Faculty of Education - Research Publications
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ItemWho is “us”? students negotiating discourses of racism and national identification in Australia( 2003)This article explores the political beliefs and the forms of reasoning about racism, national identity and Other developed by young Australian women and men from different ethnic and class backgrounds. The interviews on which the discussion is based are drawn from a larger longitudinal study of Australian secondary school students which examines how young people develop their sense of self and social values over time. The present article here has two overall purposes: to add to understandings of how the cultural logic of racism functions in one national setting, and to consider political reasoning about race and ethnicity in relation to processes of young people’s identity positioning. Three main lines of argument are developed. The first concerns students’ positioning of themselves vis a vis the current ‘race debate’ in Australia, and in relation to us as researchers, including their negotiation of the protocols for speaking about ‘race’ and racism. This includes consideration of the methodological and political effects of white Anglo women asking question about racism and ethnicity to ethnic-minority students who are routinely constituted as ‘Other’: what blindnesses and silences continue to operate when posing questions about racism directly? A second and related focus is the range of emotional responses evoked by asking questions about racism and about an Australian politician [Pauline Hanson], who has been prominent in race debates. Third, we examine young people’s construction of ‘us and them’ binaries and hierarchies of Otherness and whiteness. We argue throughout that reasoning about race, national identity and Others, and the taking up of ‘political positions’, is intimately linked to identity formation and to how we imagine ourselves in the present, the past and the future.
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ItemSocial justice and the middle( 2000)‘Social justice’ is not a straightforward concept; and nor is the question of what schools do in relation to it. In this article we want to elaborate a little on the first of these claims, and illustrate the second by choosing to talk about two ‘middle’ or ‘ordinary’ high schools and their apparent impact on the students in them whom we followed in a longitudinal study from 1993 when they were in grade 6 to the present year, when most have finished school.