Sue Saltmarsh

Gender economies: literacy and the gendered production of neo‐liberal subjectivities

In this paper, we analyse the links between subjectivities as they are constructed through the intersecting discourses of gender and literacy, and we situate this analysis in the context of the current neo‐liberal social and economic order. We begin with a discussion of the background to the gender and literacy debates. We then describe what neo‐liberalism is and its implications for education, and provide an analysis of the ways in which gendered and literate subjectivities are formed. We introduce Certeau’s concept of the scriptural economy and illustrate this with four stories about children writing. In the final section we discuss some of the research on gender and literacy in school and home settings. Our overall trajectory is to show the relations among literacy, gender and the economy and to show the intensification of gendered differences that is taking place despite the neo‐liberal rhetoric that says such differences are no longer relevant.

Has anyone read the reading? Using assessment to promote academic literacies and learning cultures

This paper reports on the theoretical and political rationale for an assessment strategy designed to support the development of academic literacies and learning cultures amongst undergraduate and postgraduate education students in one metropolitan and one regional university in Australia. The ‘Critical Review’ is an integrated assessment task that aims to promote a student culture of learning preparedness, critical thinking, scholarly writing and educational ethics by equipping students with both content-specific knowledges and generalisable skills and orientations to academic learning. The Critical Review is both formative and summative in purpose, with primary emphasis given to its usefulness to individual students across a diversity of learning environments and assessment modalities, as well as its importance to enhancing institutional learning cultures. The flexibility of the assessment design is readily incorporated into a range of course structures, and adapts readily to studies in a variety of disciplinary fields.

Cultural Complicities: Elitism, Heteronormativity and Violence in the Education Marketplace.

Educational discourse in Australia has been dramatically altered in recent decades as neoliberal choice policies favouring an increasingly marketized, tiered educational landscape have witnessed a burgeoning of private sector schooling. In this climate, many perceive private sector schooling as providing moral, social and academic benefits beyond those available to students in the public sector. Amid rhetorics of excellence and accountability that pervade discourses of private schooling, however, recent high‐profile incidents of violence involving students at elite private schools provide a powerful provocation to these dominant discourses, and call into question a range of cultural practices associated with elite schooling. In this paper, the author draws on data generated from a three‐year study of sexually violent incidents that took place at an elite boys’ school in Sydney, Australia and their representation in the public domain, to consider how discourses of elitism, heteronormativity and violence circulate in dialogue. Through analysis of school‐ and media‐generated texts, and interviews with a former student and parents of the school, it is argued that the education marketplace is a site of disjuncture and contradiction, in which the privileges of private school consumption are simultaneously upheld and revoked in a complex interplay of school, media and social discourse. In so doing, the author considers how a range of cultural and institutional practices are complicit in the production of violence.

Becoming economic subjects: agency, consumption and popular culture in early childhood

This paper considers how young children in early childhood education draw on popular texts and consumer goods in their constitution of subjectivities and social relations. The paper draws on poststructuralist theories of subjectivity, agency, consumption and power, to explore how performative practices of consumption figure in the constitution of economically oriented subjectivities. Drawing on data generated in research undertaken in early childhood centres in the culturally diverse outer metropolitan region of Greater Western Sydney, Australia, the paper considers how economic discourse informs childrens cultural knowledges, shaping the ‘techniques of the self’ through their engagement with commercially available images and products. The argument is made that children make strategic use of their knowledge of popular culture and its potential to locate them advantageously in material and symbolic economies, and that the deployment of symbolic and material goods that shapes childrens dress, play, and conversation is an important means of rendering oneself intelligible within normative discourses of economic participation.

The Production of "Proper Cheating" in Online Examinations within Technological Universities

This paper uses poststructuralist theories of governmentality, agency, consumption and Barry’s (2001) concept of Technological Societies, as a heuristic framework to trace the role of online education technologies in the instantiation of subjectification processes within contemporary Australian universities. This case study of the unintended effects of the adoption and usage of an online educational technology (WebFreedom) for online examinations in an Australian university setting is analysed using poststructuralist theories of governmentality, agency and consumption. The analysis demonstrates how techniques of governing the learning practices of students via online educational technologies intersect with the agentive capacity of students who are relocated as consumers in the higher education marketplace. In particular the paper focuses on the production of unintended localized online examination behaviours resulting in a form of ‘subterranean ethics’ or cheating in online exams. The results from this case study raise critical questions concerning the ways in which both students and tertiary educators are constituted within neoliberal governmental thought, as well as the ways in which students produce themselves in practice as autonomous agents and educational consumers within tertiary education. Suggestions on the focus of future research in the area are discussed.

Haunting concepts in social research

The notion of haunting has a long and complex history spanning cultural contexts and epistemological borders, in every age functioning to interrogate the coextensive relationships between past, present and future. Whether through folk traditions, literary fictions, or philosophical inquiries, the concept of haunting makes a potent call upon the ontological un/certainties of what Derrida refers to as the ‘disjointed or disadjusted now’ (Derrida, 1994, p. 1). Perhaps not surprisingly, haunting has emerged as a conceptual tool within the humanities and social sciences including the troubling of historical memory by the ‘living ghosts’ posed by Homi Bhaba (Bhaba, 1996); the unsettling of multicultural discourses in Sneja Gunew’s ‘haunted nations’ (Gunew, 2004); Slavoj Žižek’s thesis that Western academia is haunted by the spectre of Cartesian subjectivity (Žižek, 1999); and Jacques Derrida’s extensive critique of late twentieth-century capitalism in Spectres of Marx (1994). Despite their very different concerns and orientations, such works confer on the spectral a range of theoretical and methodological possibilities for interdisciplinary research encounters. In this essay, I am interested in exploring the productive potential of haunting as a ‘travelling concept’ (Bal, 2002, 2007), and the methodological work that it undertakes in two recent sociological texts: Haunting the Knowledge Economy (Kenway, Bullen, Fahey, & Robb, 2006) and Avery F. Gordon’s recently revised Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (2008). Through a discussion of each of these texts, I consider how the concept of haunting interrogates, ‘through a confrontation with, not application to’ (Bal, 2002, p. 24) the objects of analysis of concern to the respective authors, and contemplate the implications of such approaches for interdisciplinary educational research. Concepts, as elaborated in the work of cultural analyst Mieke Bal, are understood as doing the work of theory and method, functioning ‘not so much as

Technographic Research in Online Education: Context, Culture and ICT Consumption

Technologically‐mediated learning environments are an increasingly common component of university experience. In this paper, the authors consider how the interrelated domains of policy contexts, new learning cultures and the consumption of information and communication technologies might be explored using the concept of technography. Understood here as a term referring to “the apprehension, reception, use, deployment, depiction and representation of technologies” (Woolgar, 2005, pp. 27–28), we consider how technographic studies in education might engage in productive dialogues with interdisciplinary research from the fields of cultural and cyber studies. We argue that what takes place in online learning and teaching environments is shaped by the logics and practices of technologies and their role in the production of new consumer cultures.