School-based sexuality education is a type of sexology directed at specific bodies: `unfinished' adolescent bodies in the process of becoming sexual bodies. This article explores notions of the adolescent `unfinished' body in the context of HIV/aids education for young people. Drawing on empirical research carried out in Australian secondary schools, we look at the concepts of the project of the self and reflexivity as they are articulated by young people in their evaluation of HIV/aids education. The open character of self (...) identity and the reflexively monitored nature of the body were emphasized by the young people in their attempted construction of intimacy and sexuality. The discourses of openness and trust and the reliance on both `expert' and `experiential' knowledges were evident in the ways in which they dealt with the risk of HIV/aids. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these data for the theorizing of risk and reflexivity. (shrink)

The present essay focuses on problematizing the European Union's claim that intercultural dialogue constitutes an advocated method of talking through cultural boundaries—inside as well as outside the classroom—based on mutual empathy and non‐domination. More precisely, the aim is to analyze who is being constructed as counterparts of the intercultural dialogue through the discourse produced by the EU in policies on education, culture and intercultural dialogue. Within the Union, Europeans are portrayed as having an a priori historical existence, while the ones (...) excluded from this notion are evoked to demonstrate its difference in comparison to the European one. The results show that subjects not considered as Europeans serve as markers of the multicultural present of the space. Thus, intercultural dialogue seems to consolidate differences between European and Other—the ‘We’ and ‘Them’ in the dialogue—rather than, as in line with its purpose, bringing subjects together. (shrink)

This article explores the development of professional training for youth leaders (now, youth workers) in England and Wales between 1939 and 1945. The article identifies the state's construction of young people as a problematic social category at a time of national crisis and its mobilization of youth leadership as part of the war effort. The Board of Education supported, sometimes tacitly, the development of courses in some universities and voluntary organizations for youth leaders. By 1942 full-time courses of training existed (...) at five universities and university colleges and one voluntary organization and were recognized by the Board under Circular 1598. This article explores tensions between the discourse of voluntarism, in which youth leadership had traditionally been set, and the newly developing discourse of professionalism. The article suggests that these discourses are fundamentally ethical and tensions lay in contested definitions of the ?good youth leader?. Little consensus existed on what counted as the good leader, animating a conflict between voluntarism and state provision. The article concludes by drawing distinctions and continuities between the war years and the present day. (shrink)

Recent attempts by American theorists to produce a radical politics, characterized by the effort to translate the insights of Continental philosophy into a political register, remain trapped in that which they purport to transcend: the metaphysics of subjectivity. In their essential determinations, the works of William Connolly, Stephen White, Richard Ashley, etc. remain firmly anchored in a traditional liberal schema. The reason for this is that while these efforts have sought to de-center political identity by exposing its relational character they (...) have not re-thought 'rela tionality' itself. Our attempt to develop the more profound political impli cations of 'relationality' unfolds through a synthetic explication of Martin Heidegger's analysis of language, Jacques Derrida's logic of the gift, and Emmanuel Levinas' consideration of the Other. The emergent thematic of asymmetrical relationality reconfigures liberalism and provides for a rethinking of the structure of welfare. (shrink)

Motivation is a concept more frequently found in venues concerned with educational psychology than in ones concerned with educational philosophy. Under the influence of psychology, and its typically dualistic way of making sense of the world, motivation in education has tended to be viewed in dichotomous terms, for example, as intrinsic or extrinsic in character. Such psychology-derived theories of educational motivation operate within a dichotomous ontology, traceable to structuralist notions of agency versus (rather than within) structure, while exemplifying the tendency (...) in psychology that philosopher R. S. Peters identified over half a century ago, of seeking to provide totalizing, comprehensive theories of human behaviour in emulation of the achievements of the natural sciences. This article offers an alternative reading of motivation in terms of Foucauldian ethical self-formation that attempts to recognize motivation as arising from the individuals? socially situated and constrained agency, and that focuses on how individuals pursue learning as a way of creating a particular desired version of the self. We illustrate this approach through a vignette of Wolfgang, a Hong Kong learner of German as a third language. Although we are certainly not seeking to supplant other approaches to theorizing motivation, we believe that the approach we elaborate here contributes significantly to the repertoire of motivational research in education. (shrink)

Building from J.L. Austin's concept of ‘performative,’ this essay explores the production of subjectivity and of educational subjects by applying important work from Judith Butler on Foucault, Derrida, and as centrally illustrative, through an analysis of sex and gender. Given this analytical framework, the turn is then to queer performativity and the possibility of performative power in pedagogy. The last draws assistance from Valerie Walkerdine, Homi Bhabha and especially James Donald.

Beginning with a reconsideration of what the school is and has been, this paper explores the idea of the school to come. Emphasizing the governmental role of education in modernity, I offer a line of thinking that calls into question the assumption of both the school and education as possible conduits for either democracy or social justice. Drawing on Derrida’s spectral ontology I argue that any automatic correlation of education with democracy is misguided: especially within redemptive discourses that seek to (...) liberate education from its present enclosure. This rereading of the field of education in the light of an account of the fundamental ontology of its key institution problematizes all rhetorics of education as social salvation. Education, it proposes, cannot be conceived as the ideal soul of a corrupted or as yet defective body, the school. Education—having taken on the character of an ontotheological principle—has become a governmental instrument as much as its specific institutions. This ontological condition can be understood within various accounts of the nature of contemporaneity. This paper considers the monstrous proposal that education be abandoned as the grounds for social, ethical and cultural redemption. The good news is that this abandonment opens the possibility for thinking beyond education, a beyond that is also beyond the strictures of instrumental rationality. (shrink)