity. As the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton (2003) writes,

Living on the edge: rethinking poverty, class and schooling

In this current cycle of education reform, neoliberal policies, self-managing schools, pay-for-performance, scripted curricula and test-based accountability regimes have ushered in sweeping changes...

LEAPing into Youth Work: PAtR in a Cultural Profession

This chapter provides an example of Gregory’s critical engagement with action research approaches. It illustrates the way that power is always already present before you even enter the research space and the way that always already present power can drive the process. This example is not presented here as a perfect example but as a ‘best effort’ in the given context and one you might use to better understand the practice and its complexities, tensions and contradictions, both in theory and practice. Unfortunately, a tendency exists in some of the reported AR literature to tell stories through compelling exemplars that sentimentalise, romanticise or grossly oversimplify the process and the outcomes. This propensity for simplification or exaggeration may be for personal or political reasons such as presenting sanitised reports in order to win funding or to mobilise allies through partisan rhetoric. However, the danger is that this can lead to naive, mechanical, distorted or even erroneous understandings of the change process promoted by PAtR.

A Checklist for Activist Research(ers)

This chapter is a checklist that seeks to act only as a starting point. It should be read alongside the details in the related chapters: